Critical Times

The oil monopolies are giant foreign-owned juggernauts
making billions out of this country’s resources, squeezing
those who work for them and holding workers and small
business hostage to their petrol monopoly and their drive
for ever-increasing profits.

They are making billions while ordinary Australians scrimp
and save to afford the petrol they need to get to work.

The government is in league with the oil monopolies
in the ‘import parity pricing’ rort, insisting that Australia
remain tied to imported oil while the cleaner local product is
exported overseas.

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A plan to meet the oil crisis

Coalition MPs met on Monday in Canberra and failed to come up with any worthwhile policy to control the spiralling petrol prices. There was a lot of talk about various alternatives such as ethanol and converting vehicles to LPG but nothing is to be done to control prices, stopping the obvious collusion between the oil companies or lowering GST and excise on petrol. More radical policies such as nationalising the oil companies or looking for alternative sources of supply outside of those controlled by British and American oil companies will not have crossed the minds of Coalition MPs.

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Hello and welcome to the latest edition of Critical Times! Much has changed since we last produced an edition back in 2001, and yet it seems we face many of the same problems, only intensified. So why produce a newspaper at all? There is so much information in so many places these days – ‘it’s all out there’. Well, because we can! Here at Helps Road Institute we’ve been building Single Step Printing to the point where we can print our own paper on our own printing press. read more »

Welcome to the first edition of Critical Times.

We are living in a world of increasing contradictions, where what we are told is becoming further away from reality every day. Political leaders of all persuasions tell us that the economy is booming, that everything is rosy, we’ve ‘never had it so good’ – meanwhile, the realities of long-term entrenched unemployment (44,000 full time jobs lost last month), the crisis in our hospitals, and many other real issues continue to impact on the community. read more »