As all you know, Covid 19 is having a devastating affect on small businesses, workers and non - salaried student employees. We are international students and although we have proven family financial support, the whole world is in crisis and in need of help. A lot of schools already have adopted the reduction of fees up to 50%. We are having all our jobs cancelled and this help would be a great opportunity to allow us to continue staying and studying in Australia. Also, we recognise the importance of us for the Australia economy, mainly for the schools that offer courses to international students in general. We are seeing big part of us going back home and leaving the courses and all the investment behind. We really want to finish our course and make this investment worth it and gain this knowledge as we planned.

Because TISM

There is no evidence this trade deal will benefit workers in Australia or Indonesia - it simply gives more power to corporations. This deal has been negotiated in secret with no public consultation, and no assessment of the economic, health, environmental or human rights impacts. We demand the Morrison government immediately stop the process of ratifying this agreement, and commence a thorough assessment of the impacts of this agreement, consult with the public, and renegotiate the agreement accordingly.

On September 24 2018, amidst the heat of the 46th year of commemorating the Filipino peoples’ struggle against Martial Law under former dictator Ferdinand Marcos, the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) released a statement that the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) and the New Peoples Army (NPA) were planning to oust the current Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte. Shortly after, on October 2, 2018, General Antonio Parlade Jr., assistant deputy chief of staff of the Armed Forces of the Philippines accused Universities of being bases for mass recruitments for the CPP and NPA. Parlade Jr released a list of accused educational/academic institutions in the Philippines including premiere Philippine universities such as the University of the Philippines, Ateneo de Manila University, De La Salle University, and Philippine Polytechnic University. The evidence cited for this claim was that campuses host anti-Martial Law film screenings among other artistic and cultural activities. These events have triggered widespread concern among many Filipino artists and acadmics who denounce the malicious efforts by the AFP to “red-tag” educational institutions as part of their counter-insurgency operations. Tagging academics and artists as Communists has historically been a precedent in the Philippines for military and government crackdowns against a wide range of critics. During the Marcos dictatorship, the University of the Philippines served as a space for free expression, speech, and assembly amidst country-wide state censorship, and this space became vital to resisting, opposing, and eventually putting an end to Martial Law. During the Martial Law period artists and academics were prominent among the 70,000 imprisoned and 34,000 tortured between 1972 and 1981 (Amnesty International).