Comment and analysis

The Danish government is Australian activist Natasha Verco and US citizen Noah Weiss, who are standing trial and facing a potential 12-and-a-half-year jail sentence for organising a protest during the December United Nations climate summit. This follows a global trend.

Employment in the Latrobe Valley in Victoria is heavily dependent on brown coal for electricity generation.

On March 23, Ewan Saunders was preselected as Socialist Alliance candidate for the seat of Brisbane in the upcoming federal election. Saunders is Queensland co-convenor of SA and is studying occupational therapy at the University of Queensland.

On March 15, opposition leader Tony Abbott said the shadow cabinet would support the federal ALP government’s extension of “income management” to more welfare recipients in the Northern Territory — not just those living in targeted Aboriginal communities.

For the 2009 climate summit, I wrote a short article titled “Looking back — moving forward: ten lessons for the climate movement”. It attempted to articulate some of the challenges and opportunities for the community climate movement after two years of rapid growth in scope and capacity.

“The Aboriginal community is moving to call for a national day of action against Black deaths in custody on Saturday April 10”, Queensland Aboriginal leader and Socialist Alliance member Sam Watson told Green Left Weekly on March 19. “We are calling on all state and federal governments across Australia to conduct a national audit of the implementation of the recommendations of the 1991 Royal Commission into Black Deaths in Custody.

The inquest into the fatal boat explosion involving Afghan asylum seekers and the Australian navy in April 2009 has ended with appalling conclusions. Despite evidence suggesting the five deaths and extensive injuries could have been avoided if defence personnel had operated differently, the refugees received sole blame and may face criminal charges.

One feature of the otherwise successful Perth rally against internet censorship on March 6 was an attempt by a far-right political group to hijack the event.

About 300 people participated in the rally and march. Speakers included internet studies lecturer Mike Kent, Greens Senator Scott Ludlam and an Iranian refugee, who talked about the draconian nature of Iran's internet censorship.

Other speakers included Socialist Alliance Senate candidate Ben Peterson and Mike Walmsley from the Liberal Democratic Party.

Witness Roy Bramwell told the re-opened inquest into Aboriginal man Mulrunji Doomadgee’s death on March 8 that police threatened to “come after him”, as they crushed his original damning witness statement and threw it in the bin.

Politicians from the Coalition and Labor Party are proposing nearly identical housing polices for remote Aboriginal communities — and both ignore the experiences of Aboriginal people themselves.

The Sandon Point community, on the New South Wales south coast, has been fighting for decades to protect the area from developers. Sandon Point is a declared Aboriginal site, significant for ecological and historical reasons and valued as public open space.

Changes to Aboriginal employment, infrastructure and welfare programs have stripped remote Aboriginal communities of resources and left many Aboriginal people, in effect, working for rations.

On February 25, federal education minister Julia Gillard announced the release of the new national curriculum. She sounded like a consultant for a private education firm, yet at the same time revealed her utter ignorance of education in this country.

The proposal by the Greens to the Rudd government that it introduce a price on carbon (starting at $23 a tonne) “as an interim measure in the transition to a functional and effective emissions trading scheme” is provoking a lively debate in the grassroots climate action movement.

When it comes to avoiding the most catastrophic impacts of global warming then whatever the financial cost, the price is still worth paying. But new research by Beyond Zero Emissions (BZE) shows Australia could meet 100% of its stationary energy needs from renewables in a decade and stimulate the economy at the same time.

Steve Gumerungi Hodder, an Aboriginal broadcaster in Central Australia, has taken legal action against Google to compel them to remove links to a site promoting extreme racism in the guise of humour. On January 27, Green Left Weekly ran an article by Edmund Parker arguing against using legal action in the fight against racist ideas. Hodder responds below.

The rapid melting of the Arctic sea-ice is one of the most alarming examples of the looming climate change catastrophe. But where most see disaster, some of the world's richest corporations see a business opportunity.

Under the Northern Territory intervention, in the “prescribed areas” the government has taken control of communities, acquired compulsory leases of Aboriginal land and introduced “welfare quarantining” — in which half the income of social security recipients is replaced with a “Basics Card”, which can only be spent at specified shops on specified items.

Green Left Weekly spoke to Socialist Alliance national convener Peter Boyle about the political dynamics of the coming federal election and asked him what sort of campaign the Alliance was intending to run.

The modern queer rights movement was born on June 28, 1969 in New York City.

“The law is an ass”, said Mr Bumble, in Charles Dickens’ classic, Oliver Twist. And more than 150 people agreed as they rallied yesterday on the same site, six years to the day, where 17-year old Aboriginal boy, TJ Hickey, was impaled on fence in Waterloo.

Elaine Peckham is a Central Arrernte woman who lives on homelands in the West MacDonnell Ranges. She spoke at the Prescribed Area People’s Alliance meeting in Alice Springs on February 12. The speech below is abridged from text prepared by the Intervention Rollback Action Group rollbacktheintervention.wordpress.com.

Alyawarr elder Richard Downs spoke at the Prescribed Area People’s Alliance (PAPA) meeting in Alice Springs on February 12. Downs is a leader of the walkoff protest against the NT intervention at Ampilatwatja.

The following is abridged from an article by Peace and Justice for Colombia.

How to sum up the Liberal Party’s “direct action” scheme to tackle global warming? Well, how about: a fraud wrapped in demagogy inside a delusion?

Western Australia Liberal premier Colin Barnett wants to introduce draconian legislation which will give police more power. A wide spectrum of critics agree the proposed new powers are unprecedented in most of the Western world, would be grossly intrusive and would disproportionately penalise the most marginalised groups.

February 7, 2009, Black Saturday: you’re glued to your TV watching an inferno devour Victoria’s bushland, terrified that in a country like Australia, such a fire could have happened anywhere.

It seems bizarre that when the science of human-caused climate change is more worryingly conclusive than ever, climate denial could enjoy a resurgence. After all, no climate denier has published a peer-reviewed article in a scientific journal in the past 15 years.

When, after destroying Malcolm Turnbull, the Liberal Party took a surprise turn and embraced Tony Abbott as leader, there were those on the left who greeted the news with combined incredulity and glee.

The Australian Greens announced an “interim carbon price proposal” on January 21, whereby carbon would be taxed essentially within the framework of the federal Labor government’s proposed Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS).

On July 14, 2009, the Alyawarr people from Ampilatwatja, three hours’ north-west of Alice Springs, walked off their community and set up a protest camp on their traditional homelands.

In the lead-up to “Australia Day” on January 26, former TV host Ray Martin restarted a debate about the need to change the Australian flag.

On January 14, the Sydney Morning Herald reported that Google had removed links to Encyclopedia Dramatica, a user-editable, “satirical” website that uses the same MediaWiki software as Wikipedia.

The campaign to prevent longwall coal mining under the fertile Liverpool Plains region in NSW has suffered a setback, with a legal challenge to the mine being dismissed.

The Indian Mail Today cartoon that has so outraged Australian politicians was a response to Australian authorities’ claims that the spate of murders and assaults against Indian nationals in Australia was “not racially motivated”.

“Two hundred years [ago], we had all the country out there, we had freedom to move, freedom of access to all our sites”, Aboriginal leader Richard Downs told Green Left Weekly on January 4.

My name is Sue Gilbey. I live in an urban eco-village located on the land of the Kaurna people, in what is now Adelaide. I say that to acknowledge the people who lived here first and to boldly state that I will endeavour to be as good a custodian of my little bit of land as they were.

The call by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez at the International Encounter of Left Parties in Caracas last month to begin to launch a ``Fifth Socialist International’’ could not have been better timed.

It has reached that time of year when Christian churches commemorate the birth of a child in a stable to homeless parents because “there was no room at the inn”. It is also a time of year when there is increased demand on homelessness services because of, among other reasons, family relationship breakdowns, domestic violence and mental illness.

Thousands of Australians will march in every major Australian city and more than 20 regional centres on December 12, to again demand genuine climate action from our government. The rallies are part of a global day of action that will take place during the Copenhagen climate summit.

Australian governments, both Liberal and Labor, have had a policy of treating refugees as enemies for at least 20 years. Probably the most infamous occasion was the Coalition’s November 2001 federal election victory, where the major parties adopted a joint policy of turning back 438 refugees who had been saved from drowning by the Norwegian freighter the MV Tampa.