Comment and analysis

Below is an abridged version of a speech by Greens NSW parliamentarian John Kaye at an anti-privatisation forum held at Parramatta Town Hall on July 16.

On August 6, the Australian Bureau of Statistics released labour force figures for July that showed unemployment remained steady at 5.8%. However, while the total number of people employed stayed stable, full-time jobs fell by 16,000 while part-time employment rose by 48,200.

On August 4, theatrical pre-dawn raids in Melbourne by more than 400 Victorian, NSW and federal police and ASIO agents — including paramilitary units armed with sub-machineguns — launched Australia’s latest terrorism scare.

In the year to May, manufacturing employers shed more than 68,000 jobs due to reduced demand emerging from the economic crisis, said the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

In the state that claims to have the greenest energy on the Australian mainland, South Australia’s climate camp will confront two of the country’s dirtiest power stations. The Northern and Playford B plants, fuelled by cheap but low-grade brown coal, are just outside Port Augusta, a four-hour drive north of Adelaide.

The Australian and US government’s have proposed carbon trading schemes as a response to the threat of climate change. How to respond has been hotly debated in the climate action movements of both countries. Green Left Weekly has campaigned strongly for the Rudd government’s carbon trading scheme to be rejected as a false response to the climate emergency. Below, Ilan Salbe puts an alternative view.

The national ALP Conference was held in Sydney from July 30 to August 1. Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s speech on the opening day of the conference was full of congratulatory remarks about the greatness of his party and the way the ALP federal government had handled the economic crisis.

To win the battle to stop climate change, climate activists in Queensland have an important part to play. The Queensland ALP government is a strong backer of Australia’s biggest polluters.

Five Filipino workers holding 457 visas, who were employed at a Fletcher International abattoir near Albany, were made redundant and given 10 weeks’ entitlement pay on June 2.

“We've had the gun at our head.” This is what William Tilmouth, Tangentyere Council CEO, said in response to Aboriginal affairs minister Jenny Macklin's triumphant July 29 announcement that the council had agreed to lease Alice Springs town camps to the federal government for 40 years in exchange for $135 million in housing upgrades

More than 200 council workers and their supporters joined sacked council workers Mick Van Beek and Peter Anderson in Johnston Park, Geelong on the morning of July 28.

Australian Coal Association (ACA) executive director Ralph Hillman believes the industry doesn’t want special treatment from the Rudd Labor government. It just wants the same “fair treatment” given to other big polluters under the proposed Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS).

A boat carrying 74 asylum seekers disappeared en route to Australia near the Komodo island in Indonesia last week. The boat was believed to have women and children on board and had vanished — feared to have sunk — when the Australian Federal Police was notified by a refugee rights advocate, Ian Rintoul, on July 7.

Echoing some of the slogans of protesters in Iran, about 80 Iranians from Melbourne and Sydney chanted “Rockets, guns and Basiji [state-run militia] do not scare us anymore” and “Khomeini you are Pinochet, Iran is not Chile” outside the Iranian embassy in Canberra on July 9.

>Graham Brown is a retired coalminer and climate change activist. He’s also a member of the Upper Hunter Greens in NSW, and is helping build a union and community alliance aimed at creating a “just transition” to a carbon-neutral economy. Such a transition would ensure workers in the coal industry move into alternative employment. Green Left Weekly’s Zane Alcorn spoke to Brown, and this is the first of three parts of the interview.

The article below is based on a speech given by Simon Butler as chair of the Sydney Climate Emergency Rally on June 13. Butler is also a member of the Socialist Alliance.

The Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) hosted a forum on the jobs crisis in Sydney on July 20. The Jobs Summit: Pathways to Recovery brought academics, economists and trade unions together to discuss the effects of the global financial downturn on working people, and solutions to the resulting jobs crisis.

International students are big business in Australia. Enrolments peaked at a record 543,898 and generated $15.5 billion in export income in 2008.

On July 15, elders left the remote Aboriginal community of Ampilatwatja for more remote ancestral lands. They were protesting a dire lack of basic services in their community, despite repeated government promises to “close the gap” and end Aboriginal disadvantage.

More than three months after a fatal explosion on an asylum seeker boat, only one new detail has come to light: Northern Territory police still have not formally identified the five people killed from the blast, ABC Online said on July 18.

The 42 nations that make up the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) have called for world governments to set targets that would limit global warming to a 1.5°C increase.

Almost immediately after the Rudd Labor government’s Fair Work Australia came into effect on July 2, the Australian and other News Ltd newspapers launched a sustained attack on the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union’s (AMWU) wage claim for the manufacturing industry.

This is the second part of an interview about breaking Australia’s addiction to coal between Green Left Weekly’s Zane Alcorn and retired Hunter Valley coal miner and climate activist Graham Brown. The first article can be read here.

They discuss how a “just transition” away from coal could be made – a transition that benefits the workers and communities now dependent on coalmining and coal-fired energy plants.

This year is the seventh year Melbourne’s Community Radio 3CR will broadcast its Beyond the Bars program.

On June 10, the federal government’s new occupational health and safety (OH&S) peak body — the Safe Work Australia Council (SWAC) — held its first meeting. Workers in Australia took one more step towards eroded and unsafe working conditions.

Low-paid workers in luxury hotels, including cleaners and kitchen staff, were the first to lodge an application with Fair Work Australia (FWA) when the federal government’s new industrial relations regime, the Fair Work Act 2009, came into effect on July 1.

The threat of the publication of damaging school league tables in New South Wales has been averted for the moment.

After Labor Premier Anna Bligh announced on June 2 that Queensland would be selling off $15.4 billion of the state’s assets, a June 17-18 Galaxy Poll conducted for the Brisbane Courier Mail found that 84% of people opposed the move.

The first person to die after testing positive to swine flu in Australia was a 26-year-old Aboriginal man from a remote desert community. Health workers have said it is evidence of the significant gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous health, and warn more deaths are likely.

The inquest into the death in custody of Palm Island man Mulrunji Doomadgee in November, 2004 will be reopened. In 2006, deputy state coroner Christine Clements found senior sergeant Chris Hurley was responsible for Doomadgee’s death.

The NSW budget was handed down on June 16. NSW state treasurer Eric Roozendaal tried to spin it as a “beacon of hope” for the state.

Saharawi refugee and preschool teacher Fetim Sellami is a central character in the Australian documentary Stolen, a film set in the refugee camps in south-west Algeria that have been home to 165,000 Saharawi refugees since their country, Western Sahara, was invaded by Morocco in 1975.

However, when she and her husband, Baba Hocine Mahfoud, attended its June 11 premiere at the Sydney Film Festival, they did not receive red carpet treatment, despite the long distance they had travelled.

“I would have been concerned if it was a dog or some other animal who died in those conditions, but since it was only a black-fella …”

We would have loved for them to be bigger, but the June 13 national climate rallies were an unmistakable step forward for the climate action movement. More than 11,000 rallied nationally, making them the largest climate actions yet in the era of PM Kevin Rudd.

Aboriginal residents living in remote communities in the Northern Territory have condemned the government’s “consultation” about the NT intervention as farcical.

On June 15, the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) raised the rate of its standard variable mortgage by 0.1%. For home buyers with the typical $300,000 mortgage, this means repayments go up by $18 a month.

Joe de Bruyn, national secretary of the Shop Distributors Alliance and Allied Employees’ Association (SDA) and fervent Catholic militant had some novel advice on how to resolve the debate about the Australian Building Construction Commission (ABCC) within his Labor Party.

More than 200 people packed into the Brisbane city hall on June 1 for a public forum on why individual rights in Australia needed to be enshrined in a Human Rights Act.

“Delivering for all Working Australians” was the slogan for the 2009 Australian Council of Trade Unions congress held June on 2-4. This raises the question — what if you are not working or an Australian citizen? But the congress will not be remembered for such philosophical questions — there were many more immediate issues at stake.

Three months after wining a state election, Queensland Premier Anna Bligh has been given the green light by the June 6-7 ALP state conference to push ahead with her $15 billion sell-off of state-owned assets.

Marion Scrymgour — the highest ranking Aboriginal member of any government in Australia — quit the Northern Territory Labor Party over its Aboriginal policy on June 4. As an independent, she now holds the balance of power.

At first glance, the climate change policy decided at the June 2-4 Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) national congress looks serious. Global warming is “the policy challenge of our time”, it declares.

On May 29, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd told radio 3AW that his government has “absolutely no plans to make any change” to the superannuation preservation age — the age at which workers may access the superannuation paid into a super fund by their employer.