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Western Australian public servants voted unanimously to continue their fight for a decent pay rise at a 1000-strong rally on the steps of Parliament House on May 8.

“[It] would be imprudent to tip the winners in the race for low emission technologies”, wrote Barney Glover, University of Newcastle deputy vice-chancellor, in an April 10 letter defending the university’s research in so-called clean coal technologies.

Plans are under way for the 2008 Resistance national conference, to be held at the University of Technology, Sydney from June 27-29. This year’s theme is: “war, racism, environmental destruction, homophobia, sexism … Turn anger into action!”

A May 8 meeting in Wollongong heard an eyewitness account of the political struggle within Venezuela from Carlos Sierra, a political leader in the radical Venezuelan youth organisation Frente Francisco de Miranda. The meeting was part of Sierra’s Resistance-organised tour which also took him to Newcastle and Sydney Universities.

On April 27, around 300 residents gathered at Rozelle’s Callan Park in the second Sunday protest against the NSW ALP government’s bid to close the psychiatric hospital and redevelop the parklands.

While Mount Isa welfare organisations are alarmed about not being able to provide for the large influx of Aboriginal people who have fled the federal government’s Northern Territory intervention, the government is looking to expand this racist bipartisan policy.

On May 5, Victorian Premier John Brumby and education minister Bronwyn Pike announced that they had struck a deal with the Victorian Australian Education Union (AEU) over teachers’ pay. While there are several aspects of the agreement to be finalised, the government decided to go public and claimed that Victorian teachers are now the highest-paid teachers in Australia.

On May 5, the night before the Victorian budget was released, it was revealed that Premier John Brumby’s government is proposing to pay households with solar power$0.60 per kilowatt hour for electricity that they feed into the grid. However, this $0.60 will only be paid if households are exporting more energy than they are taking from the grid.

Thirty people participated in a media stunt outside the office of federal resource minister Martin Ferguson on May 7 to demand that he and the ALP keep their election promise to repeal the Commonwealth Radioactive Management Act of 2005 and its 2006 amendment. The protest was organised by Friends of the Earth.

Ground-breaking new research findings posted on the internet in April have confirmed what many scientists and climate activists have already concluded — that the goals for reducing greenhouse gas emissions embraced by the European Union and Australia’s Labor government are gravely inadequate.