Simon Butler

The US embassy in Canberra secretly assessed Australian ethnic minority groups, Indigenous prisoners, the Socialist Alliance, anti-war protesters, Cuba and Palestine solidarity activists and Amnesty International for links to political violence and terrorism, an embassy cable released by WikiLeaks on August 29 has revealed. The cable, titled “Canberra — Security Environment profile”, was sent to the FBI, the CIA, the US Defense Intelligence Agency and the Secretary of State in Washington on March 2, 2009.

In 2007, Australian government officials repeatedly told the US embassy in Canberra of its plans to increase Australian troop commitments in Afghanistan. But they asked the US government to keep quiet about it, as the plans had not yet been made public. Other Australian officials briefed the embassy on Australia’s likely troop deployments even before the federal cabinet had approved it. The revelations are contained in three embassy cables — classified secret — that were released by WikiLeaks on August 29. Related coverage:

Israel has been rocked by weeks of ongoing protests against high house prices and the cost of living. To avoid being painted as “extremists”, the organisers have avoided the obvious ― the cost of the occupation of Palestinian territory and protecting the illegal Jewish settlers has directly contributed to the Israeli state's neoliberal austerity policies.

Dick Smith’s Population Crisis: The Dangers of Unsustainable Growth for Australia Allen & Unwin, Sydney 2011, 228 pages   Those who say today’s big social and ecological problems stem from there being too many people on the planet face a special difficulty. As the Australian ecologist Alan Roberts once said, populationist authors need “to persuade their readers that the main thing wrong with the world was the existence of those readers themselves”.  

Antony Loewenstein is an independent journalist and author of My Israel Question and The Blogging Revolution. Green Left Weekly’s Simon Butler asked Loewenstein about recent attempts to intimidate supporters of the boycott, sanctions and divestment (BDS) campaign against Israel.

About 100 people gathered on the steps of the Sydney Opera House on August 21 to show their support for the student movement in Chile, which is campaigning for free education. As protests and strikes for free education rock the country, more than two dozen high school students have launched a hunger strike until the Chilean government agrees to make public education free. A solidarity protest also took place in Brisbane’s West End on August 20 in support of the hunger strikers.

Unions have sharply criticised Qantas as the airline announced it had doubled its profits a week after it said it needed to lay off 1000 workers. Qantas chief executive Alan Joyce reported a $249 million after-tax profit for 2010-11 — about twice what it earned the previous year. Its before tax profit amounted to more than $550 million, which is a rise of about 50% over the 2009-10 financial year. On August 16, Qantas announced plans to restructure its business, which would include setting up two new Asian-based airlines and cutting up to 1000 Australian-based jobs.

Friends of the Earth (FoE) have called on the Victorian Liberal government to “immediately ban any coal seam gas or new coal developments in the state”. The environmental group says Victoria “faces a wave of exploration licenses for coal seam gas (CSG), coal, and shale gas” and has urged people to write to Premier Ted Baillieu to demand “a thorough investigation into the likely impacts of [the coal and coal seam gas] industry on water resources, farmland and food security, local communities and natural biodiversity."

Conservation groups have criticised a new deal on Tasmania’s forest industry, saying it will not end the logging of old growth forests, it will hand millions of dollars to the logging industry and will not stop Gunns Ltd’s proposed pulp mill in northern Tasmania going ahead in the face of community opposition.

NSW groups opposed to the rollout of coal seam gas mining in the state have said new rules for the industry fall far short of what is needed to protect water reserves, farmland and communities from toxic contamination. The changes, announced on July 21, put a moratorium on fracking until the end of the year and ban the use of evaporation ponds to dispose of toxic wastewater from the coal seam gas mining process.

Supporters of former Guantanamo Bay prisoner David Hicks have slammed the July 21 announcement that Australian government lawyers will try to prosecute Hicks under the Proceeds of Crime Act.

The Victorian secretary of the Electrical Trades Union (ETU), Dean Mighell, told the July 20 Age that his union could not support the Gillard government’s carbon price plan. Mighell said the scheme gives compensation payouts to the fossil fuel giants, but gives no guarantee for workers employed in coal-fired power stations in Victoria’s Latrobe valley.