Steve Painter

  • Union bash may backfire on Greiner

    SYDNEY — Amid a poisonous hail of racial slurs, union-bashing, unsubstantiated allegations and red-baiting, the Royal Commission Into Productivity in the Building Industry in NSW issued its final report on May 26. The

  • Will Tasmania be the New Right's laboratory?

    Both sides in the bitter dispute at Associated Pulp and Paper's Burnie mill know this is a struggle over much more than the immediate issue of conditions in the mill, important as these are. Excited by huge blows dealt to the

  • Phil Cleary:

    'The big parties got it wrong'CANBERRA — Phil Cleary is angry. The first non-Labor member for the Wills electorate is in his office in Parliament House, watching a closed circuit television relay of the prime minister's

  • The politics of theft

    Sell-offs, contracting out, liberalisation, deregulation, community provision — privatisation has paraded under a number of guises and slogans over the past decade, but in the end they all mean the same thing: theft.

  • Northern ozone layer is vulnerable

    The US space agency, NASA, claims the danger of ozone depletion over the northern hemisphere has eased due to a short Arctic winter, but a seven-month study by the agency confirms the ozone shield is "increasingly vulnerable to

  • Commission backs off over Killiekrankie

    Commission backs off over KilliekrankieSYDNEY — The NSW Forestry Commission is negotiating with the North East Forest Alliance (NEFA) over logging operations begun at Mt Killiekrankie in northern NSW as a result of the

  • Pesticide bombardment of Canadian forest

    Canadian environmentalists are fighting plans by the New Brunswick provincial government to spray the region's forests with insecticide for the 40th year running. Opponents of the plan say this is probably the longest sustained

  • The enterprise bargaining trap

    As the German trade union movement unleashes a powerful strike wave over declining living standards — an approach dismissed as old-fashioned by most Australian union officials — most local unions are sinking deeper

  • Earth Summit: Who pays for survival?

    The United Nations Earth Summit will be one of the largest political conferences ever, attended by around 100 heads of state and many more high government officials as well as about 30,000 delegates from around 160 countries.

  • Earth Summit agreements blocked

    Third World nations and non-government organisations (NGOs) are gloomy about prospects for the United Nations' Earth Summit following an unproductive five-week preparatory meeting (Prepcom Four), which finished in New York on

  • British Labour squandered chances

    Campaigning on its most right-wing platform ever, the British Labour Party lost the April 9 elections after leading the Tories in opinion polls by up to 20% just before the replacement of Margaret Thatcher as prime minister. In

  • APPM throws an industrial tantrum

    It seems Associated Pulp and Paper Mills (APPM) is bent on replicating the New Right's most spectacular assault on trade unionism to date — the 1986-87 lockout at the Robe River iron ore operation in WA. APPM last week