Like Australia, Israel was established by settlers on the myth of an empty land. However, unlike here, expulsion rather than genocide has been the preferred method of removing the previous inhabitants.
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More than 30 workers at the Preston Motors plant in Campbellfield went on strike at 6am on March 13 over the companys continued refusal to negotiate a meaningful wage increase. The National Union of Workers (NUW) members have been attempting to conclude a new union collective agreement with the company after the previous agreement expired in September 2006.
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On March 15, the federal Coalition government announced that 82 of the 83 Tamil refugees from Sri Lanka intercepted by the HMAS Success on February 21 are to be deported to Nauru, where they will be indefinitely detained.
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Adelaide backpacker David Hicks will be arraigned before an illegally constituted military tribunal at the Guantanamo Bay concentration camp on March 20 and face the retrospective and ill-defined charge of “material support for terrorism”.
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In an out-of-court settlement, which became public on March 4, Victorian Labor Premier Steve Bracks’ government agreed to pay compensation to 47 protesters injured at the “S11" blockade of the World Economic Forum in Melbourne in September 2000. The settlement awards $700,000 in compensation, although $600,000 will go to legal fees.
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Hicks has spent five years, mainly in solitary confinement, at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp, which the US set up on illegally occupied Cuban territory to ensure independence from the legal system of any country, including the US itself.
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Serious fears are held for the safety of 83 Tamil refugees from Sri Lanka who are, at the time of writing, being detained on Christmas Island. Australian, Indonesian and Sri Lankan officials are talking about returning the refugees to Sri Lanka, via Indonesia, without their asylum claims being assessed a new departure from Australias international legal obligations to refugees.
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The invasion and occupation of Iraq has never been popular. With more than 650,000 Iraqis, mostly civilians, having been killed since the March 2003 US-British-Australian invasion, it is not surprising that three quarters of Iraqis want the US and other foreign troops out, with 61% supporting armed attacks on US troops. The war is also opposed by a majority in the West, including those countries that are involved in the US-led occupation.
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On February 16, ABC News featured the US military prosecutor Colonel Morris Davis vilifying Adelaide father of two David Hicks as a war criminal. Davis would not specify when Hicks would be brought before a military tribunal of the type that was ruled illegal by the US Supreme Court last June but reinstituted by Congress a few months later.
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In recent years “making poverty history” has become the fashionable cause for ageing rock stars such as Bono and Sir Bob Geldof. As global poverty means that each year 9 million children die of preventable diseases, the need to achieve this goal is undeniable.
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On February 2, ABC News Online reported the laying off of 110 workers by Melbourne carpet manufacturer Feltex. A spokesperson for Godfrey Hirst, which took over Feltex late last year, said the workers jobs would go with the closure of the Feltex factories in Tottenham and Braybrook in Melbournes west. This vindicated workers and unionists who had resisted attempts by Godfrey Hirst to take away their redundancy entitlements, Textile, Clothing and Footwear Union media officer Tommy Clarke told Green Left Weekly.
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As with other environmental issues, Australia’s water crisis has reached such an extent that mainstream media and politicians are being forced to abandon their traditional policy of denial. However, true to form, politicians are proposing solutions that are a mixture of the half-hearted, the irrelevant and the destructive. In common with the debates on global warming and Third World poverty, there is an underlying assumption that the water crisis can be overcome by the very thing that created it — the market economy.