Thank you
I was both delighted and surprised that I won the major prize in the Green Left Weekly Christmas hamper raffle.
Together with my family, I did not have a particularly good 2007, having lost several dear friends, including Gail Lord and Bernie Banton to major illnesses. I would have to call 2007 one of the saddest years of my life.
Gail and Bernie did not die in vain however, and both struggled to the end. This has given me hope to keep struggling for a better society and life for working people all over the world. I would like to thank the editors and workers of GLW for all their hard work in 2007 in issuing an excellent newspaper which gives the news that is not covered by the mainstream media.
It is important for us to keep up the struggle and agitation for a better society for working people all over the world.
I would like to encourage people to support the GLW Fighting Fund so that we can continue to present the truth about what is happening in Australia and the world, and bring awareness of these concerns to a wider readership.
Christine Gleeson
Parramatta, NSW
Electricity privatisation
There are two types of public response to the decision by the NSW government to privatise the power industry: (1) Don't do it because privatisation has had bad consequences for the public good in more than ways than one. And (2) It is now clear that the Iemma government must go.
As to these public responses, two comments can be made. Firstly, if a Labor government will not resist privatisation, what other government would? Secondly, with massive budget surpluses at the federal level, how can it be that the NSW state government has to resort to selling the power industry in order to provide funds to fix the transport mess?
Clearly Australia's system of governance is in need of a complete overhaul and the states have to go.
But what is the cause of this economic rationalist madness? Why do we end up with major party politicians and their mandarins who are all steeped in the economics teachings of Friedman, Hayek, et. al., and the political examples of Thatcher and Reagan? The universities surely have something to answer for.
There is a definite place for public ownership of major infrastructure and, at last, the public senses this. Unless Rudd and company grasp this very early in their term
and act on it, nationally, the "Howard lite" label will rightly stick and Australia will the poorer for it.
Klaas Woldring
Pearl Beach, NSW
Whaling
It's ironic that the Japanese whaling fleet has just been declared illegal by the Federal Court and yet they are now holding an Australian Sea Shepherd activist (as well as a British activist) on their illegal whaling ship, possibly to take them back to Japan to try them as "eco-terrorists" when they were just handing them a letter declaring that their whaling activities were illegal — a job our government should have done.
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd now has no choice but to act on Labor's pre-election promise and enforce the court injunction. The government has its Oceanic Viking ship in the area and should hand the whalers the injunction, instruct them to return to Japan and stop all whaling for all time and retrieve the hostages immediately.
Dean Jefferys
Mullumbimby, Qld
'Australia Day'
Australia Day — a day for flag raising and hollering our proud achievements and values to the world; when town crier impersonators roam the streets, celebrating the blessed day 220 years ago, when Captain Arthur Phillip unfurled the British flag claiming sovereignty and ownership of unoccupied land.
Not a great day though for the Aborigines who had occupied the continent for some 40,000 years, and is probably why you wont see too many surviving Aboriginal people in old England town crier outfits hooting and hollering come this January 26. Instead, they will be mourning the massacres; the theft of their land and children; the institutionalized poverty and loss of cultural traditions.
But hold on: in the true Aussie spirit of fair go and mateship, PM Kevin Rudd is preparing a hollow compensation-free apology to our Indigenous people for past wrongs! So Happy Australian Values Day as you raise with pride your flags with the British Union Jack in the corner and pledge your continued subservience to a British queen as our head of state.
As for me: Faced with another year of choosing between national pride or national shame about the past, I'll be off to join the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people at Victoria Park, to celebrate their culture and continuous courageous survival — albeit with 17 years life expectancy difference to the rest of us.
Keith Mobbs
Lane Cove, NSW
Port Phillip Bay project
On the same day that Blue Wedges Coalition headed off to the Federal Court to challenge federal Labor environment minister Peter Garrett's decision to approve the Port Phillip Bay channel deepening project (which includes a 5 square kilometre underwater toxic dump), we were met with the announcement by Garrett that he is terribly concerned about the state of our waterways, and his remedy is to ban plastic bags.
Although we commend the idea of reducing plastic bag pollution, Garrett would have been better off taking a closer look at what the channel deepening project really entails.
When it was referred to the federal government in 2002 by the then Victorian Channels Authority, it described a project of one-tenth the scale that is now proposed, and without any mention of the millions of tonnes of toxic spoil that will be produced or where this will be put.
Justice Heerey, in his decision delivered on the January 15, dismissed the Blue Wedges application with particularly glib reasoning. He explained that the referral (of 2002) contemplated channel deepening, therefore the subsequent proposals, among other things, to dispose of toxic dredge spoil in the bay, was just part of the originally proposed action "because deepening channels necessarily involves disposal of the material removed".
Think about that. The fact that the disposal of toxic spoil in the bay was absolutely fundamental to the environmental impacts of the project, and the core of public opposition to it, never crossed the poor judge's mind.
It is notable that section 3.1 of Victoria's best practice environmental management guidelines for dredging, states "Where feasible, sediments from the urban lower reaches of the Yarra should be disposed to land". The only reason for not adhering to this provision was the cost of doing so.
Jim Walker
For Blue Wedges Coalition
Melbourne [Abridged]