Many Muckaty Traditional Owners are opposed to establishment a radioactive waste dump on the Muckaty Land Trust, 120 kilometres north of Tennant Creek in the Northern Territory.
Australia
The Socialist Alliance released the statement below on February 9.
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Socialist Alliance supports, and expresses its full solidarity with, the Syrian people’s democratic uprising against the tyrant Bashar al-Assad.
We also condemn the interference by Western imperialist powers and the threats of military intervention. Further, we call on the Australian government to extract itself from the US alliance and its involvement in aggressive multinational military operations.
About 40 people crowded into the Brisbane Activist Centre on February 7 for a Green Left Weekly public forum titled “The truth about the Aboriginal Tent Embassy”, presented by prominent Murri leader and Socialist Alliance Aboriginal affairs spokesperson Sam Watson. Watson was an activist at the Tent Embassy in Canberra in 1972, and attended the Embassy 40th anniversary commemoration over January 26-28.
“We can’t eat money, we need to save our future food,” seventh generation farmer Tim Duddy told a packed forum on February 6.
Organised by the Sydney Food Fairness Alliance, the forum examined the impacts of coal and coal seam gas (CSG) activity on farming regions that make up Australia’s food bowl.
The government has admitted that it is using both the Australian Federal Police and a private intelligence consultancy to monitor coal seam gas (CSG) protesters, say the Greens.
The WA state government finally rejected Vasse Coal’s proposal for a coal mine in Margaret River on February 7. The mine would have been built 15 kilometres from the town centre, directly beneath the river.
Margaret River residents came out in force to oppose the proposal, as it posed a direct threat to water supply, biodiversity and air quality. Margaret River’s two main industries, agriculture and tourism, depend on the environmental health of the region.
Inequalities are not only unjust: they literally make us sick. This was the conclusion reached by the sizeable turnout at Left Unity’s January 31 forum: “Inequality, Health, And Wellbeing: Why Inequality Is Bad For Us.”
Much of Adelaide’s progressive community came together — Resistance and the Socialist Alliance, the Communist Party of Australia, the Adelaide Anti-Capitalist Forum, Occupy Adelaide, anarchists, and current and former members of the Greens — to hear why inequality has increased dramatically throughout the world over the past few decades.
News Limited’s flagship newspaper, The Australian, said in a September 2010 editorial that it wanted the Greens to be “destroyed”. The paper’s latest attacks on Greens Senator Lee Rhiannon, which include allegations she held secret meetings with a high-level KGB spy 40 years ago, confirm that its editorial bias hasn’t budged an inch.
Melbourne-based activist collective Quit Coal released the statement below on its website on February 6.
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One Quit Coal activist has been released pending summons for “interfering with a motor vehicle” today after stopping drilling in Bacchus Marsh. Paul Connor locked himself to the top of Mantle Mining’s 8.5 metre-tall drill rig while hanging a banner that read “No New Coal Bacchus Marsh”.
Renewing Sydney’s train fleet is far too important a matter to be left to the “free” market. On February 6 the NSW government announced it was going to pay $175 million in 2018 to bail out the failed Reliance Rail syndicate that has been contracted to build and maintain the new Waratah commuter trains for Sydney’s CityRail network.
It's another failed Public Private Partnership (PPP), meaning more public money is poured into the coffers of financiers and speculators.
In the week after the January 26 Aboriginal Tent Embassy anniversary celebrations and protests, the mainstream media poured out a continuous stream of negative, scathing commentary on the Tent Embassy and the people that defended it.
Ignoring the thousands of people gathered for three days to recognise the achievements of the Tent Embassy and protest against ongoing attacks to Aboriginal people today, the corporate media ran stories of an “angry mob” that surrounded a Canberra restaurant and “besieged” Prime Minister Julia Gillard and Liberal leader Tony Abbott.
State planning minister Brad Hazzard released draft guidelines to regulate NSW wind farms in December. The guidelines allow anyone with a residence within two kilometres to veto a wind power project.
If the guidelines become law, this would put the brakes on the wind industry, as the coal seam gas industry bolts ahead.
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