Wollongong City Council, elected on September 3, has so far made several decisions that reflect community will in the area. This is a refreshing change from the years of corruption scandals that rocked the last elected council and the four-year unelected administration that followed it.
All 13 councillors, including four Liberal, four Labor, three independent and two Green, are under immense pressure to deliver outcomes for the community. Key election issues included democracy, transparency and accountability.
Australia
The Health and Community Services Union (HACSU) has begun a series of rolling stoppages for better wages and conditions at mental health services across Victoria. HACSU covers mental health and allied health workers.
Stoppages and rallies have been held in Bendigo and Shepparton, and at Eastern Mental Health, St Vincents and Melbourne Health. A two-hour stopwork rally will be held at Latrobe Valley Mental Health on November 29, from noon at the Latrobe Valley Hospital in Traralgon.
A voluntary system of certifying whether goods are free from forced labour is about as far as things go in Australia when it comes to abolishing the slave trade throughout the world.
Though it is illegal to import slave made goods, there has never been a single prosecution for the crime in Australia.
STOP THE TRAFFIK Australia believes it should not be left to the ethics of consumers to decide whether to purchase products made by slaves. Rather, they simply shouldn’t be available in Australia.
Stop CSG Illawarra released the statement below on November 23.
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This week the Planning Assessment Commission granted approval to a 16th coal seam gas (CSG) borehole in the Illawarra.
Stop CSG Illawarra spokesperson Jess Moore responded: “It is now abundantly clear who [Premier Barry] O’Farrell represents. It’s not communities, and the concern we express for our water, environment and health; it’s the CSG industry.
The 1LOVE conference organisers released the statement below on November 23.
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The first national, grassroots marriage equality conference in the history of the movement is taking place on Sunday December 4 at Sydney University.
It is scheduled to take place the day after the ALP National Conference and Marriage Equality Rally in Sydney.
Activists involved in organising October’s peaceful protests during the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) in Perth had warned that special security laws passed for the event could be used to restrict the right to protest in Western Australia.
Now, a month after CHOGM finished, three Perth-based activists are fighting charges related to CHOGM.
The Mercury, Nov 22 -- There they fell during 2011, one after the other in past-their-prime domino descent.
Zine El Abidine Ben Ali from Tunis, Hosni Mubarak from Cairo, Dominique Strauss-Kahn from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Muammar Gaddafi from Tripoli, Georgios Papandreou from Athens, Silvio Berlusconi from Rome, US football guru and sex-crime cover-upper Joe Paterno from Penn State University. Media baron Rupert Murdoch, soccer supremo Sepp Blatter, Syrian tyrant Bashar al-Assad and Yemeni dictator Ali Abdullah Saleh looking decidedly shaky, too.
Trade unionists from the Transport Workers Union, the National Tertiary Education Union and the Maritime Union of Australia joined Occupy Sydney activists in a protest on November 22 outside Angel Place Recital Hall, where the union-bashing CEO of Qantas Alan Joyce was addressing a forum.
MichaelMoore.com, Nov 22 -- This past weekend I participated in a four-hour meeting of Occupy Wall Street activists whose job it is to come up with the vision and goals of the movement. It was attended by 40+ people and the discussion was both inspiring and invigorating. Here is what we ended up proposing as the movement's "vision statement" to the General Assembly of Occupy Wall Street:
Two hundred people rallied outside NSW parliament on November 23 and handed over 20,000 petitions that call for a moratorium on coal seam gas (CSG) mining, a royal commission into the industry's impacts on communities and the environment and a ban on fracking.
Coalition Premier Barry O'Farrell promised before the last election that his government would convoke a parliamentary debate on any issue upon receiving at least 10,000 petitions.
As US President Barack Obama received a standing ovation inside Australia's Parliament House on November 17, a protest organised by Sydney Stop The War Coalition, Peace Bus, Bradley Manning Support Group, Christine Assange and Wikileaks supporters took place outside.
Occupy Adelaide released the solidarity statement below on November 22.
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The Egyptian occupiers of Cairo’s Tahrir Square were an inspiration to genuine democrats and 99-percenters around the world. They overthrew the repulsive US-backed Mubarak dictatorship, at the cost of much pain and sacrifice of lives.
But their revolution was only half-done.
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