Workers in the Department of Immigration and Citizenship have won pay rises of about 11% over three years. Management initially offered only 9%, but conceded bigger rises following a 65% “no” vote to the offer in a staff ballot. Members of the Community and Public Sector Union had threatened industrial action over the issue.
By contrast, Australian Taxation Office (ATO) management has so far refused to go beyond its original offer of 9% over three years.
Australia
More than 500 people gathered in Melbourne over September 30 to October 3 to take part in four days of stimulating talks and discussion at the second Climate Change Social Change conference. The conference, which featured five plenary sessions, 39 workshops and more than 90 speakers, was organised by Green Left Weekly, Socialist Alliance and Resistance.
NSW education minister Adrian Piccol has announced a process of “community consultation on the reform of TAFE and the vocational education and training sector in NSW”.
The NSW Liberal government plans to repeat its Victorian counterpart’s attacks on public education and further privatise vocational education. The government plans to encourage private colleges and universities to undercut TAFE providers. It will offer a publicly-funded student voucher system to achieve this.
As part of its attacks on the NSW public sector, the O’Farrell Liberal government will begin charging parents up to $40 a day for each child they send to the once-free public preschools run by the Department of Education and Community Services (DEC). The fees will be introduced next year to the 100 DEC preschools across NSW.
These preschools were established to improve the educational opportunities for students in poor socio-economic areas, including communities that may be isolated, and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities.
Dr Aunty Ruby Langford Ginibi, one of Australia’s foremost Aboriginal authors, passed away on October 2 in a Sydney nursing home. Through her numerous books, short stories, poetry, interviews and public appearances and her commitment to “edu-ma-cating” non-Aboriginal people about Indigenous peoples’ circumstances and struggle, she made a distinctive and substantial contribution to Australian history and literature. Her books were studied in high schools and universities in Australia and internationally.
Mining company ECI International has “submitted a surrender request” to the state government for its coal and gas exploration licence covering 500 square kilometers — including the town of Colac and a large region of the Otway Ranges — said the October 7 Colac Herald.
This is the second coal exploration venture in the area that has withdrawn after Mantle Mining pulled out of its project in the Deans Marsh area.
The withdrawal occurs less than two weeks after 100 residents packed a hall at Forrest, in the Otway Ranges, to organise opposition to the project.
Just about every passerby stopped at a recent Green Left Weekly stall in Hamilton, Newcastle, to sign a Lock the Gate Alliance petition for a moratorium on coal seam gas (CSG) mining.
All those who stopped were concerned about plans to mine CSG at nearby Fullerton Cove.
As the world watched the Egyptian people overthrow the hated dictator Hosni Mubarak earlier this year, there would have been many who asked themselves: Could it happen in my country too?
Some did more than wonder, they took to the streets and tried to “walk like an Egyptian” and a wave of people’s power began to sweep the Arab world. But this wave of revolt didn’t stop there.
There were powerful reverberations in Spain, Israel, Malaysia and even in the United States, the world’s richest country.
Inspired by the three-week-long Occupy Wall Street protest in New York, which has now spread to more than 100 cities across the US, ad-hoc activist coalitions in several Australian cities have called for similar occupations beginning on October 15.
Wall Street-style occupations have been called for Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, Brisbane and Adelaide. By October 6, close to 1300 people had indicated on Facebook that they would attend the Melbourne event.
At noon on October 8, Stop the War Coalition Sydney will mark the 10th anniversary of the start of the longest running war in Australia’s history. A protest, starting at Town Hall, will hear from a state MP, an aid worker and a lawyer and had intended to march via the Sydney Cenotaph in Martin Place to the US Consulate in Martin Place.
Together with the veterans’ group Stand Fast, the anti-war coalition was to lay a wreath to commemorate all the dead from the Afghanistan war.
Fay Waddington, a long-time activist in the Palestine solidarity movement in Brisbane, held a free give-away of “Mohammed Brenner chocolates” to passersby in Boundary Street, West End, on September 24.
Waddington and other supporters have held a regular weekly Palestine solidarity stall there every Saturday morning for several years, ever since the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 2006.
Waddington, a Socialist Alliance member, issued a statement to Green Left Weekly, describing the action as “a Chaser-inspired take on the Max Brenner brouhaha” in Australia over recent months.
“For the good of both peoples, the Separation Wall must come down, the Israeli control over the lives of Palestinians must be defied so that a secular democracy where all Israelis and Palestinians live as equals can be established in our shared homeland," says Miko Peled, Israeli writer and peace activist.
Peled gave a public lecture, sponsored by the Queensland Council of Unions, under the theme, "Moving towards a democracy in Israel/Palestine," at the TLC building here on September 23.
- Previous page
- Page 796
- Next page