Australia

In his notorious April 11 speech, “The End of the Age of Entitlement”, shadow treasurer Joe Hockey said that if the Liberal-Nationals were elected to federal government they would slash Australia's already battered welfare system. “The Age of Entitlement is over,” Hockey said with a sly smirk. “We should not take this as cause for despair. What we have seen is that the market is mandating policy changes that common sense and years of lectures from small government advocates have failed to achieve.”
In recent weeks, a boat with more than 120 refugees was forced back to Indonesia under Australian orders, 10 Falun Gong members from China docked at Darwin’s wharves and another boat made several distress calls to Australia before vanishing. The first boat was on its way to Christmas Island when it began taking on water. A Singapore-flagged ship rescued the 120 Afghan and Iranian refugees onboard and took them back to Merak, Indonesia.
Mental health workers have been striking for two hours at a time in rolling stoppages around Victoria since April 10. The campaign is in support of a new enterprise bargaining agreement. Key elements of the claim include a 16% pay rise over three years and improved staffing. After seven months of negotiation, the government has still not budged on its position of capping pay rises at a below-inflation 2.5% a year. The union covering mental health workers, the Health and Community Service Union (HACSU), has negotiated with the employers via Fair Work Australia.
The Community and Public Sector Union (CPSU) was forced into compulsory arbitration in December over the primary Victorian Public Service Agreement (VPS), but continues to campaign on several other agreements.   There is still no outcome of the compulsory arbitration from the VPS, which covers 30,000 state public servants.   For agencies such as the Victorian SES, parliament and parks, enterprise bargaining agreements expired mid-last year. But negotiations were stalled because the government still insists on a cap of 2.5% a year on public sector pay rises.  
Campaigners against the mining companies’ push to open up the Kimberley region in WA to vast gas and mineral exploitation told a public meeting on April 19 that this was the “Franklin Dam campaign of our time”. The forum “Saving the Kimberley: Our Land or Gasland?” was organised by Stop Coal Seam Gas, Sydney.
The Construction Forestry Mining Energy Union (CFMEU) has demanded that BHP Billiton surrender its lease on the Norwich Park coalmine, near Dysart in Central Queensland. The BHP Mitsubishi Alliance (BMA) combine announced early this month that it would shut down the mine because it was allegedly losing money. BMA has laid partial blame on the long-running industrial dispute with mineworkers in Queensland for losses at Norwich Park and other mines in the state.
About 240 people attended a forum on “Wikileaks, Assange & defending democracy” on April 19. Presented in partnership with the WikiLeaks Australian Citizens' Alliance (WACA), the forum argued that conversations about WikiLeaks and its editor-in-chief Julian Assange are about much more than the organisation and the individual behind it. They encompass freedom of speech and the press, whistleblower protection, government transparency, the underlying tenets of our democracy and civil rights. 
Supporters of WikiLeaks and Julian Assange protested outside the Sydney Convention Centre on April 20 as Attorney General Nicola Roxon spoke inside at the Commonwealth Regional Law conference. Earlier, three activists entered the conference venue and chanted slogans in support of Assange outside the room where Roxon was speaking. They continued for about 10 minutes before they were asked to leave.
Pay Justice Action released the statement below on April 19. * * * Pay Justice Action (PJA), a grassroots activist group campaigning for equal pay, applauds the initiative of the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) for making insecure work a focus for the whole union movement.
Prime minister Julia Gillard’s April 17 speech on Afghanistan was widely heralded as a change of policy. It is and it isn’t. It does set out a schedule for a partial withdrawal of troops — thereby bringing Australia belatedly into line with the US drawdown of troops by 2014. But it also affirms that Australia, like the US, will not withdraw all its troops.
About 50 people attended an April 17 rally in King George Square to mark a global day of action against military spending. The rally, organised by Just Peace Brisbane, called for Australian military funding to be radically cut back in the upcoming federal budget. “If the world cut military spending by just one-half of 1%, we could save the lives of 6 million children," Peter Arndt, from the Catholic Justice and Peace Commission, told the audience.
Tasmania is facing a series of big, interlinked problems. These include: • a health system in crisis, • job losses in other public services causing big service inadequacies and unacceptable workloads and stress on frontline staff, • bleeding of skilled professionals and new graduates to other states, • the highest unemployment rate in the nation, • an economic recession, and • a rising cost of living.