More than 29 Hazaras traveling on a bus near Quetta, Pakistan, were separated from other passengers and executed by Islamic fundamentalists on September 20. This was the third time Hazaras have been attacked in a month.
After hearing the news, more than 400 Hazara asylum seekers in Curtin detention centre protested the killings near the centre’s administration building on September 21. The protest was to alert the immigration department of the situation Hazaras face in Pakistan.
Australia
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, at least for me, is a paradox. As Dorothy McKellar famously wrote, “I love a sunburnt country, a land of sweeping plains, of rugged mountain ranges and droughts and flooding rains”.
The extremes in our landscape and our weather seem to have been etched into our national psyche as well, which is something I’ve never quite understood.
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.
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.
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This is the second coal exploration venture in the area that has withdrawn after Mantle Mining pulled out of its project in the Deans Marsh area.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.
Liberal students at Queensland University of Technology (QUT) have run a bogus ticket under the name “Green Left” in the QUT Student Guild elections, held over September 20 to 23.
The two main tickets in the election were Epic, backed by the Liberals, and Activate, backed by the Labor students and the left on campus.
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.
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.
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.
Pat Eatock laughs at the suggestion that her successful Federal Court action against Andrew Bolt and News Ltd has jeopardised free speech. Bolt is one of Australia’s most widely read conservative columnists. His blog boasts 3 million web hits a month.
On September 28, Justice Mordecai Bromberg ruled the ultra-conservative columnist Bolt had breached the Racial Discrimination Act in two articles he wrote in 2009 in which he criticised “fair skinned Aborigines” for what, he argued, was a choice they had made to identify as Aboriginal.
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