Australia

Queensland climate activist David White gives six reasons why he will not tune in to the ABC show I Can Change Your Mind About Climate. * * * 1. It is well and truly past the time for debating whether or not anthropogenic [human-caused] climate change is occurring. 2. Continuing to debate the issue gives the contrarians’ [deniers] viewpoint a validity and respectability that it should not have. It just encourages those with delusions and paranoia to continue to promote their fantasies.

The immigration department ordered 22 asylum seekers be taken to Sydney’s Silverwater jail after protests in Villawood detention centre last Easter. But the department did not keep a complete record and failed to follow its own procedures or visit the detainees within the 24 hours required. On the advice of federal police, the Iranian and Kurdish asylum seekers were forced out of Villawood in the early hours of April 22 last year, accused of being the “ring leaders” of the spate of protests that took place over the Easter weekend.

This article is republished from Overland magazine. * * * Anzac Day celebrates forgetting. Its revival, the transformation of a ceremony nearly extinct in the 1980s into today’s turbocharged festival, coincides with the excision from national consciousness of the most important aspects of the Great War.

The Injured Workers Support Network released the statement below on April 22.

Equal marriage rights supporters rallied at Margaret Court's Victory Life Centre on April 24. The centre hosted an anti-equal marriage event that evening.

The Student Environment Action Collective (SEAC) of the University of Sydney hosted a public forum titled “Our Water, Our Land, Our Future” on April 19. The forum discussed the effects of coal seam gas (CSG) mining and the campaign against it in Sydney and NSW. Speakers included the NSW Farmers’ Federation’s Brianna Casey and Charles Thomas, along with Jacinta Green of Stop CSG Sydney.

Under the theme "Racism has got to go!", Aboriginal protesters and supporters held a rally against police violence outside the Queensland parliament on April 24. About 70 people attended the rally, which coincided with the Sydney march against police assaults on Black youth in that city. Speakers at the Brisbane rally expressed solidarity with the Aboriginal community in Sydney and said similar police racism was rife in Queensland. One activist said police had provoked him many times in the past and taunted him to fight them.

The article below is based on a speech by Socialist Alliance national co-convenor Peter Boyle at the April 24 emergency rally called by the Indigenous Social Justice Association to protest the recent police shooting and bashing of two unarmed Aboriginal teenagers in Sydney’s Kings Cross.

Local bus services in the City of Whittlesea in Melbourne’s outer north may be thrown into chaos due to the opening of the South Morang rail extension on April 22. Rather than serving the new station and surrounding housing estates with new bus services, the Baillieu Liberal state government intends to re-route most of the existing Epping and Mill Park bus services to South Morang without public consultation and with little information to the public.

The Darwin Asylum Seeker Support and Advocacy Network released the statement below on April 24. * * * A 10-year-old year old Vietnamese asylum seeker has provided a community visitor from the Darwin Asylum Seeker Support and Advocacy Network (DASSAN) with a letter pleading for help. The 10-year-old girl arrived in Australia by boat in March 2011 and has been detained in three different centres located in three different states since arriving in Australia.

Stand Fast, an anti-war group of military veterans, released the statement below on April 24. * * * “You do not honor the dead through mindless flag waving, rewriting history or promoting new wars,” said Hamish Chitts, East Timor veteran and spokesperson for Stand Fast — a group of veterans and former military personnel who oppose the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.