Pip Hinman

National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) members at the University of New South Wales will vote on the next steps in protracted enterprise bargaining negotiations with the university’s management.
A 200-strong public meeting that claimed to support the Palestine-Israel peace process was organised by right-wing union leader Paul Howes at the ALP conference in Sydney on July 30.
John Pilger, renowned journalist, author and filmmaker, has been awarded the 2009 Sydney Peace Prize.
Thirty people at a July 6 meeting hosted by the Sydney Stop the War Coalition heard from Sara Poya, an Iranian-Australian anti-war activist and researcher, and Mansour Razaghi, from the Committee in Solidarity with Iranian Workers (Australia). Razaghi is also an organiser with the CFMEU.
A seminar at NSW Parliament House on June 16 discussed the current dire situation for Tamils in Sri Lanka and the need for the Rudd Labor government to step up and help protect human rights there.
More than 120 people packed into a seminar “Media complicity: reporting Gaza and Sri Lanka 2009” on May 27 at the University of Technology.
Abdul Hekmat, a Hazara refugee from Afghanistan, doesn’t believe that the US-NATO invasion and occupation of his country amounts to a “good” war, and is troubled by the prospect of the Taliban seizing more power.
When the United Nations describes the Sinhalese army’s attacks on the Tamil areas of Sri Lanka as a “bloodbath on the beach” you know a massacre is going on.
SYDNEY — Mohan Rajan, a young Tamil activist, told Green Left Weekly he was concerned that two violent incidents between the Tamil and Sinhalese communities in Sydney on May 18 “overshadowed the human catastrophe” in Sri Lanka.
A week after the Rudd government announced Australian troops would join the US and NATO-led troop surge in Afghanistan, a May 4 US air strike on two villages in the country’s south-west killed up to 150 civilians, including many women and children.
PM Kevin Rudd likes to tell us he is against “extreme capitalism”. Like US President Barack Obama, Rudd tries to give capitalism a more human face, pretending it’s now something different to the neoliberal nightmare of the past three and a half decades.
The Sydney Stop the War Coalition called a snap protest on April 15 against government plans to send more Australian troops to Afghanistan.