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As with other environmental issues, Australia’s water crisis has reached such an extent that mainstream media and politicians are being forced to abandon their traditional policy of denial. However, true to form, politicians are proposing solutions that are a mixture of the half-hearted, the irrelevant and the destructive. In common with the debates on global warming and Third World poverty, there is an underlying assumption that the water crisis can be overcome by the very thing that created it — the market economy.

Hobart Resistance organiser Mel Barnes took part in the Australia-Venezuela Solidarity Network brigade to Venezuela in December, to see the revolutionary process for herself. The brigade was timed to coincide with the presidential election in which President Hugo Chavez won another landslide victory as people voted to deepen the Bolivarian revolution.

The scale of the death, misery and horror unleashed on Iraq since the 2003 US-led invasion is almost beyond comprehension. In October, British medical journal The Lancet published a study conducted by Iraqi physicians in conjunction with Johns Hopkins University that put the death toll among Iraqis as a result of the war at 655,000. Hundreds of people are being killed, wounded or abducted each day. According to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Iraq is the fastest-growing refugee crisis in the world, with 1.6 million Iraqis internally displaced and almost 2 million refugees having fled the country altogether.

When US President George Bush visits Australia in September for the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, thousands are expected to hit the streets in opposition to the man perhaps most known for his extensive war crimes and suspect election “victories”.

The announcement that charges have been laid against 31-year-old Australian man David Hicks, who has now been held in US military custody in Guantanamo Bay for more than five years, has been welcomed by the Howard government, which is unable to charge Hicks with any crime under Australian law.