Police minister
The Beattie government must sack police minister Judy Spence immediately. She has presided over the most appalling downward spiral in the standards of police service delivery and police accountability and, in the finest Westminster
700
“Today a new epoch begins”, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez declared in his victory speech on December 3, having won the presidential election with the highest vote in Venezuelan history on a platform of deepening the struggle to build socialism. “That new era is the new socialist democracy. That era is the new socialist society.”
In scenes reminiscent of the police brutality against students who walked out of school against the Iraq war in 2003, hundreds of NSW police and officers from the NSW Public Order and Riot Squad (PORS) tried to stop peaceful rallies on February 22 and 23 when US vice-president and war criminal Dick Cheney arrived in Australia.
An anti-war speak-out held on February 21, during orientation week at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), halted military recruitment on that campus for the day. The action was organised with the support of socialist youth group Resistance, Christian Students Uniting, the Bike Club, the UNSW Greens and the UNSW Environment Collective.
On February 21, the federal education minister Julie Bishop announced a proposal to introduce “performance-based pay” for teachers in public schools.
Coalition leaders have had a rush of blood to the head over David Hicks. After five years of inaction, PM John Howard and foreign affairs minister Alexander Downer are trumpeting what a hard line they are taking with the George Bush administration to get Hicks back to Australia — after he is found guilty at a military commission of course!
In an interview printed in the February 19 London Financial Times, Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of the UNs International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), said that Iran could be as little as six months away from being able to enrich uranium to fuel-grade level on an industrial scale.
February 23 marked the deadline for submissions to the federal parliament’s Joint Standing Committee on Treaties (JSCT) on the new Australia-Indonesia “security” pact. If there is any uncertainty about the hypocrisy that underlies Australia’s neo-colonial foreign policy, then this treaty — a “mending the fences” exercise after the federal government granted asylum to 43 pro-independence West Papuan refugees in 2006, and, before that, Canberra’s reluctant 1999 intervention in East Timor — should end it.
Many Australians would assume that death squads, disappearances, harassment by the military, violent dispersal of demonstrations and political prisoners were features of the Philippines that vanished when Ferdinand Marcoss dictatorship was overthrown in 1986.
Australia by Numbers: Sydney 2000 —Traces the birth and life of the Foundation for Aboriginal Affairs. Features interviews with Chicka Dixon, Gary Foley, Joyce Clague, Esther Carroll and Ray Carroll, combined with previously unseen archival
Pages
