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“Democracy remains a great danger to those who have privilege and control. When you are part of the top 1% of the population that has as much income as the bottom 75% of the people, democracy is a permanent threat to your interests.”

The following is abridged from a statement received by the socialist youth organisation Resistance from the Frente Francisco de Miranda (FFM), an organisation of revolutionary youth at the forefront of Venezuela’s socialist revolution.

After five years of solitary confinement in a small metal cell, David Hicks pleaded guilty on March 26 to one of the two charges brought against him by US military prosecutors on March 1, to finally get out of the notoriously brutal US military prison at Guantanamo Bay. Hicks’s case has revealed just what a sham the US-led “war on terror” really is.

In the lead-up to the April 27-29 ALP national conference in Sydney, a number of federal Labor frontbenchers and state premiers have declared themselves in favour of scrapping the party’s “no new mines” policy in favour of an unrestricted expansion of uranium mining. This push — which ignores the views of a majority of Australians and the extreme dangers inherent in uranium mining and the nuclear cycle that it is part of — reflects booming prices for the mineral on the world market. However, a number of trade unions have opposed the policy change and vowed to fight it at the conference.

On the grass outside an abattoir on the Western Plains of New South Wales, in the dark, cool air, a few workers are forming the late-night shift of a picket. Some journalists are hanging around, talking to them. It is less than a week after the federal government’s new industrial relations legislation, known as Work Choices, has taken effect. The men are outside the Cowra abattoir, not inside, because they have received termination notices. Twenty-nine have been sacked from their jobs for “operational reasons”.