A dispute at Preston Motors has been resolved after an almost five-week-long campaign by workers, the National Union of Workers (NUW), Union Solidarity and other community groups. The companys initial offer of a mere $4 a week pay rise left the workers with little choice but to fight for their rights. A community picket line was established and held tight while the dispute was underway, and the company finally agreed to negotiate with the workers union, the NUW.
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On April 2 the National Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisation and Oxfam Australia published Close the Gap, a report highlighting the shameful state of Indigenous health in Australia. The report ranked Australia as the worst at improving the health of indigenous people compared with other wealthy nations.
While NSW police minister David Campbell has inspected the new APEC command in Sydney in which the state government is wasting millions of dollars anti-war, environmental and workers rights activists are preparing to send their message to US President George Bush, PM John Howard and other APEC leaders in Sydney in early September.
Following the trial of Tasers among Queenslands Special Emergency Response Team, they are now being introduced to all duty police officers in the Brisbane and south-east police regions, according to a joint statement issued by Queensland police minister Judy Spence and Police Commissioner Bob Atkinson.
Citing low pay, management intimidation and poor safety, metal construction workers at the Coles Myer distribution centre in Somerton resigned their casual employment with labour hire contractor Busicom Solutions on April 11 and set up a 24-hour protest outside the centre.
According to a report by the Palestinian Independent Commission for Citizens Rights, between September 2000 (the beginning of the Al Aqsa Intifada) and July 2006, 68 pregnant women were forced to give birth at Israeli checkpoints in the Occupied Territories after Israeli soldiers barred them from crossing the road blocks to access hospitals and medical centres. Thirty-four infants and four pregnant women died at these checkpoints.
Last week, right-wing Sydney Radio 2GB shock jock Alan Jones was let off with a ticking-off from Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) for inciting on air the infamous anti-Lebanese bashing spree in Cronulla in 2005.
While the Howard government has succeeded in partially defusing David Hicks’s unjust imprisonment as an election issue, it has still not convinced most people that Hicks’s guilty plea means he is a terrorist.
Supporters of the Venezuelan and Cuban revolutions assembled on April 11 at the Iberoamerican square to commemorate the failure of the April 2002 US-backed coup against the government of Venezuela’s socialist president, Hugo Chavez.
“There is no future for oil-dependent agriculture”, well-known Columban priest and Philippines-based anti-GMO campaigner Brian Gore told the WA launch of Say No to GMO (genetically modified organisms) on April 5.
A year after the Howard government introduced Work Choices, the legislations negative impact on workers wages and conditions and unions ability to defend their members interests is clear for all to see.
Prensa Latina reported on April 11 that more than 100,000 Bolivians have already learned to read and write through the Cuban Yes, I Can literacy program since it began early last year. According to education minister Victor Caceres, in La Paz, more than 40,000 of the 286,280 people in the program have already graduated. The national program aims to teach more than 1.2 million illiterate people how to read and write so that the country can be free from illiteracy in 2008. President Evo Morales has already declared Tocata municipality, in Cochabamba, the first locality to be illiteracy-free.
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