The Australia-Cuba Friendship Society held its 2007 national consultation in Canberra on April 13-15, attended by some 60 activists from around Australia. The gathering was also attended by Cubas consul and consul general in Australia, Nelida Hernandez Carmona and Ifrahim Miranda Leon, as well as representatives of the Cuban Institute of Friendship with the Peoples, vice-president Buenaventura Reyes Acosta and Alicia Corredera Morales.
707
Green Left Weekly will be taking a one-week break. Out next issue will be dated May 9.
Around 100 people filled Newtown Neighbourhood Centre on April 18 to hear visiting Zimbabwean socialist Munyaradzi Gwisai explain the background to the Zimbabwean people’s struggle for democracy.
Resistance held a NSW activist camp on April 13-15, themed “Confronting war and imperialism, socialism in the 21st century”. The camp was attended by 50 people and included workshops on socialist solutions to the environmental crisis, the Venezuelan revolution, fighting sexism today, racism and imperialism, and the Palestinian struggle.
With his April 17 speech to the National Press Club, federal Labor Party leader Kevin Rudd launched a pre-emptive strike against all those unionists, including ALP members, who thought that the April 27-29 ALP national conference would be debating a new industrial relations policy to replace the Howard government’s hated Work Choices legislation.
Refugee-rights groups have accused immigration department and GSL management at the Villawood detention centre of collective punishment of detainees in the aftermath of two detainees escaping on the evening of April 19.
Joe Collins from the Australia West Papua Association said on April 19 that Australia should have no ties with the Indonesian military (TNI) until it is proven to have reformed. TNI commander Marshal Djoko Suyanto was visiting Canberra at the time to strengthen Australia-Indonesia military relations.
It now appears certain that the ALP’s national conference, to be held in Sydney from April 27-29, will drop the party’s “no new uranium mines” policy, adopted in 1998.
This will satisfy the big mining companies’ desire to expand uranium mining. Labor leader Kevin Rudd and his “left-wing” deputy, Julia Gillard, are leading the push to scrap the policy.
ALP leader Kevin Rudd’s industrial relations policies, outlined in an April 17 speech to the National Press Club, have caused great concern among many trade unionists because they echo many of the anti-worker provisions in the federal government’s Work Choices laws.
A community protest organised by Union Solidarity shut down the construction site at Woodsides Otways gas plant near Port Campbell on April 17.
Carbon rationing
Tony Iltis ("Stopping climate change: tomorrow is too late!" GLW #706) draws extensively from the recent Carbon Equity Project report, Avoiding Catastrophe, but is wide of the mark in dismissing carbon rationing as simply "a right
With support from the South Australian Labor government and the federal ALP, pilot work is starting on the desalination plant that is to supply fresh water for BHP Billitons planned expansion of its copper-gold-uranium mine at Olympic Dam.
- Previous page
- Page 3
- Next page