Five thousand people attended the vibrant Climate Emergency Rally in Melbourne on June 5. Grassroots environment activists and groups came from all over Victoria to protest numerous environmentally destructive projects currently underway or proposed, demanding action instead be focused on renewable energy and public transport.
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Professor Ross Garnaut’s draft review of climate change policy options for the Australian government was released on July 4, with climate change minister Penny Wong due to release a green paper canvassing policy options on July 16. Garnaut’s report looks at the “costs” and “benefits” of mitigating drastic climate change through a carbon polluting trading scheme. It suggests tax cuts and “welfare reform” to compensate low-income households, which will be hit hard by energy price rises.
According to a July 2 Brisbane Times article, the Iraqi government is suing the formerly Australian government-owned AWB Limited, which has a monopoly over Australian wheat exports, over its alleged rorting of the United Nations oil-for-food program as part of UN-enforced sanctions against Iraq following the first Gulf War in 1991.
Three of the five Sydney residents who joined a May Day solidarity brigade to Venezuela reported back on their observations and experiences of the Bolivarian revolution to a meeting of 35 people on June 24.
More than 200 people from across Australia turned anger into action at the Resistance National Conference, held in Sydney from June 27-29. Activists met to discuss everything from revolutions in Latin America to the next steps in the climate change campaign.
As Malaysian opposition parties and social activists, emboldened by advances in the March general elections, prepared to hold a giant protest against recent oil price hike (petrol up 41%, diesel up 67%) in Kuala Lumpur on July 6, a series of disturbing events unfolded.
On June 29, ZANU-PFs Robert Mugabe was declared the winner by electoral officials of the presidential run-off vote on June 27, in which he was the only candidate. It was announced that Mugabe had won 2,150,269 votes against 233,000 for the leader of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) Morgan Tsvangirai.
One of the lawyers for Mohamed Haneef, the doctor charged with terrorism-related offences in 2007, told a 100-strong June 21 public meeting that the Howard government had wanted Dr Haneef to be a terrorist but he wasnt. The Australian Federal Police (AFP) case against Haneef spectacularly imploded.
This article is based on a talk given by Naomi Rodgers-Falk to the closing session of the Resistance National Conference, held at the University of Technology, Sydney, on June 27 to 29.
On June 24, more than 10,000 workers picketed a power loom factory in Sadhar Faisalabad for more than eight hours. They were demanding the arrest of the owner of the factory and his gangsters.
The last time I saw Aung San Suu Kyi, general secretary of Burma’s National League for Democracy (NLD), was in 1996.
We live in precarious times. Consider these two announcements over the last week:
1. The Bank for International Settlements (the international organisation of the world's central banks) warned that a severe global economic downturn seems
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