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The Newcastle ALP branch effectively delivered Newcastle Council to the right in the September 13 elections, by preferencing Aaron Buman’s team of “razor gang” independents instead of the Greens.
Residents of Caroona, in the Liverpool Plains of New South Wales, are in their 11th week of a blockade that has stopped BHP Billiton from carrying out coal exploration on their land.
“We need a genuine people’s movement like this planet has never seen”, Friends of the Earth’s Dr John Mackenzie told the launch of Climate Emergency Week at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) on September 22. “We need a global movement that will make the sixties look like a rehearsal!”
Newspaper articles sometimes tell so much of the truth that they prompt raids by the Australian Federal Police.
“I’m a strong believer in free enterprise, so my natural instinct is to oppose government intervention”, affirmed US President George W. Bush, in his September 24 television speech to promote the biggest corporate bailout plan since the Great Depression. “I believe companies that make bad decisions should be allowed to go out of business.”
“Save the Tamil children in Sri Lanka”; “Cricket Australia — don’t play cricket in the Tamil killing field”; “Mr Rudd <197< condemn Sri Lanka for breaking the peace accords”. These were some of the messages on placards and banners held at a picket of PM Kevin Rudd’s Morningside office on September 23.
Speaking from within the belly of the beast, Bolivia’s indigenous President Evo Morales announced at the 63rd United Nations General Assembly that the world today is paying witness to a “fight between rich and poor, between socialism and capitalism”.
Outraged by illegal and unsafe development on the Illawarra escarpment, more than 50 local residents piled into their community hall on September 21 for a meeting organised by Corrimal Action for Rehabilitation of our Escarpment.
The “new racist regime” in Australia — also “called the Rudd government” — was condemned by Aboriginal activists at a Redfern rally held on September 27, before the release of a federal government review into the “intervention” into Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory and other parts of Australia.
Members of a range of unions protested outside the RACV club on September 25, where the Victorian WorkCover Authority (VWA) announced its end of year financial and operational results. The protest was called by the Victorian Trades Hall Council (VTHC), which is concerned about changes to WorkCover proposed in the Hanks review.
Former foreign minister in Nicaragua’s revolutionary Sandinista government of 1979-1990, Miguel D’Escoto Brockmann, gave the United Nations Security Council a blast in his opening address to the new annual session of the UN General Assembly on September 16.
To lobby or not to lobby? Fortunately for the Australian union movement our forebears in the union leaderships didn’t spend much time trying to answer this question. Campaigns were more direct and more successful than today’s so-called strategies of “boxing smart” and “keeping your powder dry”.