Australian refugee advocates have announced they will send a delegation to Dili in the second week of May to lobby against a proposal by Australian PM Julia Gillard to build a regional processing centre for refugees in East Timor.
The announcement follows recent comments by East Timorese president Ramos Horta that such a centre “remains a possibility".
The delegation was invited by the Timor Leste Forum of NGOs and the Student Front of Timor Leste and will meet with community groups, NGOs, unions and political parties to lobby against the Australian government's proposal.
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Sydney's Marrickville council is coming under increasing pressure to overturn a resolution it passed in December in support of the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel.
NSW Liberal Premier Barry O’Farrell has threatened to use his powers under the Local Government Act to sack the council unless the resolution is overturned.
Supporting Palestine is not anti-Semitic
With the NSW elections, we saw the ALP and Coalition stooping to the lowest common denominator attacking the Greens for supporting the boycott divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaign in Marrickville Council.
The anti-Greens campaign was also supported by the far right Australian Protectionist Party
There was a filthy smear campaign with anonymous signs and graffiti slandering the Greens as anti-Semitic and Greens billboards were spray-painted with swastikas.
In his April 13 speech on his country’s $14.3 trillion government deficit, US President Barack Obama called on the US Congress to change the US tax system “so that the amount of taxes you pay isn’t determined by what kind of accountant you can afford.”
He said: “In the last decade, the average income of the bottom 90% of all working Americans actually declined. The top 1% saw their income rise by an average of more than a quarter of a million dollars each. And that’s who needs to pay less taxes?
Activists in Hobart have condemned the federal government’s plan to imprison 400 men in a new refugee detention centre in Pontville, Tasmania.
Instead, the activists said, the government should use community-based processing and settlement alternatives that respect human rights.
The activists said they were pleased to hear there are plans to house women and children in the community, but said the government should also treat the 400 men who will be imprisoned at Pontville in the same way.
In the past few weeks, Rupert Murdoch’s News Ltd media have attacked Jewish-Australian journalist and author Antony Loewenstein over a March 30 article he wrote for the independent online news service New Matilda.
The story examined to what degree the NSW Greens’ stance on Israel cost them lower house seats in the recent state election.
“Coal is really dirty. Gas is pretty dirty too. It's a bit cleaner than coal,” said City of Sydney CEO Monica Barone as she explained the plan to move to gas-powered energy production at a packed community meeting at St Peters Town Hall organised by Sydney Residents Against Coal Seam Gas (SRACGS) on April 13.
Barone agreed that we need to move to a low carbon economy, but said moving to a zero carbon economy, such as the plan set out by Beyond Zero Emissions, would be “enormous”.
A ferocious media campaign, led by the Murdoch press, has been unleashed against Sydney’s Marrickville Council over a motion it passed endorsing the global campaign of boycott, disinvestment and sanctions targetting Israel.
In December 2008, Israel launched an all-out military assault on the 1.4 million people in the Gaza Strip. Twenty-two days later, about 1400 Gazans were dead, including 300 children.
In its 2009 report on the assault, titled Operation “Cast Lead”: 22 Days of Death and Destruction, Amnesty International said: “The scale and intensity of the attacks were unprecedented, even in the context of the increasingly lethal Israeli military campaigns in Gaza in previous years.
As the May federal budget approaches, Labor PM Julia Gillard and opposition leader Tony Abbott have gone on a welfare-recipient bashing spree. Exploiting the well-worn and reactionary “dole bludger” stereotype, they are softening us up for budget cuts to welfare and other social services.
But this sadly predictable spectacle is not washing with most people, according to the findings of an April 11 Essential Report survey.
Environmentalist Bob Irwin, father of the late “Crocodile Hunter” Steve Irwin, said he will continue to protest against the coal seam gas (CSG) industry despite his arrest at a protest on April 12.
Police detained Irwin along with Queensland Greens spokesperson Libby Connors and Queensland Party MP Aiden McLindon at a protest organised by Lock the Gate at Tara, 300 kilometres west of Brisbane.
They were charged with disobeying a police direction. They will appear in court in May.
Workers from the Australian Services Union (ASU) and the Australian Nurses Federation (ANF) stopped work for the second time in a week to protest outside Ballarat city hall.
The second protest coincided with a visit from Victorian Premier Ted Baillieu on April 15.
However, Baillieu did not turn up while the workers were protesting, delaying the scheduled event for 90 minutes.
The ASU and the ANF have been locked in negotiations with the Ballarat City Council for more than 12 months for a new enterprise agreement and wage rises. Workers last received a pay rise in July 2009.
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