Gippsland power industry unionists met on February 20 to discuss a plan for rescuing the industrys occupational health and safety (OHS) standards after two deaths and one serious injury in the power industry late last year.
Issue 700
News
On February 24, the Refugee Council of Australia called on PM John Howards government to grant full and fair hearing in Australia to any claims for asylum by a group of 83 Sri Lankans rescued off Christmas Island by an Australian naval ship.
At 8am on February 16, police served writs citing a court injunction from Forestry Tasmania on three Huon Valley Environment Centre (HVEC) office-bearers, according to the February 17 Hobart Mercury. The court order was to stop a walk-in planned for the following day in the Weld Valley exclusion zone to highlight the ongoing logging of old-growth forests.
In scenes reminiscent of the police brutality against students who walked out of school against the Iraq war in 2003, hundreds of NSW police and officers from the NSW Public Order and Riot Squad (PORS) tried to stop peaceful rallies on February 22 and 23 when US vice-president and war criminal Dick Cheney arrived in Australia.
An anti-war speak-out held on February 21, during orientation week at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), halted military recruitment on that campus for the day. The action was organised with the support of socialist youth group Resistance, Christian Students Uniting, the Bike Club, the UNSW Greens and the UNSW Environment Collective.
On February 21, the federal education minister Julie Bishop announced a proposal to introduce “performance-based pay” for teachers in public schools.
Analysis
A small Western Australia-based company, Eden Energy, is working on a project to convert most of Indias public buses to run on a cleaner type of gas that will reduce smog in packed Indian cities. Eden Energy owns the patent for a fuel known as Hythane, or HCNG, a compressed mixture of hydrogen and compressed natural gas.
Al Gores film, An Inconvenient Truth, raises the issue of global warming in a way that scares the bejeezus out of viewers, as it should since the consequences of global climate change are truly earth-shaking. The former vice-president does a good job of presenting the graphic evidence: exquisite and terrifying pictures that document the melting of the polar ice caps and the effects on other species, new diseases and rising ocean levels.
The invasion and occupation of Iraq has never been popular. With more than 650,000 Iraqis, mostly civilians, having been killed since the March 2003 US-British-Australian invasion, it is not surprising that three quarters of Iraqis want the US and other foreign troops out, with 61% supporting armed attacks on US troops. The war is also opposed by a majority in the West, including those countries that are involved in the US-led occupation.
I was very saddened to hear about the death of Neville Curtis at his home in White Beach, Tasmania, on February 15. He was 60 years old.
Twenty-four hours before British PM Tony Blairs February 21 announcement that his government would withdraw 1600 troops from Iraq in coming months, Australian foreign minister Alexander Downer warned that any, even staged, withdrawal of US and allied foreign troops from Iraq would be a victory for the al Qaeda terrorists.
Coalition leaders have had a rush of blood to the head over David Hicks. After five years of inaction, PM John Howard and foreign affairs minister Alexander Downer are trumpeting what a hard line they are taking with the George Bush administration to get Hicks back to Australia — after he is found guilty at a military commission of course!
The nationalist rejoicing and fervour displayed on January 26 each year celebrates the 1788 colonial invasion of Australia. However, this year the jingoism was broken by the Palm Island victory against the racist cops of Queensland. This resulted from the combined mass actions of the Palm Islanders themselves (including physical struggle in the immediate wake of the murder of Mulrunji Doomadgee), a similar grassroots response by the Aboriginal community at Aurukun against racist cop violence, and the urban solidarity campaigns centred in Brisbane.
What are the alternatives to the last resort plan the $1.9 billion desalination plant at Kurnell that NSW Premier Morris Iemmas Labor government is so keen to get moving on?
NSW Labor Premier Morris Iemma is digging in on the proposed desalination plant at Kurnell in NSW. Despite continuing public opposition, Iemma seems determined to go ahead with this expensive, electricity-guzzling project.
February 23 marked the deadline for submissions to the federal parliament’s Joint Standing Committee on Treaties (JSCT) on the new Australia-Indonesia “security” pact. If there is any uncertainty about the hypocrisy that underlies Australia’s neo-colonial foreign policy, then this treaty — a “mending the fences” exercise after the federal government granted asylum to 43 pro-independence West Papuan refugees in 2006, and, before that, Canberra’s reluctant 1999 intervention in East Timor — should end it.
World
“Today a new epoch begins”, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez declared in his victory speech on December 3, having won the presidential election with the highest vote in Venezuelan history on a platform of deepening the struggle to build socialism. “That new era is the new socialist democracy. That era is the new socialist society.”
An official European Union report issued on February 20 revealed that one in six people in the EU live below national poverty thresholds. The February 21 British Morning Star reported that according to the European Commission’s social inclusion report 10% of people in the EU — one of the wealthiest regions in the world — live in households in which no-one has a job.
The following report is by a correspondent in Zimbabwe: Zimbabwe’s political situation has suddenly become pregnant with the possibility of uprisings, as ordinary people begin to defy police brutality. Unlike in the past when people were very scared of the police, now the situation seems to be different, with events bearing testimony to the mood of resistance. Just a drive around Highfield Township on February 18 was enough to see the return of the late ’90s fighting spirit among the poor people.
The left-wing Acehnese Peoples Party (PRA) will be holding its founding congress in the provincial capital of Banda Aceh at the end of February. Sydney University Southeast Asian Studies lecturer Max Lane spoke to Thamrin Ananda, chairperson of the Preparatory Committee of the PRA.
El Salvadoran President Antonio Saca’s right-wing government has proclaimed 2007 the “year of peace”, inaugurating this move with an attempt to nominate the late Roberto D’Aubuisson, founder of Saca’s ARENA party, with the highest human rights award in the country.
In an interview printed in the February 19 London Financial Times, Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of the UNs International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), said that Iran could be as little as six months away from being able to enrich uranium to fuel-grade level on an industrial scale.
Many Australians would assume that death squads, disappearances, harassment by the military, violent dispersal of demonstrations and political prisoners were features of the Philippines that vanished when Ferdinand Marcoss dictatorship was overthrown in 1986.
On February 17 one day after the US House of Representatives approved a non-binding, bipartisan resolution opposing President George Bushs plan to increase the size of the US occupation force in Iraq by 21,500 combat troops the commander of US forces in Baghdad announced he had filed a request for even more soldiers.
Culture
Australia by Numbers: Sydney 2000 —Traces the birth and life of the Foundation for Aboriginal Affairs. Features interviews with Chicka Dixon, Gary Foley, Joyce Clague, Esther Carroll and Ray Carroll, combined with previously unseen archival
Not Buying It: My Year Without Shopping
by Judith Levine
Free Press, 2006
274 pages, $39.95 (hb)
by Judith Levine
Free Press, 2006
274 pages, $39.95 (hb)
Death of a President
Written, produced & directed by Gabriel Range
Hopscotch Films
In cinemas from March 1
Written, produced & directed by Gabriel Range
Hopscotch Films
In cinemas from March 1
The Gates of Egypt
Written by Stephen Sewell
Directed by Kate Gaul
Company B, Belvoir St Theatre, Sydney
Until March 11
Written by Stephen Sewell
Directed by Kate Gaul
Company B, Belvoir St Theatre, Sydney
Until March 11
I went down to the mine to black diamond country
So the face of the earth would be warm comrade
For years I silently waved a pick in this prison
So that my children would smile comrade
But there is no one smiling in our home
So the face of the earth would be warm comrade
For years I silently waved a pick in this prison
So that my children would smile comrade
But there is no one smiling in our home
Sydney has long endured right-wing shock jocks taking cash for comment from corporate sponsors, but a new radio program is providing a refreshing change with a focus on working families, strong communities and industrial rights.
General
Green Left Weekly is celebrating its 700th issue! Thanks to everyone who sent messages of solidarity from across Australia and around the globe. Green Left Weekly couldn't have made it to 700 without our readers, subscribers, writers, sellers and all
Seven hundred issues ago the first copy of Green Left Weekly hit the streets in the midst of the first US-led invasion of Iraq. Just say no to the war, was the cry on our multi-coloured cover, and the issue was snapped up eagerly at the anti-war protests.
Letters
Police minister
The Beattie government must sack police minister Judy Spence immediately. She has presided over the most appalling downward spiral in the standards of police service delivery and police accountability and, in the finest Westminster