MELBOURNE On March 5, the Melbourne-based Women for Palestine group endorsed the call issued on January 31 by the International Coordination Network on Palestine and the Palestinian Grassroots Anti-Apartheid Wall Campaign for global protests on June 9-11 under the slogan The world says no to Israeli occupation.
-
-
At noon on March 8, 50 protesters gathered outside James Hardie Industries Pitt Street offices to express outrage at the companys decision to lock out 12 maintenance workers at its Rosehill plant in western Sydney and to strip them of entitlements.
-
SYDNEY — More than 50 people joined the Socialist Alliance contingent in the Mardi Gras parade on March 3, chanting “What do we want? Marriage rights! When do we want it? Now!” For more photos visit <http://www.socialist-alliance.org>.
-
On March 8 at the Brisbane Activist Centre, 30 people attended a forum to discuss the Aboriginal movement in Australia and indigenous struggles in Bolivia and Venezuela. Sam Watson, Aboriginal rights activist and Socialist Alliance member, spoke about recent developments over the Palm Island killing of Mulrunji and how the case has galvanised the whole of Aboriginal Australia. He said it has renewed activism within the community and made Aboriginal people aware of the broader support for their struggle.
-
The construction division of the Victorian branch of the Construction, Foresty, Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU) has condemned as a callous act the sacking from a building site of occupational safety representative Leigh Scott, the sole provider for and father of five children.
-
A ban on political content took place during the March 1 orientation day at Charles Sturt University in Bathurst, rural NSW. The Student Representative Council (SRC) fought this censorship and successfully negotiated with university management to hold a “political market day” forum the following week.
-
Political fervour, passion and a fighting spirit marked the Fighting racism in the NSW state election forum held by the Socialist Alliance Parramatta branch on March 6.
-
Rallies and other events took place around Australia on March 8-10 to mark International Women's Day. Pictured is Brisbane's rally. In Melbourne, around 300 people gathered on March 8 for a rally initiated by the Victorian Trades Hall Council under the theme of "women and work". Delegations from a wide range of unions and community groups protested the Howard government's vicious anti-union and anti-worker laws, which are having a disproportionately negative impact on women.
-
The vice-president of Geelong Trades Hall, Christine Couzens, has been awarded the Jenny George Award for the advancement of women in unions. Couzens was presented with the award by Australian Council of Trade Unions president Sharan Burrow on March 7.
-
@9point non = CAIRNS The Times Up campaign, seeking to throw out the Howard government and its anti-worker laws, held a rally and public meeting on March 5. More than 80 people protested at the office of federal Liberal MP Warren Entsch, while that evening 30 people heard from Andrew Dettmer, state secretary of the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union; Michael Ravbar, the state secretary of the construction division of the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union; and Peter Simpson, assistant state secretary of the Electrical Trades Union.
-
The reason for the existence of the Redfern-Waterloo Authority (RWA) can be summed up in just two words: corporate greed.
News
-
On March 7, 60 people joined with three comfort women survivors Jan Ruff OHerne AO, Hsie Mei Wu and Gil Won Ok, from Australia, Taiwan and Korea outside the Japanese Consulate in Martin Place.
-
A spirited demonstration of 200 people marched to state parliament on March 9 to protest the poisoning of Kurdish leader Abdullah Ocalan, who is imprisoned in Turkey. Waving Kurdish and Australian flags and holding pictures of Ocalan, the founder of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), the protesters chanted “Freedom for Ocalan, long live Kurdistan” and called for an end to the war in Kurdistan.
-
Kevin Rudd made a point of letting everyone know which side the Labor Party is on when he went and had a friendly meeting with war criminal Dick Cheney while slandering the peaceful protesters outside as violent ferals, student anti-war activist Simon Cunich told Green Left Weekly.
-
PM John Howard and US President George Bush are in trouble over their war on terror. Two things help illustrate why this is the case, and how we can hasten them both into the dustbin of history.
-
Every week since February 3, around 60 people have gathered outside the office of federal Liberal MP Kerry Bartlett to call for Guantanamo Bay detainee David Hicks to be brought home. The initiator of the vigils, Kevin Hardwick, told Green Left Weekly that the vigils would continue until the Hicks issue is resolved.
-
In an out-of-court settlement, which became public on March 4, Victorian Labor Premier Steve Bracks’ government agreed to pay compensation to 47 protesters injured at the “S11" blockade of the World Economic Forum in Melbourne in September 2000. The settlement awards $700,000 in compensation, although $600,000 will go to legal fees.
-
Some 40 Sydney University students held a speak-out outside the army recruitment stall during orientation week on February 28, drawing attention to campus anti-war sentiment. Sydney University anti-war activists passionately poured their knowledge of the wars criminality into the megaphone and the action was a spectacle of peaceful dissent.
-
One of Resistances main campaigns is to strengthen the movement across Australia to end the occupation of Iraq. As well as building the biggest possible protests on March 17-18, the fourth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, we are helping to organise contingents from around the country to join the mass convergence in Sydney when US President George Bush comes to the APEC meeting in September.
-
The Community and Public Sector Union (CPSU) voted to affiliate to the ALP at the union’s March 2-4 national governing council meeting. The enabling motion, heavily amended during the course of the meeting, passed by 42 votes to 12.
-
During May-June this year, Queenslands Shoalwater Bay will host tens of thousands of Australian and US troops engaged live-fire, large-scale military exercises that will pose grave risks for the environment and peoples health. The Shoalwater Military Training Area (SWMTA) is located inside the Great Barrier Reef National Park.
-
The organisers of the Latin American and Asia Pacific International Solidarity Forum, Fighting and organising globally against neoliberalism, are calling on all activists, organisations and communities who are committed to building a better world to join together in Melbourne on October 11-14.
-
Becoming socially aware in Townsville, a city of One Nation voters, was not ideal. It was politically isolating and hard to find information that shed any light on the pressing questions on my mind: why is the world so screwed up and how is this sustainable?
-
Several NSW unions have decided to endorse the March 17 Sydney rally against the war in Iraq, organised by the Stop the War Coalition. They are the Maritime Union of Australia (MUA); the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union; the NSW Fire Brigade Employees Union; and the National Tertiary Education Union.
Analysis
-
In the run-up to the NSW elections both major parties are claiming to be able to run the economy better. But the release of the Australian Bureau of Statistics December quarter figures on March 7, which revealed that NSW is not technically in a recession, is likely to help the state ALP governments lead over Peter Debnams Liberals on March 24.
-
With global warming increasingly dominating mainstream political discussion, the debate about solutions has intensified. While PM John Howard has thrown his weight behind the lie of “clean, green” nuclear power, the ALP has maintained its opposition to this deeply unpopular option.
-
Adelaide backpacker David Hicks will be arraigned before an illegally constituted military tribunal at the Guantanamo Bay concentration camp on March 20 and face the retrospective and ill-defined charge of “material support for terrorism”.
-
A satirical website created by climate action group Rising Tide Newcastle (RTN) has twice been shut down by the powerful coal industry lobby group, the NSW Minerals Council.
-
In Green Left Weekly #693, we published an article broadly in favour of George Monbiot’s call for carbon rationing. Below, Gar Lipow critiques this as a strategy for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
-
Women's day Happy Women's Day, health minister Abbott. Just a reminder that undermining the independent choices of women has alienated nearly half the voting population. And, as a parent of an autistic child, whose expensive therapy is not
-
The Blue Team appeared to regain some advantage after the leader of the (mislabeled) Red Team was forced to admit hed made an error of judgement in meeting up three times last year with convicted fraud and former WA premier Brian Burke (now a professional lobbyist).
-
A tiny group dominates Australian politics and Labor leader Kevin Rudd recently met them. He knows very well that the key to Labors electoral success later this year is an accommodation with the Australian oligarchy.
World
-
Commenting on the natural disaster that has left large swathes of Bolivia’s lowland east underwater after months of flooding, and much of the Andean region covered in ice, in late February Bolivian President Evo Morales called for a global debate on the effects of climate change and environmental destruction on poor nations.
-
The situation remains tense in East Timors capital, Dili, in the wake of the Australian Defence Force-led operation on March 4 to capture renegade East Timorese army officer Major Alfredo Reinado.
-
International Womens Day (IWD) March 8 was marked by marches protesting the recent acquittal of former assistant police commissioner Clint Rickards and two other former police officers on charges of rape.
-
A general strike that shook the African state of Guinea ended on February 27 with the appointment of a new prime minister acceptable to the trade unions and the political opposition.
-
It is year six of the UN-backed NATO occupation of Afghanistan, a joint US-European Union mission. On February 26 there was an attempted assassination of US Vice-President Dick Cheney by Taliban suicide bombers while he was visiting the “secure” US air base at Bagram (once an equally secure Soviet air base during an earlier conflict). Two US soldiers and a mercenary (“contractor”) died in the attack, as did twenty other people working at the base. This episode alone should have concentrated the US vice-president’s mind on the scale of the Afghan debacle. In 2006 the casualty rates rose substantially and NATO troops lost 46 soldiers in clashes with the Islamic resistance or shot-down helicopters.
-
On March 5, the International Federation of Chemical, Energy, Mine and General Workers’ Unions (ICEM), the global union federation for oil workers, issued a call for “strong condemnation” by supporters of workers’ rights of US-led military raids on union offices in Baghdad on February 23 and 25. During the raids, targeting the General Federation of Iraqi Workers (GFIW), a member of the union’s security staff was arrested and office equipment was destroyed. On February 19, the Iraq Syndicate of Journalists was raided and computers and membership records were confiscated.
-
On the eve of Chinas annual parliamentary session the National Peoples Congress (NPC) on March 5-16, Beijing announced plans to increase its military spending for 2007 by 17.8% to 350 billion yuan (US$45 billion), provoking immediate concern from Washington.
-
On January 30, 2003, as Washington assembled its military forces for the long-planned invasion of Iraq, US magazine Business Week explained to its corporate readership the expected benefits of the coming US-led occupation: “Since the US military would control Iraq’s oil and gas deposits for some time, US companies could be in line for a lucrative slice of the business”, and thus they could “feel just as victorious as the US Special Forces”.
-
Four years after the US-led invasion of Iraq, the country is wracked by ongoing and escalating violence. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have died, according to a study published in the respected British medical journal The Lancet in October.
-
The revolutionary left in the Philippines has deep roots in the mass movement but its influence has been weakened by disunity. The left began overcoming these divisions through a May 2005 Democratic Left Conference.
-
After promising during his 2000 inauguration not to push for Taiwanese independence, a commitment reaffirmed after his 2004 re-election, President Chen Shuibian reversed his stance hours before Chinas annual parliamentary session the National Peoples Congress started on March 5.
-
“At Iran’s request, the UN Security Council condemned the deadliest terrorist attack in the country in years and extended ‘sincere condolences’ to the Iranian people, but not to their government, at US insistence”, Associated Press reported on February 15.
-
On March 4, police arrested 33 women and charged them with endangering national security, propaganda against the state and taking part in an illegal gathering. The women were demonstrating outside Iran’s Tehran Revolutionary Court to demand a fair trial for five prominent women’s rights activists arrested in June 2006 during a peaceful protest.
-
On March 4, hundreds of armed right-wing militia, calling themselves the Indonesian Anti-Communist Front (FAKI), attacked the East Java regional conference of the National Liberation Party of Unity (Papernas) at Hotel Selekta in Batu City. The same militia group attacked Papernass founding national conference in January.
-
“Our experience of Venezuela is of a mass people’s revolution. It was something completely different from anything I had experienced in my life … simply the feeling of a mass revolution is something fantastic. It is reminiscent of [Russian revolutionary V.I. Lenin’s] phrase that ‘a revolution is the festival of the oppressed’.”
-
More than 120 branch delegates and a substantial number of visitors attended a conference in Glasgow on March 3 to finalise the Scottish Socialist Party’s manifesto for May’s Scottish Parliament elections.
Culture
-
A Weekend in the City
Bloc Party
Vice Records, 2007 -
The Unknown Terrorist
By Richard Flanagan
Picador, 2006
RRP $32.95 -
Arguably Australia's best band to hold a riot to, Melbourne-based The Nation Blue, released their highly anticipated third album Protest Songs on March 3. As the bio/release notes put it: "The Nation Blue mount the horses of the apocalypse with their