Around 100 people filled Newtown Neighbourhood Centre on April 18 to hear visiting Zimbabwean socialist Munyaradzi Gwisai explain the background to the Zimbabwean people’s struggle for democracy.
Issue 707
News
Refugee-rights groups have accused immigration department and GSL management at the Villawood detention centre of collective punishment of detainees in the aftermath of two detainees escaping on the evening of April 19.
A community protest organised by Union Solidarity shut down the construction site at Woodsides Otways gas plant near Port Campbell on April 17.
The eight-day trial against seven people facing charges relating to a February 2006 protest against Kerry Packers taxpayer-funded state memorial has concluded with the dismissal of one or more charges against each defendant. Four defendants decided to plead guilty to one minor charge each.
new front in the battle against the Howard governments anti-union laws has opened with a push by federal workplace relations minister Joe Hockey for local councils to sign their employees up to the new Work Choices legislation.
Workers at Wangaratta fabric manufacturer Bruck Textiles defeated a second attempt by management to implement a non-union agreement in votes held on April 19 and 20. Bruck tried to entice workers to sign its sub-standard non-union agreement with a 3% annual pay increase that wouldnt even keep up with inflation.
Civil rights and anti-war activists rallied around Australia on April 21 to demand immediate freedom for David Hicks and the closure of the US’s military prison in Guantanamo Bay.
Around 1000 workers rallied in Musgrave Park on April 20 to oppose the Howard government’s Work Choices legislation, under the theme “Time’s Up”.
On April 14, the Victorian Socialist Alliance held its state conference, which unanimously voted to make the federal election a key area of campaigning for the coming year. The alliance will hold further meetings to preselect candidates and determine the shape of the election campaign.
The Our Public Transport campaign was launched in Melbourne on April 12, when some 40 local commuters rallied at Flinders Street Station to demand free, publicly run transport.
Forty-nine workers at Coghlan and Russell, a car components factory in Geelong, have been stood down after the company called in receivers.
On April 5, the workers discovered that their superannuation had not been paid for more than eight months. When the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union (AMWU) confronted management, it was told that the company had a plan and would talk to the union in a couple of days.
Sydney city council is preparing a vicious crackdown on the ability to distribute newspapers such as Green Left Weekly and leaflets advertising political rallies and events.
Analysis
It now appears certain that the ALP’s national conference, to be held in Sydney from April 27-29, will drop the party’s “no new uranium mines” policy, adopted in 1998.
This will satisfy the big mining companies’ desire to expand uranium mining. Labor leader Kevin Rudd and his “left-wing” deputy, Julia Gillard, are leading the push to scrap the policy.
It is 20 years since the release of Australia Reconstructed, a policy report that came out of an Australian unionists tour of Western Europe in 1986. It is also 25 years since Australia On the Rack was published by the metalworkers union (now the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union - AMWU). Back on Track - A Way Forward for Australia is the latest such policy offering.
The federal Coalition government is proposing to bar the entry to Australia of migrants and refugees with HIV, supposedly to contain HIV rates.
With his April 17 speech to the National Press Club, federal Labor Party leader Kevin Rudd launched a pre-emptive strike against all those unionists, including ALP members, who thought that the April 27-29 ALP national conference would be debating a new industrial relations policy to replace the Howard government’s hated Work Choices legislation.
ALP leader Kevin Rudd’s industrial relations policies, outlined in an April 17 speech to the National Press Club, have caused great concern among many trade unionists because they echo many of the anti-worker provisions in the federal government’s Work Choices laws.
Those hoping for a more serious approach to tackling global warming from the federal ALP than the do-as-little-as-politically-possible tack of John Howard’s Coalition government should revise down their expectations. On February 25, Labor leader Kevin Rudd unveiled the centrepiece of his party’s “climate action plan” — $500 million in funding for “clean coal” technologies research.
With support from the South Australian Labor government and the federal ALP, pilot work is starting on the desalination plant that is to supply fresh water for BHP Billitons planned expansion of its copper-gold-uranium mine at Olympic Dam.
World
With 80 million inhabitants, West Bengal is the fourth most populous state in India. It has been ruled by the Communist Party of India (Marxist)-led Left Front (LF) coalition for three decades. This government, however, has regularly used police repression against workers and peasants to defend big-business interests.
As the regime of President Hosni Mubarak regime in Egypt faces a growing crisis of legitimacy, expressed by protests, boycotts and industrial strikes, the government has pushed through a referendum to amend the constitution and enshrine the countrys police-state laws. On March 25, Amnesty International said the amendments will cause the greatest erosion of rights in 26 years in Egypt.
On April 15, Ecuador voted overwhelmingly to ratify President Rafael Correa’s proposal to convoke a Constituent Assembly with the power to re-write the constitution with the intention of weakening the stranglehold on the country of the traditional wealthy elite.
Returning once again to Venezuela — having last spent four months here in 2005 — I recalled a refrain that had been constantly repeated by Venezuelans: “After we re-elect Chavez in 2006, the real revolution will begin.” It took very little time for me to realise exactly what they meant.
An authoritative opinion poll for the Scotsman newspaper indicates a strong increase in support for the Scottish Socialist Party (SSP) in the run-up to the Scottish Parliament elections on May 3. The April 6 Scottish Socialist Voice reported that “in both the constituency and regional list vote, 5 per cent of Scots voters plan to vote Scottish Socialist”, according to the ICM poll. This represents a 3% rise in the regional vote and a 4% increase in the constituency ballot — the biggest increase in support in the previous month for any political party in Scotland.
The Women Workers Help Line is a member-based, voluntary, non-profit making, non-governmental organisation, struggling to create legal, political, democratic and trade union awareness among women for a socially just, economically equitable, politically aware and gender sensitive society, explains the WWHLs vision statement. Green Left Weeklys Jim McIlroy visited Bushra Khaliq, the WWHLs general secretary, at the organisations Lahore headquarters in late March.
The Israeli journalist Amira Hass describes the moment her mother, Hannah, was marched from a cattle train to the Nazi concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen. “They were sick and some were dying”, she says. “Then my mother saw these German women looking at the prisoners, just looking. This image became very formative in my upbringing, this despicable ‘looking from the side’.”
The six cabinet members loyal to Iraqi Shiite cleric Moqtada al Sadr quit the 37-member cabinet of US-backed Prime Minister Nuri al Maliki on April 16. The Sadrists had headed the ministries of agriculture, health, tourism and transportation.
A preliminary US military investigation indicates that more than 40 Afghans killed or wounded by Marines after a suicide bombing in a village near Jalalabad last month were civilians, the April 14 Washington Post reported it had been told by the US commander who ordered the investigation.
Culture
Kurt Vonneguts life and art were shaped by personal tragedies. His mother committed suicide. His sister and her husband died within days of each other, leaving three children. One of his sons suffered from schizophrenia.
John Brown, Abolitionist
By David S. Reynolds
Vintage Books, 2006
578 pages, $34.95 (pb)
By David S. Reynolds
Vintage Books, 2006
578 pages, $34.95 (pb)
Nabarlek is one of the bands synonymous with Indigenous rock in this country today. Rounding up their Queensland tour at the Cairns Civic Theatre on March 10, they brought the house down. The audience was dancing in the aisles in the second set when this nine-piece group from Manmoyi in Western Arnhemland got the place rocking.
Dances in Deep Shadows: Britains Clandestine War in Russia 1917-20
By Michael Occleshaw
Constable, 2006
360 pages, US
By Michael Occleshaw
Constable, 2006
360 pages, US
The Chaser's War on Everything — Australian political satire. ABC, Wednesday, April 25, 9pm.
Child Soldiers — The plight of children recruited to fight in armed conflicts around the world, and the daunting post-conflict challenges they face.
Editorial
Describing the situation as unprecedentedly dangerous, PM John Howard announced on April 19 that no water will be allocated to irrigators in the Murray-Darling basin after June 31, unless there is substantial rainfall and therefore water inflows to the basin in the next six weeks.
General
Paul Wolfowitz, president of the World Bank and formerly US President George Bushs deputy secretary of defence, doesnt seem to comprehend why he is in trouble. He has admitted to ordering a US$60,000 pay increase for his lover, a World Bank employee, before seconding her to the US State Department as part of a generous compensation package.
Green Left Weekly will be taking a one-week break. Out next issue will be dated May 9.
Letters
Carbon rationing
Tony Iltis ("Stopping climate change: tomorrow is too late!" GLW #706) draws extensively from the recent Carbon Equity Project report, Avoiding Catastrophe, but is wide of the mark in dismissing carbon rationing as simply "a right
Resistance!
The short answer to that question is: because we need to be. It is an illusion that women have attained true equality.
On April 17, 160 people rallied at Melbourne University (MU) against the introduction of the “Melbourne model”. They were joined by students from the Victorian College of the Arts (VCA).