[Abridged from a presentation by Raul Bassi, on behalf of the Socialist Alliance, to a conference hosted by the Venezuelan embassy in Sydney on July 7.]
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The media hysteria over a possible Australian link to the recent British terror attacks serves to highlight a basic reality: the Australian healthcare system is critically dependent on overseas-trained doctors and it wouldnt work without them.
News
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On July 18, 100 people supported 15 striking workers at the Esselte office supply warehouse in Minto by stopping delivery trucks entering the site for seven hours.
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Fords decision to close down its Geelong engine plant will have a catastrophic effect on the town. Its not just the 600 jobs at Ford that will be lost; hundreds of jobs will probably also be lost in the car components factories and various supply companies. This flow-on could mean up to 2400 more unemployed workers in Geelong.
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The global climate crisis and campaigns for environmental and social justice, including the defence of Aboriginal land rights against the Howard governments takeover of Northern Territory communities featured prominently at the Students of Sustainability (SoS) conference at Murdoch University from July 9-13. Some 300 Students and activists attended from around Australia.
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Lawyer Michael Bozic, unionist Peter McLelland and investigative journalist Wendy Bacon addressed 100 people at a July 16 Sydney public forum. The meeting was organised by the Stop Bush Coalition in the lead-up to protests during the September APEC summit, which US President George Bush will attend.
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On July 18, six students were arrested on the Gardens Point campus of the Queensland University of Technology when 20 police brutally attacked a peaceful protest outside the University Council, which was meeting to pass the final decision to shut down QUTs humanities and human services faculty.
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Two Tamil men, Sivarajah Yathavan and Aruran Vinayagamoorthy, who were arrested in Melbourne in May under the anti-terrorism laws, were granted bail by Justice Bernard Bongiorno on July 17.
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The decision by immigration minister Kevin Andrews to throw 27-year-old Indian doctor Mohamed Haneef into immigration detention — despite a Queensland court granting Haneef bail on charges of “recklessly” (meaning not deliberately) supporting terrorism — has further exposed the Howard government’s utter disregard for civil rights and the judicial system, and the dangers inherent in its “anti-terror” laws.
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On July 20, 80 people rallied outside the Brisbane immigration department offices to protest against the detention of Indian doctor Mohamed Haneef. The rally was called by the Stop the War Collective.
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On June 2, 1975, sex workers in Lyon, France, occupied a church for two months, an action that inspired the contemporary sex-worker rights movement. On June 2 this year, 60 sex workers and supporters held a demonstration at Circular Quay to protest against the NSW parliaments passage of the Brothels Legislation Amendment Act. Protesters described the legislation as a significant reversal of decriminalisation.
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Organising is well under way for protests during the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Sydney in September, to which PM John Howard will be welcoming his war criminal mate, US President George Bush.
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An article in GLW #717 incorrectly listed Cheryl Kaulfuss as the chair of Melbourne’s July 14 rally for Indigenous rights. The chair was Shiralee Hood. An article in the same edition described Wally Curran as a metalworkers’ union leader. Curran was a long-time leader of the Australasian Meat Industry Employees Union.
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As the worlds most recognisable symbol of struggle and liberation, Ernesto Che Guevaras image seems to become more popular every year. Even the Weekend Australian, a mouthpiece of Australias ruling class, put Che on its front page on July 14 to grab potential buyers attention.
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The anti-terror hysteria in the lead-up to the Sydney APEC summit in September has been ramped up still further this time by Lord Mayor Clover Moore.
Analysis
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Gollinger interview Eva Gollinger, in her interview "US continues destabilisation push in Venezuela" (GLW #716), regrettably made errors in referring to our organization, the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict (ICNC). She says that our
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Four thousand timber workers and their families attended a rally in Launceston in support of the controversial Bell Bay pulp mill on July 19. The Construction, Forestry, Mining, and Energy Union (CFMEU) called the rally as part of a one-day stop-work action aimed at combating the threat to jobs posed by radical green groups.
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On July 17, PM John Howards climate change policy was released amidst great fanfare. For most of his political career, Howard has denied the link between climate change and human industry, and the threat that it poses to the planet and society. Now the scientific evidence is irrefutable he has changed tack, and is promoting solutions to the climate change threat that avoid threatening the profits of the polluting corporations.
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The July 1 Sydney Morning Herald reported that the “southern part of the Murray-Darling Basin has seen some rainfall, but not enough to stave off zero water allocations when the new irrigation year begins on Sunday… Howard’s grave warning in April of no water for irrigators from July 1 in Australia’s food bowl has been realised, with soaring fruit and vegetable prices expected to follow.”
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On July 18, Ford Australia president Tom Gorman announced that Ford's Geelong engine plant would close in 2010, putting 600 workers out of work. Geelong Trades Hall Council's Union Air radio show interviewed Australian Manufacturing Workers Union vehicle division delegate plant Tony Anderson.
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Queensland University of Technology (QUT) academic Dr Gary MacLennan told a public meeting on July 18 that ordinary people think laughing at the disabled is wrong only in a university is it seen as otherwise.
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The Socialist Alliance is aiming for a 60% overall emissions reduction, including 95% power station emissions reduction, by 2020 and a 90% overall emissions reduction by 2030. Immediate comprehensive planning is required, including the setting of annual targets, to meet these overall targets on time or sooner.
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The peace movement lost a dedicated activist last week. Samantha Kelly, one of a team of radio presenters for NoWar SA, died in Adelaide at the age of 39.
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Australians Brendan Hurst and Justin Saint were recently killed in a roadside attack near Baghdad. They had been working for the Queensland-registered security firm BLP International as contractors training Iraqi police.
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The corporate media has heaped praise on Al Gore following the international rock gig Live Earth. But to ask the Uwa people, from the tropical cloud forests of north-eastern Colombia, what they thought about Gore and Occidental Petroleum (Oxy), the oil company from which his personal fortune is derived, would be to receive a very different opinion.
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Below is an abridged speech given by Lawrence Gibbons, editor of the City Hub, a part of the Alternative Media Group, to a benefit for the South Sydney Herald on July 8.
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The July 1 Sydney Morning Herald reported that the southern part of the Murray-Darling Basin has seen some rainfall, but not enough to stave off zero water allocations when the new irrigation year begins on Sunday Howards grave warning in April of no water for irrigators from July 1 in Australias food bowl has been realised, with soaring fruit and vegetable prices expected to follow.
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PM John Howard announced on June 28 that his government was “taking control” of up to 80 remote Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory, claiming this was a necessary response to the 320-page Little Children are Sacred report, which detailed high levels of sexual abuse of children on a range of NT Indigenous communities.
World
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Max Lane spoke to the Socialist Party of Timors (PST) secretary-general, Avelino da Silva Coelho, in the wake of East Timors June 30 parliamentary elections, in which the PST received 0.96% of the vote.
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According to a report issued by the Palestinian National Information Centre (PNIC), during the month of June, Israel occupation forces killed 49 Palestinians and wounded a further 147. During the same period, Israel abducted and arrested 383 Palestinians and carried out 765 invasions into Palestinian communities in the West Bank and committed a total of 2380 human rights violations against the civilian Palestinian population.
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The revolutionary student movement in Venezuela is divided into countless tiny organisations, often with bases in just one faculty or one campus. One of these organisations, the Popular Revolutionary Movement of Fire (MPR Fogata), in a statement issued in June called for the revolutionary student movement of Venezuela to strengthen the forces in favour of unity. The statement argued: Now we are presented with the possibility of deepening these forces and gradually making that [unity] a reality.
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This is an abridged version of a motion adopted by the national leadership of Frances Revolutionary Communist League (LCR).
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On July 17 the British House of Commons standards and privileges committee recommended the suspension of George Galloway, the former Labour MP who is now an MP for the left-wing Respect coalition, for 18 days. Galloway was expelled from the Labour Party in 2003 because of his opposition to the Iraq war.
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Internationally known environmental activist Sajida Khan passed away on the night of July 15 in her Durban home at age 55. She was suffering her second bout of cancer, and chemotherapy had evacuated her beautiful long hair.
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The election of Nicolas Sarkozy as Frances president in April and the landslide to the conservatives in the first round of the parliamentary elections on June 10, described in France as the blue wave, were widely presented in the Australian capitalist media as a dramatic shift to the right in French political life. They are all too keen to wipe out last years images of French workers and students successfully resisting anti-worker laws, something they only grudgingly reported on in the first place.
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At least 500 Teleco workers received termination letters on July 6 as part of the governments announced plan to privatise the company.
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The head of Britains Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) has called for police to be given the power to imprison terror suspects indefinitely without charge.
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The French presidential and parliamentary elections produced very contradictory results for the broadly defined radical left. Its collective vote of a little less than 9% in the presidential poll, while large compared to other industrialised countries, was down from 15% in 2002. However the Revolutionary Communist League (LCR) bucked the trend and cemented its position as the most credible voice of the anti-capitalist left.
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The dramatic advances of the Venezuelan revolution, and the alliances it has forged with other insurgent peoples and governments resisting imperialism, are creating an historic opportunity to strengthen international anti-imperialist collaboration and rebuild the revolutionary socialist movement worldwide.
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A furor has erupted over the recent formation of the GAM party in Indonesia’s northernmost province of Aceh. Former members of the Free Aceh Movement (GAM) announced the formation of the party on July 7. Chaired by former GAM military commander Muzakkir Manaf, it adopted GAM’s white crescent and star symbol on a red background as its logo. Former GAM “prime minister” Malik Mahmud later said that Jakarta had agreed to the establishment of a local party in Aceh based on the former rebel group that fought for Acehnese independence from Indonesia.
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Cuba has an energy policy whose core concept is to rely less and less on hydrocarbons and give greater space in the energy balance to renewable sources like solar, wind, tide, and water. Cuba has put in place a conservation system that starts at house level and continues to the public sector and cooperative farms, by substituting incandescent lamps by fluorescent bulbs, distributing energy-saving household appliances, and revamping the national power grid Prensa Latina news service, June 8.
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A previously undisclosed US Army investigation into an audacious January attack in Karbala that killed five US soldiers concludes that Iraqi police working alongside American troops colluded with insurgents, the July 12 USA Today reported.
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The European-wide human rights monitoring organisation State Watch is now collecting reports on the policing of protests during the June 6-8 G8 summit in Germany.
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Iraqi children are worse off today than they were before the US-led March 2003 invasion, Dan Toole, director of emergency programs for the United Nations Childrens Fund (UNICEF), told reporters in Geneva on July 16.
Culture
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Freedom Next Time
By John Pilger
Bantam Press, 2006
356 pages, $35.00(pb)
Available from http://www.resistancebooks.com -
Acting from the Heart: Australian advocates for asylum seekers tell their stories
Edited by Sarah Mares & Louise Newman
Finch Publishing, 2007
256 pages, $24.95 -
The Deserter’s Tale: Why I Walked Away From the War in Iraq
By Joshua Key
Text Publishing, 2007
224 pages, $32.95 (pb) -
As It Happened: Cuba — An African Odyssey — From Che Guevara's military campaign to avenge Lumumba in the Congo, up to the fall of apartheid in South Africa, 300,000 Cubans fought alongside African revolutionaries. SBS, Friday, July 27,