SYDNEY Hundreds of students from at least five university campuses joined the Demand a better future rally organised by the National Union of Students on March 19. The rally called on the new Labor government to increase education funding and to scrap the Voluntary Student Unionism legislation that has significantly undermined student organising. A speaker from the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union extended solidarity from the trade union movement. The march dwarfed a pro-VSU counter-demonstration organised by Liberal students. There was a rally in Melbourne of 150 people and actions in other cities on the same day.
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Events such as the April 11-13 Climate Change Social Change conference occur very rarely in the intellectual and political life of an Australian city. This gathering in Sydney will bring together an extraordinary range of speakers to tackle the theme of social action to stop climate change.
News
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The Tullamarine toxic waste dump is likely to be closed permanently after the Environmental Protection Authority (EPA) announced that from February 18 no more waste would be accepted at the site, pending an inquiry.
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The seven-member Bass Coast Shire Council, on whose land the Victorian Labor government plans to build a $3.1 billion desalination plant, voted on March 19 to drop its support for the project. In a March 20 media release, council CEO Allan Bawden
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On February 26, Forestry Tasmania, the state-government-run corporation that manages Tasmanias forests, revealed that it had signed a 20-year deal to supply wood to Gunns Limiteds proposed Tamar Valley pulp mill.
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The WA Aboriginal Rights Coalition (ARC) has demanded that the state government allocate adequate resources to the Aboriginal Legal Service (ALS) to deal with the thousands of compensation claims from members of the Stolen Generations.
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On March 20, a 40-strong community picket blocked trucks from entering the Coburg plant of Visy Industries, the world’s largest packaging and recycling company. The picket was to protest the sacking of George Kyridis, a member of the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union (AMWU) Visy is owned by the Pratt family and employs about 8000 people in Australia, New Zealand and North America.
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The March 25 Sydney Morning Herald reported that the site of a planned supermarket development in the northern NSW town of Moree is an Indigenous burial site.
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Fifty people gathered outside of the Crown Casino on March 18 to protest Prime Minister Kevin Rudds support of a gala dinner of the United Israel Appeal Refugee Relief Fund (UIA), a Zionist organisation.
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Members of the Stolen Wages Working Group (SWWG) walked out of a meeting with Queensland Indigenous affairs minister Lindy Nelson-Carr on March 25 when they were told that $21.2 million in promised extra compensation payments would be redirected to
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On March 13 the Victorian Legislative Assembly passed a bill to establish a relationships register, which will allow couples, regardless of gender, to be formally recognised under Victorian law. However, concerns have been raised that the proposals contain a number of serious shortcomings.
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Federal parliament passed the Workplace Relations Amendment (Transition to Forward with Fairness Bill) on March 19. The bill which the corporate media falsely claims has brought an end to Australian Workplace Agreements (AWAs) became law on March 28.
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In December 2006, when Kevin Rudd was elected leader of the federal Labor Party, he held a press conference about his personal values where he stated the obvious: I am not a socialist. I have never been a socialist and I never will be a socialist. His argument against socialism was basic it is a 19th-century arcane view.
Analysis
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Palestine I GLW #743 carried a front cover headline "End Gaza Holocaust", to which I object. There is no justification, factually or ethically, to abuse the memory of the victims of Nazi genocide by describing Israel's actions as a holocaust. This
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It was lunchtime in one of Haitis worst slums, and Charlene Dumas was eating mud. With food prices rising, Haitis poorest cant afford even a daily plate of rice, and some take desperate measures to fill their bellies. Charlene, 16 with a 1-month-old son, has come to rely on a traditional Haitian remedy for hunger pangs: cookies made of dried yellow dirt from the countrys central plateau.
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As part of the former Howard governments Northern Territory intervention, the Community Development Employment Program (CDEP) was abolished. The Howard government had planned to abolish it across other states on July 1 this year.
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On March 20, the Sydney Morning Herald reported that federal immigration minister Chris Evans had agreed to speed-up the processing of 457 visas, which allow bosses to hire skilled workers from overseas to fill alleged skill shortages.
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When the outside world thinks about Australia, it generally turns to venerable cliches of innocence — cricket, leaping marsupials, endless sunshine, no worries. Australian governments actively encourage this. Witness the recent “G’day USA” campaign, in which Kylie Minogue and Nicole Kidman sought to persuade people in the US that, unlike the empire’s problematic outposts, a gormless greeting awaited them Down Under. After all, George Bush had ordained the previous Australian prime minister, John Howard, “sheriff of Asia”.
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Global warming, General Motors vice-chairperson of global product development Robert A. Lutz told reporters in a closed-door meeting in January, is a total crock of shit. Within hours the remark was reported on the internet, and spread, as Lutz subsequently lamented, like ragweed.
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Channel Seven boss Kerry Stokess HRL Ltd and Chinas Harbin Power Engineering Company are to build a $750 million clean coal power station in the Latrobe Valley that, when operational from the end of 2009, will add significantly to Victorias greenhouse gas emissions.
World
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Within days of Washingtons war on Iraq entering its sixth year, the White House confirmed news reports that the US troop death toll had passed the 4000 mark. Associated Press reported on March 23 that the grim milestone came after a roadside bomb killed four US soldiers in Baghdad.
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On March 18, Peter Boyle, the national secretary of the Democratic Socialist Perspective a Marxist tendency in the Socialist Alliance — interviewed S. Arutchelvan, the secretary general of the Malaysian Socialist Party (PSM), about the PSMs electoral successes in the March 12 general elections. This interview was originally published by socialist e-journal Links at .
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Below is an abridged March 19 statement by Human Rights Watch, .
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On March 6, Tamil National Alliance (TNA) member of parliament K. Sivanesan was killed by a claymore mine while driving through a village in northern Sri Lanka on his way home from a parliamentary sitting in Colombo. Sivanesan had voted against a further extension of the state of emergency currently in place.
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It is not an overstatement that the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela is a shining beacon of hope for struggling masses around the world.
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On March 19, JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon joined Bear Stearns CEO Alan Schwartz to face a group of 400 stunned Bear executives. Five days earlier, Bear Stearns, one of Wall Streets five largest investment banks, had lost $17 billion of wealth, triggering the biggest financial panic since the Great Depression.
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The European Commission is increasingly annoyed by its inability to foist unwanted, unnecessary and unsafe genetically modified crops onto European consumers and some member-state governments.
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Venezuela's Bolivarian revolution, led by President Hugo Chavez, is an ongoing process aiming at the transformation of Venezuela to overcome poverty and empower the poor majority — as well as lead a process of Latin American integration to break
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March 17 and 18 were bad days for the US government and the corporate interests it represents, as it suffered two blows to its campaign to undermine the growing movement in Latin America towards regional integration to challenge US domination.
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Sickly and malnourished, Kirana Kapito began his working life on a large commercial tobacco estate in Malawi’s northern region. Such farms sell their produce on the country’s auction floors directly to international corporations, including Limbe Leaf Tobacco (majority-owned by the Swiss-registered Continental Tobacco Company), and US-based Alliance One Tobacco.
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A demonstration by Buddhist monks in the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, on March 10 to commemorate the anniversary of Chinas crushing of the Tibetan independence movement in 1959 triggered protests for self-determination that, by March 14, had escalated into anti-Chinese riots in which 19 people were killed.
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Percy Schmeisers decade-long legal odyssey has finally come to an end and hes got a cheque for [C]$660 to prove it, the March 20 Toronto Globe and Mail reported.
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Kathy Black recently took part in a speaking tour of Australia at the invitation of Sydneys Stop the War Coalition. Black is one of six national conveners of US Labor Against the War and is also the Philadelphia president of the Coalition of Labor Union Women (CLUW), a group affiliated to the AFL-CIO union federation. She spoke to Green Left Weeklys Margarita Windisch about some of the gender and race issues that US unions have to tackle.
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The Prague City Court rejected an appeal from the Czech Communist Youth Association (KSM) against an official banning order, the German JungeWelT reported on March 27. The interior ministry prohibition order was originally issued in October 2006.
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Below is an abridged statement by the International Trade Union Confederation
Culture
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Message Stick: Talking Stick — Filmmakers discuss the Indigenous Unit at the Australian Film Commission. ABC, Friday April 4, 6pm. Muddy Waters: Life and Death on the Great Barrier Reef — By 2030, half of the Great Barrier Reef may be gone.
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Cold Tea for Brandy A Tale of Protest, Painting & Politics
By Joan Coxsedge
Vulcan Press, 2007
$39.95 or $30 + postage from the author, (03) 9857 9249 -
The Soviet Century
By Moshe Lewin
Verso 2005 416 pages, $73.56 (hb) -
Cold Tea for Brandy A Tale of Protest, Painting & Politics
By Joan Coxsedge
Vulcan Press, 2007
$39.95 or $30 + postage from the author, (03) 9857 9249