Issue 762

News

  • SA teachers stop work over pay and funding

    South Australian teachers undertook four days of rolling stoppages and community rallies across the state from August 4-7 in an attempt to force the state government to re-negotiate its pay and funding arrangement for public schools and TAFEs. Eighty-three per cent of teachers voted in favour of the stoppages in workplace ballots in late July.

  • Protesters call on PM to abolish ABCC

    “Abolish the ABCC! Support rights of building workers!” was the message on protesters’ placards outside PM Kevin Rudd’s electorate office in Morningside on August 8.

  • Breaking Queensland's coal addiction

    “Queensland is the biggest coal producing state in the biggest coal producing country in the world”, John MacKenzie of Friends of the Earth told an August 6 Socialist Alliance forum.

  • Palestinian refugee deported to death

    Palestinian refugee Akram al Masri, 31, who was deported from Australia in 2002, has been shot dead in his homeland less than six months after Australian authorities allegedly refused him a visitor’s visa.

  • Keep Australia nuclear free!

    “If only 0.3% of the world’s current nuclear armaments were used, it would create a nuclear winter, and the end of humanity on this planet”, Dr Marianne Hanson, senior lecturer in international relations at the University of Queensland, told the Brisbane Hiroshima Day rally on August 3. The rally attracted 100 people.

  • Climate justice seminar calls for action

    With the impact of global warming already being felt, it can be hard to feel positive about the future. However, an August 2 “climate justice” seminar at Melbourne University provided some positive directions for the 140 people who attended.

  • Hillsong's miracle make-up cure

    The conservative Christian group Hillsong has launched a controversial new youth program “Shine”, aimed, it says, at “promoting self-esteem” in teenage girls considered to be “at risk”, due to personal problems or behavioural issues.

  • Pope, sexuality and human rights

    Fifty people took part in a discussion around the topic “Sex, sexuality and the church” hosted by the Socialist Alliance on August 6.

Analysis

  • Labour shortage or lack of well-paid jobs?

    On August 6, Victoria University of Technology (VUT) hosted a seminar, “Pacific Islands Migration and Labour Mobility: Issues and Responses”, which discussed the potential for an unskilled guest worker scheme for Pacific Island workers. Some Pacific nations have called for such program to help alleviate high rates of unemployment.

  • Write On: Letter to the editor

    Work Choices @letter =What rock was Nick Everett hiding under during last year's federal election? (Write On, GLW #761) You couldn't move without a Labor political hopeful promising to "tear-up" Work Choices through the campaign. Rudd promised it

  • An apology to the Tamil people

    There can be no peace, and certainly no peace with coexistence, in Sri Lanka — divided or undivided — until there is an apology from the Sinhalese to the Tamils for all the atrocities unleashed on them, not just in 1983, but all the way back to 1956, and increasingly so today.

  • Call for national emergency climate protests

    The following call for a national week of protest action, beginning September 21, was issued by the July 5 Climate Emergency Rally organising committee in Melbourne, and endorsed by the August 2 Climate Justice seminar.

  • Sewerage reform: concrete sustainability ideas

    Hydrologists such as professors Peter Cullen, Richard Kingsford and Derek Eamus, speaking at public forums in NSW earlier this year, warned that Australians are extracting water from stressed rivers and artesian systems faster than it is being replenished.

  • Can markets stop climate change?

    Internationally, as in Australia, governments forced to promise climate change action have generally promoted market-based carbon abatement schemes, mostly of the “cap and trade” variety. But can we trade our way out of our climate difficulties? Can market mechanisms deal with a problem of such scale and urgency?

  • Fanning the flames of climate change

    “As near as we can tell looking at the historical record, there’s been ice in the Arctic in the summer for at least 16 million years”, Don Perovich, a geophysicist with the US army’s Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory, told the August 4 Four Corners program. Arctic ice melt over this year’s northern summer has been at record levels, leaving the amount of ice remaining alarmingly low.

  • A tale of two meetings

    A flurry of public meetings followed the federal government’s green paper on carbon emissions trading. I attended two quite different information sessions in Sydney.

World

Culture

  • Monster Saturday against power sell-off

    On “Super Saturday” August 16, hundreds of activists across NSW will staff “Stop the Sell-Off” stalls in 50 NSW electorates. Part of the campaign to stop the state ALP government from privatising electricity, the stalls are expected to gather thousands of signatures on petitions, and promote the mass anti-privatisation rally planned for September 20, at Sydney Town Hall.

  • Venezuela: a revolution in motion

    Changing Venezuela by Taking Power: The History and Politics of the Chavez Government
    By Gregory Wilpert
    Verso, 2007
    352 pages, $49.95