The frustration of rank-and-file building workers who marched to the ALP national conference on July 31 was obvious. They demanded Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s Labor government honour its promise to abolish the Howard government-created Australian Building and Construction Commission (ABCC).
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BRISBANE — Seven hundred teachers staged an after-school rally outside state parliament on August 5. The rally was organised after the Industrial Relations Commission ruled against a planned statewide strike.
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MELBOURNE — Ambulance workers in Victoria have stepped up their campaign for a 10-hour break between shifts and for wage justice. A mass meeting of 400 ambulance officers voted on August 4 that they would not work on their days off.
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Vestas workers ended their 18-day occupation of Britain's only wind turbine factory on August 6.
News
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On August 4, more than 400 police, including the Australian Federal Police and ASIO, staged a pre-dawn raid on 19 homes across Melbourne. The raid was carried out under the federal government’s “anti-terrorism laws” — extreme and repressive legislation created by the previous Howard government.
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On July 28, Castlemaine members of the Support Association for the Women of Afghanistan (SAWA) organised a birthing kit assembly day at the local hospital.
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The new song “Stand Tall” has become the official anthem of the Ark’s Tribe campaign. The song will be played loudly at the Elizabeth Magistrates Court on August 11 when Tribe’s court case resumes.
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One hundred Tamil and non-Tamil women attended the inaugural Women for Justiceevent at Balmain Town Hall on July 30. The meeting aimed to create awareness about, and campaign to stop, sexual abuse and human rights violations to which Tamil women have been subjected to for the past 60 years.
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In the midst of enterprise bargaining, members of the National Tertiary Education Union at the University of Melbourne were shocked by a management proposal to cut at least 220 full-time positions by the end of 2009. The university claimed the sackings were due to the economic crisis.
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2DayFM’s Kyle and Jackie O radio show hooked up a 14-year-old girl to a lie detector, as part of a competition to win tickets to a concert, on July 29. When the girl was asked whether she’d ever had sex, she revealed that she had been raped when she was 12.
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Two young Australian Tamils will walk 300 km from Sydney to Canberra to build awareness of the plight of 300,000 Tamil civilians forcibly held in military controlled internment camps in Sri Lanka.
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John Pilger, renowned journalist, author and filmmaker, has been awarded the 2009 Sydney Peace Prize.
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A pledge to create 50,000 new green jobs was a showpiece announcement in Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s speech to the ALP national conference on July 30.
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Seven of the lowest-lying pacific nations have called for global emissions cuts of 45% by 2020 to save their homelands from rising sea levels caused by global warming.
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Premier Anna Bligh was put on the spot on ABC television’s Q & A on July 30 when asked about a young Cairns couple facing charges for procuring an abortion.
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“Housing is controlled by the market system, and markets don't understand people, only money”, Father Terry Fitzpatrick told an August 4 Socialist Alliance forum on confronting the human cost of the economic crisis.
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NSW TAFE teachers in NSW will stop work on August 11 after the NSW Department of Education and Training (DET) proposed an increase of 71 teaching hours a week, an end to the allocation of professional development and a lifting of the ceiling on hours taught in any one week.
Analysis
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In the year to May, manufacturing employers shed more than 68,000 jobs due to reduced demand emerging from the economic crisis, said the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
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On August 4, the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) released figures that showed housing prices across Australia’s capital cities rose by 4.2% over the three months ending in June. The rapid increase has worried the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) enough for it to warn of a threat of a housing bubble.
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On August 4, theatrical pre-dawn raids in Melbourne by more than 400 Victorian, NSW and federal police and ASIO agents — including paramilitary units armed with sub-machineguns — launched Australia’s latest terrorism scare.
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Scientists are telling us we have to phase out coal quickly or risk an uninhabitable planet. Coal burning now accounts for about 36% of Australia's greenhouse gas emissions. Mining and handling of coal adds even more.
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In the state that claims to have the greenest energy on the Australian mainland, South Australia’s climate camp will confront two of the country’s dirtiest power stations. The Northern and Playford B plants, fuelled by cheap but low-grade brown coal, are just outside Port Augusta, a four-hour drive north of Adelaide.
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The Australian and US government’s have proposed carbon trading schemes as a response to the threat of climate change. How to respond has been hotly debated in the climate action movements of both countries. Green Left Weekly has campaigned strongly for the Rudd government’s carbon trading scheme to be rejected as a false response to the climate emergency. Below, Ilan Salbe puts an alternative view.
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Aboriginal elders and families from Ampilatwatja have set up a permanent protest camp outside their government-controlled community in protest against policies that have neglected their needs and desires.
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The largest demonstrations for same-sex marriage in Australia’s history took place on August 1. A 3000-strong rally marched on the national ALP conference in Sydney. Four thousand took to the streets in Melbourne. Record crowds mobilised in other cities.
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We face a climate crisis and something needs to change. The world’s resources are finite, as is the amount of destruction humans can do to this planet if we are to survive. As such, there is a debate in the environment movement about whether or not curbing population is an essential part of the solution.
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On the verge of another racist push? Suddenly, the Rudd government has discovered the need to pump up the "terrorist threat". First, the Attorney-General discovered the so-called "anti-terrorist laws" were not strong enough. Now, the biggest
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If we are going to meet the crisis posed by global warming, governments must take strong and urgent measures to cut emissions now. We need to build a sustainable economy and we need to do it fast. Delay will result in dangerous and unstoppable climate change.
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A chill wind was blowing early last Thursday outside my local train station. Commuters had their collars turned up and their arms folded as they hurried into the station. Dave, the suburb's iconic Big Issue seller in his red wheelchair, and I with the latest Green Left Weekly, were trying to attract those with windproof consciences.
World
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A rash of workplace occupations is spreading across the globe as workers defy the brutal consequences of the recession.
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The people of Honduras have now suffered more than 40 days of military rule. The generals’ June 28 coup ousted the country’s elected government and unleashed severe, targeted, and relentless repression.
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The article below is based on a statement by Malaysian Socialist Party (PSM) general-secretary S. Arutchelvan on August 1, on the mass protests that day against the repressive Internal Security Act. The ISA allows security forces to detain people and hold them without trial.
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The class war in South Korea reached a new stage with the struggle of the Ssangyong autoworkers. The workers strike against layoffs began in May, and they occupied their plant in Pyongtaek, 50 kilometres south of Seoul.
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Those “free speech” crusaders at the Inter American Press Association are at it again, leading the charge in an international campaign against what IAPA president Enrique Santos Calderon decried on August 2 as “the gravest attempt to silence the press that has occurred in the last few years in the region”.
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The so-called beer summit between President Barack Obama, Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates and Cambridge police officer sergeant James Crowley took place without incident on July 30 at the White House.
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On August 1, United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) members across the country participated in 1556 local assemblies to discuss the reorganisation of the party’s base into local patrols.
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Being Irish, one of the thousands who left the country during the 1980s economic crisis, I follow Irish politics closely.
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The article below is by Don Franks, an organiser with the Unite union. Unite is seeking to organise a citizens’ initiated referendum, a non-binding vote allowed for by New Zealand law, to raise workers’ wages.
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The head of Venezuela's telecommunications agency (CONATEL), Diosdado Cabello, announced the immediate closure of 32 privately owned radio stations and two regional television stations on August 1.
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The following article is abridged from a July 29 statement by the Palestinian Grassroots Anti-Apartheid Wall group
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Thirty Thomas Cook workers involved in a four-day occupation of the travel companies Graffon Street premises in Dublin were forcibly evicted by police., the August 4 Irish Times said.
Culture
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The Ecological Revolution: Making Peace with the PlanetBy John Bellamy FosterMonthly Review Press, 2009328 pages, $37.95
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Message Stick: Something to Celebrate – A celebration of the Indigenous news and culture program's 10th birthday, including highlights from the last decade and a birthday party featuring well-known performers filmed in front of a live studio
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BaliboDirected by Robert ConnollyBased on the book by Jill JolliffeIn cinemas from August 13
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Arthur MillerChristopher BigsbyWeidenfeld & Nicolson, 2008739 pages, $79.99 (hb