Gadigal Country/Sydney

On April 28, Labor PM Kevin Rudd’s government began to deport asylum seekers, beginning with a Chinese woman. The next day, two Indian men were placed in stage 1 of the Villawood immigration detention centre for preparation for deportation.

The vote against the planned sell-off of electricity by the NSW government of Premier Morris Iemma at the May 3 NSW ALP conference exceeded the expectations of ALP and union anti-privatisation campaigners.

The April 11-13 Climate Change-Social Change conference ended with the production of a statement that tries to specify the elements of a strategy against global warming that would actually have a chance of success.

More than 300 people took part in three days of invigorating discussion at the Climate Change — Social change conference on April 11-13 hosted by Green Left Weekly.

A snap protest was held outside the Sydney office of World Wide Fund for Nature on April 16 after WWF announced it was joining forces with the Climate Institute, the Australian Coal Association and the mining and energy division of the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union to push the federal government to make “clean” coal the centrepiece of its climate change abatement plan.

“The intervention is an apartheid system. It’s an abuse of our human rights — but we blackfellas are used to that”, Mutitjulu elder Vince Forrester told a meeting of 130 people in Redfern on April 12.

Approximately 20,000 votes were submitted across NSW by teachers who attended stop-work Sky Channel meetings on April 8. Teachers went on strike over the state Labor government’s refusal to negotiate a new staffing scheme that would ensure transfer rights for all teachers and guarantee qualified and trained teachers for all students in NSW public schools.

Where in the world could a jury find in favour of someone, only to have a judge deliver a decision opposite to the jury’s finding? Well, this has happened in NSW and the victim is Mamdouh Habib, best known for being imprisoned by the US military without charges at its Guantanamo Bay naval base, before being released and flown home to Australia in January 2005.

On April 1, the Sydney May Day Committee voted unanimously to accept a Unions NSW proposal to shift the traditional May Day march and rally from the first Sunday in May to Saturday May 3.

Aboriginal legal aid services are to have their funding cut for the 13th year in a row, despite an election promise by the ALP that a federal Labor government would increase their funding, Trevor Christian, the director of the NSW/ACT Aboriginal Legal Aid Service, told the March 31 Sydney Morning Herald.

Canterbury-Bankstown public school teachers will demonstrate outside Premier Morris Iemma’s Lakemba office on April 10 to express their outrage at the state Labor government’s refusal to re-negotiate a state-wide schools staffing agreement.

On March 10 and 11, the Sydney Morning Herald ran an expose of “white flight” from public schools across NSW. Using a previously confidential survey of 163 high school principals in NSW, it described the phenomenon where increasing numbers of white-European parents were removing their children from disadvantaged public schools in regional and remote areas and areas in Sydney’s south-west and placing them in private schools or in selective state schools in more distant suburbs.