The ninth Australian solidarity brigade to Venezuela, sponsored by the Australia-Venezuela Solidarity Network (AVSN), visited Venezuela from April 16 to 24. Participants saw first-hand the reality of the Bolivarian revolution, led by socialist president Hugo Chavez.
Analysis
On March 21, Anna Bligh’s election victory night, she answered a question from a journalist about how it felt to be the first female premier to be elected in Australia. She suggested the snide remarks made when she was a young woman, about Queensland being a “backward” state, could now be laid to rest.
Thousands of workers across the country rallied on April 28, including more that 15,000 in Melbourne. The rallies protested the Rudd governments maintenance of the anti-union Australian Building and Construction Commission (ABCC), which was established by the previous government of John Howard.
The Kimberley Land Council has made a controversial in-principle agreement with Woodside Petroleum and the federal and WA state governments to develop a liquefied natural gas project at James Price Point near Broome.
Blacktown ALP NSW MP Paul Gibson has openly urged Premier Nathan Rees to make public transport free.
Telstra has once again started to sack staff. The communications union fears up to 2000 workers will be let go by mid-year. This makes a total of close to 12,000 job losses over the four years since CEO Sol Trujillo took the helm.
The successful April 18 Stop the Sell-Offs! public meeting of the Sydney Power to the People coalition (pictured) gave the campaign against the privatisation of NSW public services a strong boost.
On April 21, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd finally conceded that “it’s inevitable that Australia … will be dragged into recession”.
On April 21, SBS screened two documentaries about Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez and the Bolivarian revolution he is leading. One of them was The Hugo Chavez Show, produced by Frontline, a program on the US-based PBS channel.
Sometimes you have to hand it to capitalism. It’s sheer magic the way the system takes promising concepts, hands them over to the market and turns them into howling social and environmental disasters.
On June 13, rallies around Australia will launch a new grassroots climate campaign for 100% renewable energy by 2020.
When an asylum seeker vessel exploded on April 16 while being taken to Christmas Island, killing five people, many of the critically injured were first transported to an offshore oil rig before being transferred to hospitals on the mainland.
- Previous page
- Page 531
- Next page