Indigenous Affairs minister Jenny Macklin was advised by her department against formally consulting with Aboriginal people over the compulsory acquisition of their land because it would be too expensive, tie up too many resources, and was unlikely to get the outcome the government wanted, leaked documents reveal.
Analysis
>Graham Brown is a retired coalminer and climate change activist. He’s also a member of the Upper Hunter Greens in NSW, and is helping build a union and community alliance aimed at creating a “just transition” to a carbon-neutral economy. Such a transition would ensure workers in the coal industry move into alternative employment. Green Left Weekly’s Zane Alcorn spoke to Brown, and this is the first of three parts of the interview.
If we had a solar thermal power plant for every time a world summit has declared a “historic consensus” on climate change, we’d be well on the way to winning a safe climate. Unfortunately, the only consensus to emerge from the recent Group of Eight (G8) summit in Italy was to talk big on climate action while doing practically nothing about it.
Echoing some of the slogans of protesters in Iran, about 80 Iranians from Melbourne and Sydney chanted “Rockets, guns and Basiji [state-run militia] do not scare us anymore” and “Khomeini you are Pinochet, Iran is not Chile” outside the Iranian embassy in Canberra on July 9.
Public broadcaster ABC has entered into a controversial joint venture with Australia’s largest regional commercial television network, WIN TV, to run the ABC’s master control centre to send out television and radio signals. WIN TV’s transmission spans the largest geographical area in the world, reaching more than 5.2 million viewers across Australia.
A boat carrying 74 asylum seekers disappeared en route to Australia near the Komodo island in Indonesia last week. The boat was believed to have women and children on board and had vanished — feared to have sunk — when the Australian Federal Police was notified by a refugee rights advocate, Ian Rintoul, on July 7.
Two Venezuelan revolutionaries — Daniel Sanchez and Heryck Rangel — will be guest speakers at the national Latin America Solidarity Conference 2009 to be held in Melbourne on August 28-29.
As the government tries to pass its controversial carbon trading legislation, the latest polling indicates widespread public support for it. A recent Nielsen poll found 65% support the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS), while just 25% oppose it.
On June 10, the federal government’s new occupational health and safety (OH&S) peak body — the Safe Work Australia Council (SWAC) — held its first meeting. Workers in Australia took one more step towards eroded and unsafe working conditions.
The first person in Australia to die from H1N1 virus (or "swine flu") was an Aboriginal man from a remote community.
This year is the seventh year Melbourne’s Community Radio 3CR will broadcast its Beyond the Bars program.
The three crises facing capitalism — jobs, the environment and war— were the subject of Victoria's Socialist Alliance conference on June 27.
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