Delivering for all Working Australians was the slogan for the 2009 Australian Council of Trade Unions congress held June on 2-4. This raises the question what if you are not working or an Australian citizen? But the congress will not be remembered for such philosophical questions there were many more immediate issues at stake.
Analysis
On the morning of May 31, international students in Melbourne began a powerful protest against the recent street violence that has targeted South Asian international students in particular.
On June 3, the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) released its estimates of the national accounts for Australia for the January-March quarter. Following on from a small overall drop in gross domestic product (GDP) of 0.6% for the December quarter, a fall in the March quarter would mean that Australia had entered a technical recession.
More than 200 people packed into the Brisbane city hall on June 1 for a public forum on why individual rights in Australia needed to be enshrined in a Human Rights Act.
On May 29, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd told radio 3AW that his government has absolutely no plans to make any change to the superannuation preservation age the age at which workers may access the superannuation paid into a super fund by their employer.
Jean Hale (nee Heathcote) was born on July 29, 1912 in Brisbane. Her grandfather, Wyndham Selfe Heathcote, was an Anglican clergyman who opposed the Boer War. His opposition to the Anglican Church’s social policies and his opinions, such as this from one of his essays – “The death of Jesus, as a social reformer using direct action, has been transmuted into the death of a God dying for the world” – found him at loggerheads with the Church and resulted in his leaving to become a Unitarian Minister.
With more than 20,000 extra US soldiers being deployed to Afghanistan, a member of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) argues that eight years of foreign occupation has made life worse for ordinary Afghans.
Joe de Bruyn, national secretary of the Shop Distributors Alliance and Allied Employees Association (SDA) and fervent Catholic militant had some novel advice on how to resolve the debate about the Australian Building Construction Commission (ABCC) within his Labor Party.
At first glance, the climate change policy decided at the June 2-4 Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) national congress looks serious. Global warming is the policy challenge of our time, it declares.
The June 2-4 Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) congress passed a series of motions calling on the federal government to abandon plans to build a radioactive waste dump in the Northern Territory.
On May 31 in Melbourne, 5000 angry students marched against the increasing number of violent attacks on Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi students.
Without doubt, climate change is the greatest challenge humanity has ever faced. The scientific evidence of the scale of the threat is overwhelming, compelling and frightening. Climate tipping points which, if crossed, will lead to runaway global warming are being crossed now.
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