The article below is based on an April 30 statement by the Stop the War Coalition Sydney http://www.stopwarcoalition.org.
Analysis
In an act of peaceful civil disobedience, more than 500 Tamils occupied George Street in Sydney’s CBD for more than an hour. The May 1 action protested the genocide being carried out by the Sri Lankan government against the Tamil people in the north and east of the country.
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.
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.
For more than 100 years the WA seat of Fremantle has been safe Labor territory. Now, the May 16 state by-election for the seat is tipped to be a neck-and-neck race between ALP candidate Peter Tagliaferri and Adele Carles from the Greens.
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.
Blacktown ALP NSW MP Paul Gibson has openly urged Premier Nathan Rees to make public transport free.
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