Analysis

Green Left Weekly’s Simon Cunich spoke to Peter Kennedy, a coalminer and anti-coal activist and Graham Brown, who worked with Kennedy until retiring from mining last year. Both men were at a November 22 protest outside Eraring coal-fired power station, on the NSW Central Coast. Brown’s comments were recorded in September.

Postal balloting for national elections in the Community and Public Sector Union (CPSU) began on November 19 and will continue until December 10.

Noel Washington is a senior vice-president of the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU) in Victoria. He has been a union organiser for 27 years. On December 2, simply for doing his job well, he faces a possible jail sentence under laws supported by the federal Labor government.

The first 12 months of Kevin Rudd’s federal Labor government have proved to be a continuation of the conservative, pro-war and anti-environmental politics of the Howard years.

The Greens are fielding almost 100 candidates across Victoria in local council elections on November 29. There will be Greens candidates in almost every ward.

Evidence is mounting of a coordinated global oil industry effort to seize upon the international economic crisis as an opportunity to “rebel” against ecological controls and bludgeon concessions out of governments.

Leigh Hughes, an activist in the socialist youth organisation Resistance and the Socialist Alliance, as well a member of the Australian Student Environment Network, recently won the ACT Conservation Council’s “Leading Light” award for the most outstanding environmental effort of an individual under the age of 30. He spoke to Green Left Weekly’s Simon Butler.

The Australian Coal Association (ACA) has launched a new website () and advertising campaign aimed at convincing us that coal producers are not filthy carbon merchants profiting from the most emissions-intensive fossil fuel available, but can be modernised and cleaned up using “low-emissions coal technology”.

Every week hundreds of dedicated activists hit the streets all over Australia to distribute Green Left Weekly.

SKA TV has been around for 20 years as an alternative voice to mainstream television. We started off running guerrilla transmissions before there was such a thing as community television and along the way we created, along with four other guerrilla TV transmitter groups, Channel 31.

Jillian Marsh is a member of the Adnyamathanha community in the Flinders Ranges and active in the Australian Nuclear-Free Alliance. She recently traveled to Germany to receive the 2008 Nuclear-Free Future award, and is writing a thesis entitled A look at the approval of Beverley Mine and the ways that decisions are made when mining takes place in Adnyamathanha country. Marsh spoke to Green Left Weekly’s Peter Robson about the expansion of the nuclear industry in South Australia and the Northern Territory.

National liberation movements In an otherwise excellent and very informative article on the fragmentation of the African National Congress in South Africa, Dale T. McKinley (GLW #775) writes: "As has been the case with all national liberation