Analysis

Below is an abridged speech given by Lawrence Gibbons, editor of the City Hub, a part of the Alternative Media Group, to a benefit for the South Sydney Herald on July 8.

Queensland University of Technology (QUT) academic Dr Gary MacLennan told a public meeting on July 18 that “ordinary people think laughing at the disabled is wrong … only in a university is it seen as otherwise”.

The Socialist Alliance is aiming for a 60% overall emissions reduction, including 95% power station emissions reduction, by 2020 and a 90% overall emissions reduction by 2030. Immediate comprehensive planning is required, including the setting of annual targets, to meet these overall targets on time or sooner.

Australians Brendan Hurst and Justin Saint were recently killed in a roadside attack near Baghdad. They had been working for the Queensland-registered security firm BLP International as contractors training Iraqi police.

The July 1 Sydney Morning Herald reported that the “southern part of the Murray-Darling Basin has seen some rainfall, but not enough to stave off zero water allocations when the new irrigation year begins on Sunday… Howard’s grave warning in April of no water for irrigators from July 1 in Australia’s food bowl has been realised, with soaring fruit and vegetable prices expected to follow.”

On July 18, Ford Australia president Tom Gorman announced that Ford's Geelong engine plant would close in 2010, putting 600 workers out of work. Geelong Trades Hall Council's Union Air radio show interviewed Australian Manufacturing Workers Union vehicle division delegate plant Tony Anderson.

The peace movement lost a dedicated activist last week. Samantha Kelly, one of a team of radio presenters for NoWar SA, died in Adelaide at the age of 39.

The corporate media has heaped praise on Al Gore following the international rock gig Live Earth. But to ask the U’wa people, from the tropical cloud forests of north-eastern Colombia, what they thought about Gore and Occidental Petroleum (Oxy), the oil company from which his personal fortune is derived, would be to receive a very different opinion.

PM John Howard announced on June 28 that his government was “taking control” of up to 80 remote Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory, claiming this was a necessary response to the 320-page Little Children are Sacred report, which detailed high levels of sexual abuse of children on a range of NT Indigenous communities.

PM John Howard’s new “intervention” policy in the Northern Territory has begun with federal and state police storming into Indigenous communities.

The 10th national Labour History Conference on June 4-6 delved into the labour movement’s past, but also featured interesting debates about present-day concerns.

Recent attacks on the organic food industry are about discrediting it to soften up the public to accept genetically modified (GM) crops, Dr Maggie Lilith of the Conservation Council of WA and the Say No to GMO campaign told Green Left Weekly.