News

The Geelong and Region Trades and Labour Council released the statement below on August 10.

Raids carried out at dawn this morning by police have seen several pro-Palestine activists arrested, in the most severe crackdown on civil liberties in decades.

Green Left Weekly rejects the attempt by the Victorian government to criminalise supporters of Palestinian rights, Green Left coeditor Stuart Munckton said.

The statement published below was released on August 9 by Samah Sabawi on behalf of the Australians for Palestine steering committee. * * * It has come to our attention that the Victorian Consumer Affairs Minister Michael O'Brien has singled out our organisation as well as a few others for investigation by the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission (ACCC) for an alleged suspicion that we may have been involved in ‘secondary boycotts’ against Israeli-owned businesses in Australia.

The Ward 1 campaign website of Community Voice, a ticket of community activists that will stand in the September 3 Wollongong City Council elections, released the statement below on August 9. * * * Founding members of Stop Coal Seam Gas Illawarra, Jess Moore and Chris Williams, are standing with Community Voice as Ward 1 candidates in the forthcoming Wollongong City Council elections.

Local residents made clear their opposition to plans for coal seam gas (CSG) drilling in Sydney’s inner-west at a heated public forum held in Leichhardt on Monday 1 August. Dart Energy told the crowd that it intention to drill was no longer immediate, but that exploratory drilling at the site could commence from mid-2012.

Mark Goudkamp from the Sydney Refugee Action Coalition, Gleny Rae, a participant in the SBS series Go Back Where You Came From, and Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young addressed the biggest meeting supporting asylum seekers seen in Newcastle since the Howard era on August 4. Goudkamp said 54 asylum seekers, 19 of them children, had recently arrived by boat on Christmas Island. They had not yet been told they would be sent to Malaysia. “The media reports extra riot police have been sent there,” Goudkamp said. “But the government is saying they have counsellors on hand.”

Around 200 people attended a "Unite Against Racism" rally in the King George Square on August 6. It was staged in opposition to a rally organised by the far-right Australian Defence League (ADL) attacking Islam and calling for a ban on the burqa. The tiny ADL rally was aimed at inciting hatred and violence toward Muslim people and refugees. After several speakers condemned attacks on Islam and refugees, the anti-racist rallygoers confronted a small group of around 20 racists as they tried to address passersby through a loudspeaker system.

The grassroots campaign for a community driven council in Wollongong is well underway, as the election approaches on September 3. Community Voice is standing a full ticket across all three local wards including Michael Organ, former Greens MP for Cunningham, for mayor. Organ is a local historian and environmental activist. He has been actively involved in campaigns to save Sandon Point and Wollongong's Regent Theatre. He is also part of the recent campaign to secure land at Hill 60 for preservation and public ownership.

The ALP is the party for ordinary Australians, right? Resistance members will often talk about the importance of political movements being independent of political parties, but what does this mean for the ALP? Isn’t the ALP Australia’s party of progress? And surely they are better then the Tories? Isn’t it our party? Well, it is a party that’s designed for progressives, unionists and activists, but that doesn’t mean that it's ours. If you look at its history, the ALP has attracted progressive people but rarely helped create change.

Public opposition has prevented the expansion of coal mining in south-west Victoria. “More than 250 residents gathered in the Deans Marsh town hall last night to question the managing director of Mantle Mining, Ian Kraemer, over the plan to explore for brown coal, south-east of Colac,” the ABC said on July 28. “The company had wanted to explore a 500 square kilometre area in the region. However, residents feared mining would damage the environment and lower property values.”

Community and Public Sector Union (CPSU) members in the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry held one-hour stopwork meetings at 40 sites around Australia on August 4. They are campaigning for a pay rise greater than the 3% a year offered by management. They voted to escalate their action in coming weeks, including work bans from August 11, if the employer does not make an improved pay offer. On August 2, delegates from all Australian Public Service departments rallied outside the Canberra office of the Australian Public Service Commission.