News

As part of a national day of action protesting against the federal government’s quarantining of the welfare payments of allegedly negligent parents within Indigenous communities in the Northern Territory, 30 students and staff, mainly Aboriginal, held a protest rally outside the Centrelink office on Curtin University campus on March 12.

On March 8, a group of 16 Indigenous women and children were thrown out of the Haven Inn backpackers accommodation, after tourists complained to management that their presence made them feel “scared”.

A lively forum reporting on the February 12 Canberra convergence for Indigenous rights drew more than 40 people in Perth and set the agenda for further campaigns.

On March 7 a successful community assembly of up to 150 union and community activists shut down Qantas valet parking operations at Melbourne Airport.

US Labor Against War “has organised large labour contingents at every major anti-Iraq war rally over the past five years”, Kathy Black, USLAW co-convener, told a public meeting of 60 people in the CEPU Auditorium in South Brisbane on March 1. The meeting, part of an Australia-wide speaking tour by Black, was organised by the Stop the War Collective and endorsed by the Electrical Trades Union and Rally for Peace and Nuclear Disarmament.

On March 12 the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) lodged a submission to the Fair Pay Commission calling for a $26 a week pay increase for workers covered by awards — a 4.9% increase for workers paid the minimum wage (currently $522.12 a week).

Campaign group Your Water Your Say (YWYS) has warned that Victorian state government policy will see the state “swimming in water but drowning in water bills” by 2014 if the proposed $3.1 billion desalination plant goes ahead at Wonthaggi.

Laws that curtailed civil liberties during the “extraordinary” and “temporary” conditions of the APEC protests last year in Sydney are likely to be made permanent, according to the March 12 Sydney Morning Herald.

Fifty people attended the first public meeting of Cairns Action for Sustainable Transport (CAST), on March 11 at the Serbian Centre in Edge Hill. Attendees engaged in a lively discussion about improving Cairns’s public transport and bikeways.

Three hundred delegates voted unanimously to take industrial action in response to NSW government changes to staffing procedures in public schools at a March 8 NSW Teachers Federation (NSWTF) state council meeting.

Following the age-old premise of struggling locally to effect change globally, activists fighting for justice for the Palestinian people are taking big steps forward in a Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) campaign targeted against the criminal Israeli state.

The demands reflect important struggles facing workers and the community, including the planned sell-off of NSW power and the ongoing campaign to abolish the worst aspects of former prime minister John Howard’s Work Choices legislation. In addition to the May 3 march and rally, the committee is organising a photo display in honour of past May Day struggles. It will be launched on May 1 in a local theatre and feature hundreds of photos, leaflets, posters, even an old “May Day queen” sash, ranging in dates from 1930s to recent years.