Resistance!

Six hundred students from more than a dozen high schools and colleges walked out of school and gathered at Parliament House lawns in Hobart on November 1 to protest against Gunns’ pulp mill. The mill, planned for the Tamar Valley near Launceston, would be the biggest of its kind in the world and has been approved by both state and federal governments.

The Howard government’s changes to electoral legislation, passed last year, will mean a large portion of young people who are of voting age will be left off the electoral roll for the November 24 federal election. This legislation — an obvious move to bar certain voters from the political process — affects mainly those who are statistically more likely to vote against the government, such as the young, homeless people, house-renters and those who speak English as a second language.

@body intro = My name is Ayi Layah Mon and I am a member of the Mon Youth Group.

Resistance is an active, campaigning organisation. We’re in there where the struggle is. We don’t just talk about standing up for the oppressed. We actually do it. Recently, we met members of the Burmese community in Canberra at a series of protests outside the Burmese embassy. When we met them, we naturally wanted to jump into the struggle right there alongside them. We were involved in the first meeting of the Canberra Network for Democracy in Burma (CNDB), and helped organise the protest on October 13 for the international day of solidarity with the Burmese struggle.

Tasmanian high school, college and university students are planning to walk out of class on November 1 to protest federal environment minister Malcom Turnbull’s approval of the Gunns’ pulp mill.

The Youth Affairs Council of Victoria (YACV) is calling on the Victorian government to consider lowering the voting age, following the tabling of a report in the ACT parliament recommending 16- and 17-year-olds in the territory be given the vote.

On October 5, Resistance held a protest outside the US consulate to offer solidarity to the people of Bolivia and Venezuela in the face of the campaign against their democratically elected governments by the US. Both countries are targets of Washington for their refusal to allow foreign oil and gas corporations to control their natural resources and determine their future.

A recent survey has suggested that young workers who were underpaid before the federal government’s Work Choices legislation will now be even worse off. This won’t be very surprising news to the majority of Australians.

It isn’t hard to see why Che Guevara retains his relevance today. The need for the victory of ideas that Che fought for, his vision of a better world, the struggle for human liberation, has never been so great. Following the legacy of Che, revolution is once again back on the agenda in Latin America, led by Venezuela, showing that you can kill the revolutionary, but never the revolution.

In defiance of the biggest “security” campaign ever seen in Australia, aimed at intimidating and deterring people from protesting at APEC, up to 15,000 people joined the “Stop Bush — Make Howard History” protest in Sydney on September 8. The rally was a huge victory — a mass demonstration of our collective strength on the streets that Howard and Bush can only pretend to ignore.

This year, Walk against Warming rallies are happening two weeks before the federal election. The rallies will be an important way for thousands of people across Australia to send a direct message to governments about the massive changes we need to avoid dangerous climate change. But more than that it will also give young people a voice and inspire them beyond the federal election to get active in grassroots campaigns to stop climate change.

US President George Bush will add Sydney to the long list of cities that have greeted him with mass demonstrations demanding an end to the war on Iraq. PM John Howard will remember APEC as the summit that failed to bolster his domestic support.