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“How many minutes to midnight, do you reckon it is?”, asked a Green Left Weekly buyer at a street stall last week.
Ground-breaking new research findings posted on the internet in April have confirmed what many scientists and climate activists have already concluded — that the goals for reducing greenhouse gas emissions embraced by the European Union and Australia’s Labor government are gravely inadequate.
While Mount Isa welfare organisations are alarmed about not being able to provide for the large influx of Aboriginal people who have fled the federal government’s Northern Territory intervention, the government is looking to expand this racist bipartisan policy.
More than 2000 people rallied at Fremantle Esplanade to celebrate May Day and to call for the scrapping of all of the anti-worker laws of the previous government.
More than 10,000 unionists marched through Brisbane’s streets on May 5, celebrating the union movement’s role in the defeat of the Howard government last year. The annual Labour Day parade was led by the building unions, with the Construction Forestry Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU) in the lead. This year marks the 150th anniversary of the founding of the original building workers\' union in Queensland.
Below is an abridged May 7 statement from the Burma Partnership Secretariat.
The Western press has been untiring with respect to the changes happening in Cuba after Raul Castro’s election as president of the Republic and have celebrated a possible liberalisation of the island’s economy.
Redfern’s historic “Block” will be the site of the Aboriginal Rights Coalition’s (ARC) first national conference, to be held on May 23-25. The Socialist Alliance gives full support to this initiative, a valuable occasion for Aboriginal people and their supporters from around Australia to share experiences and chart the way forward for Indigenous rights.
After a four-hour community blockade on April 9, Melbourne Chef agreed to pay out sacked National Union of Workers (NUW) member Abdelwahab Bekhaled and negotiate a collective agreement at the site. However, the company reneged on the agreement, sparking a month-long union campaign. Bekhaled has finally received a payout that included long-service leave and all his entitlements.
For the South Korean left, the April 9 general election was another fiasco following the presidential election last December, in which the election of Lee Myung-bak brought forth the return of the conservative government. Democratic Labor Party (DLP) candidate Kwon Young-gil received just 3%, less than the previous result in 2002 — a drop of 300,000 votes.
Tibet 1 Dick Nichols’ article “Let the Tibetans decide their future” (Write On #748) argues that it is irrelevant that “the Tibetan resistance army up until 1959 was funded and trained by the CIA”. This statement is incorrect, as he meant to write 1969 not 1959. More importantly, however, contrary to Nichols opinion, I believe that understanding the reasons why the CIA supported the Tibetans is very significant if one wants to develop a full understanding of the corporate media’s ongoing fixation on Tibet’s struggle for liberation.
On May 5, Victorian Premier John Brumby and education minister Bronwyn Pike announced that they had struck a deal with the Victorian Australian Education Union (AEU) over teachers’ pay. While there are several aspects of the agreement to be finalised, the government decided to go public and claimed that Victorian teachers are now the highest-paid teachers in Australia.