Bill Mason

Protesters demanded federal Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek intervene to save the Murujuga rock art from being destroyed in the Burrup Peninsula. Bill Mason reports.

BRISBANE — Fifty people, Iranians and supporters, rallied in Queens Park on May 22 to protest against the execution in early May of five Kurdish nationalists by the Iranian regime. The protesters held photos of people disappeared and killed during the movement for democratic rights over the past year. Community representative Fazil Rostam said: "Kurds are 10% of the Iranian population, but make up 50% of the prison population. Fifty percent of executions are of Kurdish people."
Five hundred farmers from the Darling Downs agricultural region attended a protest meeting at Cecil Plains, west of Toowoomba, on May 19. They protested against the expansion of coal seam gas mining on their properties. The May 19 Courier-Mail said the farmers called on the state government to place a moratorium on mining development while its environmental impacts are properly assessed. The protesters surrounded a paddock with a one-kilometre barrier of farm machinery in a demonstration of their abilityto stop the mining companies from entering their properties.
Witness Roy Bramwell told the re-opened inquest into Aboriginal man Mulrunji Doomadgee’s death on March 8 that police threatened to “come after him”, as they crushed his original damning witness statement and threw it in the bin.
“Rebuilding Haiti is important”, El Salvadoran solidarity activist Rafael Pacheco told a public forum on February 23. “But liberating the country is most important in the long run.
“It is important that this book is being released at this time. It allows us to better understand the reality of the Venezuelan revolution”, Nelson Davila, Venezuelan Charge d’affaires, told a meeting in Wollongong on October 4. Davila was launching Voices from Venezuela: Behind the Bolivarian Revolution, a new book by Green Left Weekly correspondents Jim McIlroy and Coral Wynter.
“The world is facing twin disasters in the near future: the coming economic meltdown of the international capitalist system, and the looming climate change crisis”, Jim McIlroy told a Green Left Weekly forum on July 15.
@9point non = BRISBANE — High work pressure, staff turnover, intrusive management monitoring of workers’ performance and alienation were identified as major issues facing call centre workers, at a May 22 forum organised by Worklife.
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.
“Forty years ago, the Tet offensive — the decisive battle of the Vietnam War — took place, changing the course of the war, and beginning the long retreat of the US military which eventually led to the victory of the Vietnamese revolutionary national-liberation forces with the fall of Saigon in April 1975", Jim McIlroy said at a public forum inBrisbane on January 31, one of a series sponsored by Green Left Weekly.

Two Aboriginal communities say they are "bitterly disappointed" by the Federal Court's refusal to force the Queensland government to pay for lost wages. Justice John Dowsett ruled on August 19 that the state government didn't