Solidarity Magazine #2 - Rudd plans to make us pay
KEVIN RUDD’S future summit, Australia 2020, will be held in Canberra on April 19 and 20. It could have been a chance for a real discussion about dismantling Howard’s legacy and tackling the looming economic crisis. Instead, Rudd will be sitting down with executives from Macquarie Bank, BHP Billiton and Westpac.
When the Fair Pay Commission holds its annual National Minimum Wage Case hearing in mid-2008, the major employers will propose cuts to real wages. As food, petrol and housing prices go up (along with CEO salaries) bosses want to keep workers’ wages down.
Massive ice loss in both the Arctic and Antarctic indicate that we are passing important climate tipping points. This mounting evidence of the need for serious solutions to climate change sits as a background to Professor Ross Garnaut’s Review, due to be released in full later this year.
LABOR’S Aboriginal Affairs minister, Jenny Macklin, consistently presents the Northern Territory intervention as a humanitarian effort aimed at supporting remote Aboriginal communities and stamping out child abuse.
On March 13, Protests against the NT intervention targeted Centrelink offices in 8 cities and towns around Australia, to draw attention to the racist policy of welfare quarantines for all people in “prescribed communities”.
On March 25, Vince Forrester addressed the Darlington branch of the ALP which passed the following motion:
The early months of the Rudd government have shown that it is just as committed to the neo-liberal “welfare reform” agenda as John Howard.
CENTRELINK WORKERS are well placed to fight the Rudd government’s razor gang cuts to the public sector-but the union needs to organise a much more effective campaign if we are to turn staff anger into action.
AS PART of its privatisation plan, the NSW government wants to sell off the state’s retail electricity arm. But, whatever their claims, the evidence from the recently completed retail privatisation in Queensland shows this will be a disaster for energy workers and the public.
The “Barwon 13″, thirteen Melbourne men arrested, charged and on trial under Australia’s “anti-terror” laws, have won a change in their previous humiliating jail conditions.
John Clarke QC, the former NSW Supreme Court judge, is heading the inquiry into the arrest of Mohammed Haneef under the ‘anti-terror’ laws, which is expected to start in May. But the inquiry has no power to force people to appear, to subpoena witnesses, nor to require them to produce documents that may incriminate them. Clarke can’t even protect those who do come forward from being demoted or victimised by Government, police or ASIO.
ANYONE READING last month’s papers would be forgiven for thinking that the Rudd government is about to slash the military budget. Media reports suggested that Defence Minister Joel Fitzgibbon wanted a billion dollars a year cut from defence over the next decade.
HUNDREDS RALLIED across the country to mark the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq on March 16. The demonstrations were smaller than previous anniversary rallies, with 350 in Sydney, 400 in Melbourne and 100 in Brisbane.
ON 12 March, Labor’s immigration minister Chris Evans announced he would personally review the cases of 61 detainees who’ve been incarcerated for two or more years: “Long-term detainees who pose no risk to the community should be considered for other forms of management by the department. Keeping people in immigration detention for long periods imposes high costs on Australian taxpayers and the individuals themselves.”
A political shockwave hit Malaysia in March’s general election, with opposition parties destroying the ruling coalition’s two-thirds majority domination of parliament.
It appears that Zimbabwe’s president Robert Mugabe has lost both the parliamentary and presidential elections in the country by a landslide vote.
OVER THE past month, Chinese paramilitary police and soldiers have been using tear gas and live ammunition against protesters in Lhasa, the Tibetan capital, in an attempt to put down the most visible resistance against Chinese rule in the country for nearly 20 years.
IN ITS campaign for yet another war, members of George W Bush’s decaying administration have been making almost daily condemnations of Iran over its uranium enrichment and its support for Hamas, Hezbollah or Shia militias inside Iraq.
OVER A single weekend last month, the global financial system came close to total collapse. A desperate US Federal Reserve intervened to stop the collapse of investment bank Bear Stearns, taking on a staggering $30 billion of Bear Stearns’ debts to engineer a buyout by JPMorgan.
Larissa Behrendt, director of research at The Jumbunna Indigenous House of Learning, University of Technology Sydney
In the middle of the night on April 7th 1998, security guards, some in balaclavas, emerged from rubber dinghies and buses with dogs and barbed wire, entered Patrick Stevedoring terminals across the country and escorted the night shift from the wharves.
FOR MANY western commentators, China is the saviour of the ailing world economy. However the hellish pace of China’s growth is being achieved at enormous human and environmental cost, explains Adrian Skerritt
JANUARY 2008 marked the 40th anniversary of the Vietnamese “Tet Offensive” against US and South Vietnamese armies. On the 31st of January 1968 the National Liberation Front (NLF) entered 36 major towns and cities in South Vietnam. Since the beginning of the war three years earlier the US had been backing the southern government with troops, armaments and aid. The vast majority of this war was fought out in the countryside. But in the second half of 1967 the NLF had begun planning an incursion into the south with the aim of either defeating the US rapidly, or forcing the US into a gradual withdrawal.
AS SOLIDARITY grows to print, radical Shia leader Moqtada Al Sadr had postponed plans for a million strong march in Baghdad calling for an end to the presence of foreign troops. With the forces of Iraqi president Nouri El Maliki backed up by US troops continuing to attack Al Sadr’s Mahdi army, he was threatening to lift the agreed ceasefire. This comes after the El Maliki launched an offensive against the Mahdi army in Basra two weeks ago.
NSW Premier Morris Iemma and Treasurer Michael Costa have displayed an unprecedented level of arrogance in their attempt to push through power privatisation.
