Critical Times

The following was a leaflet distributed to the May Day Rally in Adelaide, on May 3rd.

The Oath of Eureka
We swear by the Southern Cross to stand truly by each other, and fight to defend our rights and liberties.

The rights and liberties of working people continue to be under attack in this country.

It should be abundantly clear to all that for the Rudd government it’s business as usual when it comes to Aboriginal Peoples – that the new boss is indeed the same as the old.

The calls for a Treaty, Bill of Rights and Constitutional Change etc that was raised and argued for by Aboriginal delegates at the 2020 Summit in the beginning was heard loud and clear, but by Summit’s end it was reduced and hushed down to an embarrassing choice of words by the closing report back.

Behind the fine words and listening and “closing the gap” rhetoric (whatever closing the gap means) we need to ask, where is the promotion of Aboriginal languages, our education systems our learning pathways, our systems of law and justice, where is the support and funding for the just and equal acknowledgement and implementation of our cultural values, beliefs and practices – where is our right to self-determination?

I am not suggesting that western education is not needed or crucial for Aboriginal Peoples but that our ways must also be justly and rightly given equal value and worth.

It was easily the biggest May Day march in Adelaide since 1998 when workers’ anger was at a peak over the Patrick waterfront dispute. This year that anger was focussed on the Rann Government’s moves to slash injured workers’ entitlements under the state WorkCover scheme. Around 2000 workers gathered in Victoria Square heard AMWU State Secretary John Camillo detail the changes and their devastating potential.

CAPITALISM: Financial crisis,
failed policies, failed system

Anna Pha

Financial crisis, recession, poverty, wars, climate change, homelessness, health care and education cuts, privatisation, unemployment — these are just some of the outcomes of a system that is failing millions of people around the world. It is a system based on greed, on the growth and accumulation of wealth by a small minority at the expense of the majority.

It has failed to meet the social and economic needs of millions of people, while thieving their natural resources and the true value of their labour.

So this week we commemorate ANZAC day. Those who are supportive say they are not glorifying war, but marking and remembering the sacrifice of the brave soldiers who died there. The peace movement shouldn’t attack the role of the soldiers, neither then nor as regards Vietnam nor in Iraq and Afghanistan now.

A Mahammed Alatar film

An outstanding documentary about the harsh Israeli army occupation, and the history of the Israeli settlement growth in the Palestinian territories of West Bank and Gaza. The film goes on to further explain Israel’s plan to grab as much land as possible, describing withparticular care the route and arrangement of Israel’s so-called “security wall”, the 420 mile long wall snaking through Palestinian settlements.
Saturday 10th May, 2008
7pm, South West Community Centre
Delicious meal also available from 6:30
171 Sturt Street, Adelaide
Entry donation to Green Left Weekly $8, $5conc

Phone: 8231 6982, 0403 679 742

In an article for the New Statesman, John Pilger argues that an unreported war is being waged by the United States, and Britain, to restore power to the privileged classes at the expense of the majority.

Beyond the sound and fury of its conquest of Iraq and campaign against Iran, the world’s dominant power is waging a largely unreported war on another continent – Latin America. Using proxies, Washington aims to restore and reinforce the political control of a privileged group calling itself middle-class, to shift the responsibility for massacres and drug trafficking away from the psychotic regime in Colombia and its mafiosi, and to extinguish hopes raised among Latin America’s impoverished majority by the reform governments of Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia.

May 9th – 18th 2008

The Radioactive Exposure Tour is on again. Join Friends of the Earth for a journey to remote northern South Australia where we will visit the Olympic Dam uranium mine at Roxby Downs, the Beverley Uranium Project in the Gammon Ranges, the beautiful Lake Eyre and Mound Springs environments and meet with indigenous peoples and local communities campaigning against the nuclear industry. The tour offers a unique opportunity to go out on to country and witness the impacts of the nuclear industry on people and the environment.

Public presentation by Georgia Miller. Hosted presented by Reclaim the Food Chain, the sustainable food campaign of Friends of the Earth Adelaide and The Bob Hawke Prime Ministerial Centre, UniSA

Monday 5 May 2008, 6.30pm
UniSA City West Campus, Hawke Building, level 5, Bradley Forum

Georgia Miller is co-author of the report ‘Out of the Laboratory and on to our Plates: Nanotechnology in Food and Agriculture’

Get ready for the new high-tech intervention in our food system – after genetic engineering comes nanotechnology.

The decision by the Rudd Government to remove funding from Working Women’s Centres has shocked the Australian Greens.

“Just yesterday we had the Government boasting about how better off working women were going to be under the new budget, yet at the same time they are cutting funding to the most disadvantaged working women” said Senator Rachel Siewert, Greens spokesperson on employment and workplace relations.

“Working Women’s Centres (WWCs) are community based not-for profit organisations offering important advice on employment and workplace issues to women, particularly disadvantaged women – the women who are at most risk of social exclusion and should be front and centre of the new Government’s agenda,” she said.

No matter how hard you search the 2020 Summit documents, you just can’t find it.

Among all the Big Ideas there’s no reference to our rights at work, nor is there anything about getting the troops out of Iraq (let alone Afghanistan).

Yet everyone (even the Liberals) now acknowledges that hostility to WorkChoices and a desire for decent wages and conditions, job security and union rights were the key reasons Labor won the election.

Rally at Victoria Square (Tarndanyangga) at 10am. March to Barr Smith Lawns at Adelaide Uni.

The Iron Wall – Green Left film night
Adelaide
Start: 10 May 2008 – 6:30pm

“This is a powerful film exposing one of the most pressing issues of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

The following statement was initiated by the participants in the Climate Change|Social Change conference, held in Sydney, Australia on April 11-13, 2008. Anyone who agrees with it is welcome to add their signature, and an updated list of signatories will be issued on a regular basis. The statement is being distributed to environmental, trade union, Indigenous, migrant, religious and community organisations to help build the movement against global warming

1.

Bob Briton

From “The Guardian” 23 April, 2008

The warnings are dire: “Imminent wars will break out due to worsening living conditions in poor countries,” UN Special Rapporteur for the Right to Food Jean Ziegler said recently. On top of the planet’s climate change crisis and oil resources crisis, we now have a food crisis that threatens the existing order. The world market price of staple foods has gone up 75 percent in the past two months.

Source: A Communist Party of Australia (Marxist-Leninist) perspective

1. Introduction

In 2002 the Department of Treasury and Finance of the Government of South Australia released Partnerships SA. This document was a set of administrative instructions applicable to all government agencies in SA in relation to the development of infrastructure and the provision of services.

Renfrey Clarke

19 April 2008

John Bellamy Foster, author of Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature and an editor of the prestigious US-based socialist journal Monthly Review (), was a featured speaker at Green Left Weekly’s April 11-13 Climate Change — Social Change conference in Sydney. He spoke to GLW’s Renfrey Clarke.

@question = Is humanity going to pull through this environmental crisis? If it is, what are the changes that are necessary?

Well, I think there are a couple of ways you could answer that question — one way would be that, as Noam Chomsky has answered it, it’s a question of optimism or pessimism, and in some way that’s a psychological issue.

Amongst the plethora of submissions to the Australia 2020 Summit the following was submitted by the SPIRIT OF EUREKA COMMITTEE. It grabbed Critical Times attention due to its far reaching proposals. If readers know of other submissions that really challenge the status quo please email them to us and we will consider them for an airing on our site.

Environment Minister, Peter Garrett, let the coal cat out of the bag on ABC Radio National this morning, when he admitted that the proposed ‘clean coal’ is “expensive”, not the cheap solution that would allow us to continue to use cheap coal.

Australian Greens climate change spokesperson, Senator Christine Milne, said “There can be no excuse for the Government making the already uneven playing field even more biased in favour of fossil fuels, as a coalition of lobby groups is calling for in Canberra today.

“It makes no sense for the Government to throw taxpayers’ dollars at an expensive and unproven technology when the renewable energy and energy efficiency alternatives are affordable and ready to be rolled out immediately.

Some of South Australia’s largest and most powerful unions will flex their industrial muscle to ensure their members aren’t short changed by the state government’s controversial changes to WorkCover.

The Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union, the National Union of Workers, the Australian Workers Union and the Australian Education Union will seek “make up” pay if there are cuts to WorkCover entitlements.

SA Unions Secretary, Janet Giles says unions are determined that workers injured through no fault of their own are not financially penalised.