Critical Times

by Rob Gowland

What an ignominious spectacle the right wing of the Labor Party has made of the party the union movement originally set up. At the recent NSW Labor Party Conference, ministers spewed invective and abuse over the unions and the rank and file alike. Using the well-known “debating” tactics of Macquarie St, they made it explicitly clear that they had no intention of abiding by decisions of the Party.

SA Unions congratulates all the Independents and minor party members in the Upper House for staunchly defending the rights of injured workers in the Legislative Council yesterday and over night.

In particular, Mark Parnell and Ann Bressington spoke for 8 hours and 5 hours respectively in well constructed, well researched and coherent speeches.

Janet Giles, Secretary SA Unions said, “the voice of workers in this debate has been ignored and then silenced as the Premier tries to ram the WorkCover Bill through Parliament.

Peter Montague

The coal industry is planning to replace oil by turning coal into liquid fuels and into feedstocks for the chemical industry. Of course they are also planning to burn ever-more coal to produce electricity. If these plans materialise, green chemistry and renewable solar energy will both be sidelined for the rest of this century.

The Camp for Climate Action, beginning on July 10, will be an inspiring convergence of people from all over Australia who are serious about taking action on climate change. It will take place in Newcastle, NSW, which already has the world’s biggest coal port and is set for a massive expansion.

Coal is destroying the climate and threatening our future.

Review by Phil Shannon

The Whale Warriors: On Board a Pirate Ship in the Battle to Save the World’s Largest Mammals
By Peter Heller
HarperCollins, 2007
303pages, $28 (pb)

“With James Bond, the President and Batman on my side, how can I lose?”, said Captain Paul Watson about Pierce Brosnan, Martin Sheen and Christian Bale, three of the prominent supporters of the anti-whaling Sea Shepherd Conservation Society (SSCS).

Celebrities were not the only supporters of the the Farley Mowat, a converted North Sea trawler, docked in Melbourne in December 2005 en route to disrupt the 2006 Japanese whale hunt in the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary — “the union guys” from the Electrical Trades Union and other Victorian unions provided solid rubber, welding rods, steel plates and other materials to kit out the rusting, 50-year-old ship.

The National Geographic’s Peter Heller was one of the journalists among the Farley’s diverse crew of Buddhist bikers, ex-Marines, nurses, truckers, marine biologists, union shop stewards, punk rockers, semi-professional gamblers and others itching for direct action to stop the Japanese whaling fleet from breaking the international moratorium on open-sea commercial whaling by exploiting the International Whaling Commission’s “scientific research” loophole.

Why do the media insist on using the same jargon as the government? Historically, governments have had a tendency to obscure the truth when it was in their interest to do so, but on the other hand journalists could supposedly see through spin and report objectively.

In the 2008-09 federal budget some $40 billion in unspent surplus to be deposited in various funds is referred to as “investment” when it is clearly not. Deferred spending is saving, not investment.

The director of a powerful film about the final days of Bobby Sands says he has not made a hero of the IRA prisoner, whose death in a 1981 hunger strike made him one of the most prominent symbols of opposition to British rule in Northern Ireland.

Hunger, the graphic, often brutal feature debut by British artist Steve McQueen, screened at the Cannes Film Festival late on Thursday (local time) and has impressed critics with its portrayal of the violence and horror of life in the notorious Maze prison.

Some predicted that the film would prove controversial because of what they saw as McQueen’s sympathetic treatment of Sands, played by Irish actor Michael Fassbender.

A Japanese crew were discovered selling salted whale meat from their ship on return from Antarctica which violates Japan’s ’scientific research’ permit. The Nisshin Maru crew members were interviewed, informing Greenpeace that dozens of workers resold salted meat not included in the official whaling statistics. The ship’s operator Kyodo Sempaku insisted that giving crew members ’souvenir’ meat was a decade-old custom.

In his latest column for the New Statesman, John Pilger describes how the New Labour government is destroying one of the the venerable features of “communal decency” in Britain – the local post office. Economies need to be made, though not in the pursuit of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

When I first came to live in Britain, much of ordinary life was premised on a sense of community.

Compared to the euro, the value of the US dollar has fallen 76 per cent in the last five years. So who would want to be paid in a currency that’s losing its grunt? Not Iran. It’s hedging its bets by selling its oil in a basketful of currencies brimming with euros and Chinese yuan.

Oil prices have hit a record high above $US127 a barrel on fresh worries about global supplies.

US light sweet crude jumped to $US127.82 a barrel, ignoring a forecast from producers’ cartel OPEC this week that the world will need less oil in 2008.

A speech by ARUNDHATI ROY

This article was delivered as a lecture in Istanbul on January 18, 2008, to commemorate the first anniversary of the assassination of Hrant Dink, editor of the Turkish-Armenian paper Agos.

I NEVER met Hrant Dink, a misfortune that will be mine for time to come. From what I know of him, of what he wrote, what he said and did, how he lived his life, I know that had I been here in Istanbul a year ago, I would have been among the one hundred thousand people who walked with his coffin in dead silence through the wintry streets of this city, with banners saying “We are all Armenians,” “We are all Hrant Dink.

Since it was set up in 2005, the Australian Building and Construction Commission (ABCC) has operated as an all-powerful secret police in the building industry, attacking unions, unionists and the right to organise. The ABCC has been handed dictatorial power to secretly interrogate and intimidate workers, to jail and levy huge fines, all in the interest of defending profits in the building industry. The new Rudd government must honour its commitment to abolish the ABCC, not in 2010 but now! Any proposal to introduce a new “tough cop on the beat”, as proposed by deputy PM Julia Gillard in the lead-up to the 2007 federal election, must also be dropped.

Anna Pha

Neo-liberal policies have failed dismally. The policies of deregulation and corporate welfare have impacted on most areas of the economy to the detriment of ordinary people.

The financial sector is in crisis; water usage has been mismanaged; river systems are drying up; housing is becoming unaffordable for many; ships are queuing to load the tonnes of resources being thoughtlessly ripped out of the ground; private health and educations systems propped up to the neglect of the superior public systems; vital rail services slashed; privatised electricity prices sky-rocketing with blackouts more common; public transport systems underfunded, short of stock and unreliable; climate change neglected; and so the list goes.

HUMAN-generated climate change is making flowers bloom sooner and autumn leaves fall later and is turning polar bears into cannibals and birds into early breeders, a global study has found.

Hundreds of previous studies had noted specific changes and most suggested a link to so-called anthropogenic (human-generated) global warming, but a new analysis published in the journal Nature correlated earlier studies with changes in temperature, the study’s lead author said.

The study found the early arrival of migratory birds in Australia, declining water levels in western Victoria and a 50 per cent decline in Antarctica’s Emperor Penguin population were linked to rising temperatures.

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.