Critical Times

Bob Briton

Noel Washington, a Victorian official of the CFMEU’s Construction Division, will front a Geelong court on August 8 facing the prospect of a six month jail sentence for refusing to attend an interrogation ordered by the Australian Building and Construction Commission (ABCC). The case has brought to a head major disagreements between the trade union movement and the Rudd Labor government over the Howard-era building site Gestapo. The ACTU Executive voted unanimously last week to support a campaign against the commission to be spearheaded by the CFMEU and other building unions.

Matthew Knott
POLICE arrested 37 activists who chained themselves to a train and rail tracks at Newcastle Port yesterday, shutting down the world’s largest coal port for seven hours.

Protest organisers said up to 1000 people marched to the Carrington coal terminal to demonstrate against government inaction on climate change.

About 100 people scaled or cut through fences to enter the rail corridor and tie themselves to a fully loaded coal train.

By Max Oz

To paraphrase – from the title of a children’s story Run! Rabbit Run! – Rann! Labor Rann! is a fitting description of the current Labor Government’s efforts in regards to workers in South Australia. Although the Labor Party ‘Rann’ away along time ago (well before the appearance of Rann) from its working class heartland, Media Mike has contributed splendidly to its pretensions as “business-friendly” and “investment-friendly” rather being ‘champions of working people’. History inevitably catches up with pretenders and they’re a plenty in the Labor Party.

NOEL WASHINGTON FACES JAIL…HIS CRIME?

STICKING TO THE UNION!

Noel Washington has been in the Australian construction industry all his life…first as a crane driver, then as a building union official. He’s also a family man watching the future for his grandchildren. Noel wears his Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU) jacket with pride and is the Senior Vice President of his union in Victoria.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

ACF’s executive director has called on the Federal Government to use this year’s Budget to do away with tax breaks that encourage greenhouse pollution and cost the taxpayer more than $7.8 billion a year.

In a speech to the National Press Club today Don Henry said the Government should restructure the fuel tax credits scheme (costing $4.

Corey Oakley

There has been no shortage of “watershed events” over the last few years.

First was the US congressional election at the end of 2006, when the Republicans were trounced at the polls, signalling a dramatic rejection of the Iraq war by the American people.

Following a succession of other leaders of the coalition of the killing, Blair left office at the beginning of 2007.

New South Wales farmers will soon be able to legally grow a type of cannabis.

The State Government is set to introduce a licensing scheme that will allow farmers to grow industrial hemp for use in textiles, skin-care products and even dog food.

A trial plantation is already under way around Griffith, in the state’s south-west.

GLOBAL warming has plunged the planet into a crisis and the fossil fuel industries are trying to hide the extent of the problem from the public, NASA’s top climate scientist says.
NASA’s James Hansen

NASA’s James Hansen believes fossil fuel industries are trying to hide the extent of the global warming crisis from the public. AFP
“We’ve already reached the dangerous level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere,” James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, told AFP.

The Australian Conservation Foundation and the Arid Lands Environment Centre have urged NT Labor Party members to reject outright the proposal for a new uranium mine in central Australia when the issue comes up for debate at this weekend’s Territory ALP conference.

Delegates to the conference are expected to raise health, environment, cultural and water supply concerns about the proposal to mine the Angela and Pamela uranium deposits 25 kilometres south of Alice Springs.

“The Angela and Pamela uranium deposits are within Alice Springs’ water catchment boundaries,” said ACF nuclear free campaigner Adele Pedder.