Critical Times

By Humphrey McQueen

Dare Australia’s Labor government gaol Adelaide builders’ labourer, Ark Tribe? Tribe’s crime is that he refuses to attend a secret hearing of the Australian Building and Construction Commission (ABCC). His failure to appear renders him liable to six months in prison or a fine of $22,000. Similar penalties apply if he turns up but refuses to answer, or if he answers but then tells anyone what the questions were.

Source: Vanguard

1. Human rights in Australia are poorly defined and not well protected. There is no national Bill of Rights and international conventions and treaties on human rights to which Australia is a signatory are not enforceable under Australian law.

By Renfrey Clarke

For governments and vehicle corporations, the charm of biofuels used to be the promise they held out of a ready-made solution to transport-related greenhouse gas emissions – a solution that might simply be dropped in, while changing almost nothing else.

Freeways, suburban sprawl, four-wheel-drive family cars – everything could remain. Only the fuel on sale at the service stations would be different.

Protest at an industry briefing about the ‘BasicsCard’ system

Wednesday June 10
1pm @ The Sebel
28 Albion st Surry Hills

On Wednesday, the government will hold a consultation meeting for
industry about the ‘BasicsCard’ system, which facilitates the
compulsory Income Management regime forced on Aboriginal people under
the NT Intervention. The government are looking for a company to
design new BasicsCard infrastructure. This process is about
entrenching income management in Aboriginal communities and spreading
it out around Australia.

Source: Rights on Site website

Ark Tribe is a construction worker from South Australia.

Like any other Australian worker, Ark just wants to rock up for work in the morning in as safe an environment as possible, do his job, and make it home at the end of the day.

Unlike other Australian workers, Ark is facing six months in jail – charged with not attending an interview with the Australian Building and Construction Commission (ABCC).

Source: Vanguard Leaflet given out to the ACTU 2009 Congress

Unemployment, the loss of working conditions and union rights, casualisation, cuts to working hours, and general economic insecurity is hitting the working class hard. Many workers are looking for union leadership to continue the fight against WorkChoices, still enshrined in Labor’s ‘Fair Work Australia’.

The militancy and mass mobilisation of workers that characterised the struggle to defeat WorkChoices, powerfully demonstrated what can be achieved with united and strong leadership dedicated to the working class.

Source: Vanguard May Issue

In the first decade of the 21st Century, scientists of different disciplines are alerting people and governments to a second crisis of capitalism, a crisis bigger than the current economic crisis. That crisis is the destruction of the environment caused by the ‘growth at all costs’ logic of capitalism. The enormity of the crisis is summarised in the following statement by the Swedish Talberg Foundation 2008 Report, Grasping The Climate Crisis; A Provocation:
“The world at present faces a breakdown of the global financial system.

13 JUNE 2009
ADELAIDE BRISBANE CANBERRA HOBART MELBOURNE PERTH SYDNEY WOLLONGONG

ADELAIDE 11am Victoria Square

JOIN THE RALLY FOR:

GREEN COLLAR JOBS NO JOB CUTS – 100% RENEWABLE ENERGY BY 2020

GLOBAL CLIMATE JUSTICE – AUSTRALIA SHOULD TAKE THE LEAD

CLIMATE POLICIES THAT MAKE THE BIG POLLUTERS PAY

LETS RE-POWER AUSTRALIA!

The National Climate Emergency Rallies
are an initiative of Australia’s Climate Action Summit

Why we need to oppose the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS)

The CPRS locks us into inaction on climate change until 2020.

The CPRS includes the pathetic emissions targets of 5% by 2020, with the potential for up to 15% depending on international targets. These targets completely ignore the science that tells us we need to reduce emissions by a minimum of 40 -60% by 2020 to be on the road to achieving the safe climate level of 300ppm atmospheric CO2.

By Humphrey McQueen

A Review of the National Portrait Gallery – first published in the May edition of the Australian Book Review

When the National Portrait Gallery (NPG) opened in Canberra last December more thoughtfulness was evident in its bookshop than the hang. The volumes are arranged by subject and in alphabetical order: the images accord to no principle beyond decor. Here are five writers; there, four scientists.

By retired Lieutenant-Colonel Lance Collins (former head of Military Intelligence under INTERFET), who presented this speech to the “ANZAC EVE (Denis Kevans Memorial) PEACE FESTIVAL” – LEICHHARDT TOWN HALL, Sydney.

I have deployed on two overseas military operations. The first was a brief deployment to Kuwait in February 1998, a precautionary defence against Saddam Hussein during the weapons inspection crisis.

By Renfrey Clarke

“One hundred percent renewable electricity generation in Australia by 2020!” That was the bold call, endorsed by representatives of more than 100 climate action groups, that went out from the national Climate Summit held in Canberra in February.

By and large, the established media have ignored this summons – or else, dismissed it as green wish-dreaming. Renewable energy sources, the mainstream press generally has it, are incapable of replacing fossil fuels, especially coal, in providing the 24-hours-a-day “base-load” power that is the bedrock of electricity supply systems.

By Renfrey Clarke

Sometimes you have to hand it to capitalism. It’s sheer magic, the way the system takes promising concepts, steeps them in the transformative power of the market – and turns them into howling social and environmental disasters.
Take biofuels, for example.

“nil bastardum coitus circum”

Peter McVean sent the following letter to several major newspapers (some submissions abridged of the 1st paragraph for brevity). He feels strongly about the epidemic of Shipping Containers Going Overboard

After the recent incident of 31 shipping containers full of ammonium nitrate being lost overboard from the deck of the containership “Pacific Adventurer” during cyclonic conditions off the Queensland coast, I decided to do a bit of research into the statistics on shipping container losses and mishaps, and was shocked!

The incidence of shipping containers being lost overboard (sometimes en masse) are by no means a rarity, and have been happening with far more frequency than most people would know or have read about.

Most of these containers sink immediately or shortly after, but some (for various reasons) remain afloat and drifting as serious shipping hazards for months, even years.

by Jefferson Lee (written 9/3/09 as my initial contribution to this website)

On Friday 24th April 2009 (Anzac Eve) at Leichhardt Town Hall in Sydney’s inner-West will be the “Inaugural Denis Kevans Memorial Anzac Eve Peace Concert” from 6pm-11pm as a fund-raiser for Leichhardt Council’s “Friends of Maliana” friendship city project.

The significance of this event is that it will be the first time in a decade and a half that the cultural hegemony of increasing militarism surrounding Anzac Day celebrations has faced a direct and conscious challenge from progressive forces in Sydney – outside of the marginalized sloganeering of a few predictable the ultra lefty.

Flash back to Australia and Anzac Days of yesteryear.

Source: Green Left Weekly

Graham Matthews
14 February 2009

In a 7000-word essay published in the February Monthly magazine , Prime Minister Kevin Rudd blames neoliberalism for the global economic crisis.

He promises to deliver a new “social democratic state” that will “save capitalism from itself”, while protecting working people’s interests.

However, while Rudd’s prescription may provide relief for bankers, industrialists and developers, it is working people who will pay in the end.

Source: ABC Online News
Sun Feb 15, 2009

One of the world’s leading experts on climate change says a Nobel Prize-winning panel of scientists seriously underestimated the reality of global warming when it published its report just over a year ago.

Professor Chris Field, a leading member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which released the report, says he and his fellow researchers did not have access to vital data.

Professor Field says that a warming planet will dry out forests in tropical areas, making them much more likely to suffer from bushfires.

Source: The Guardian 4 February, 2009

By Bob Briton

Australian of the Year for 2009, Mick Dodson, might have predicted that his comments about the appropriateness of celebrating January 26 as our national day would set off a flurry of comment in the media. He probably didn’t anticipate just how personal and hostile some of the backlash would be. Along with many Indigenous — and non indigenous — Australians yearning for social justice, he would be disappointed that a “conversation” about January 26 and the significance of that date for Aboriginal people is still simply beyond the guardians of the status quo.

Source: Published by Nigel on February 5, 2009

While the Australian Greens purport to represent the interest of the environment and Australians, there is substantive evidence to suggest this is not quite the truth. This article suggests the Australian political party which should be voicing key issues of concern, is not, and in a parliamentary democracy, when the minority parties fail in their brief all Australians have great reason for concern.

Currently, an expanding network of concerned Australians are raising critical issues and publishing these, in the hope that Australians will make demands upon the elected representatives charged with the responsibility of ensuring a sustainable future for Australia.

A number of left-wing unions is considering to lodge a complaint to the International Labour Organisation against the Rudd Government for
maintaining many features of the previous Howard Government’s “Workchoices”.

A coalition of Victorian unions has sought legal advice for a complaint to the International Labour Organisation, arguing that the Government’s new ‘Fair Work’ legislation still curtails freedom of association and collective bargaining rights.

The Electrical Trades Union leader Dean Mighell, Victoria’s Trades Hall and left-wing unions in manufacturing, construction and education have proposed the challenge that Labor’s Fair Work bill, introduced into parliament by Acting Prime Minister Julia Gillard last month, does not go far enough in demolishing John Howard’s pro-employer Work Choices laws.

This was during the decade-long rule of the conservative coalition of John Howard, whose coterie of white supremacist academics and journalists assaulted the truth of recorded genocide in Australia, especially the horrific separations of Aboriginal children from their families.

They deployed arguments not dissimilar to those used by David Irving to promote Holocaust denial.

Smear by media as a precursor to the latest round of repression is long familiar to black Australians.