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“We need someone to take the pressure off us”, an exhausted Liz Skerrett told an electorate officer outside PM John Howard’s Sydney office on September 25 during a protest by carers and the disabled calling for more government assistance.
Job losses will result from 11 years of Coalition government policy on the environment, Gippsland Trades and Labour Council (GTLC) secretary John Parker told Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly on September 26. He said Australia has been left 11 years behind in developing clean energy technology, which means instead of now being able to export these technologies, the industry has moved overseas. Employment opportunities are wasted and inevitably jobs will be lost as our own dirty industries are forced to close.
At least 20,000 Victorian unionists defied the federal governmentÂ’s anti-worker laws and risked fines to show their opposition to Work Choices and the Australian Building and Construction Commission on September 26.
Maurie Mahoney, Textiles Clothing and Footwear Union (TCFUA) delegate at WangarattaÂ’s Bruck Textiles, is being targeted at work with disciplinary action that could result in dismissal, after speaking out against Work Choices laws allowing the company to pay some workers less then the federal governmentÂ’s Fair Pay standards. Bruck management informed Mahoney that he had breached his terms and conditions of employment. He was directed that he must not speak about the matter with anyone other than his wife, who is one of the Bruck workers currently being paid under the Fair Pay standard.
Climate change You might be surprised that Clive Hamilton's book Scorcher: The Dirty Politics of Climate Change is actually an update of The Dirty Politics of Climate Change from 2001. For all the revelations he gives about Australia's
In February this year, a boat carrying 83 Tamil asylum seekers from Sri Lanka was intercepted by the Australian Navy. After being detained on Christmas Island for a month, the Tamils were transferred to Nauru.
Sydney University students and staff rallied outside Fisher Library on September 6 to protest against plans, announced by vice-chancellor Gavin Brown to open a new ,that will cooperate with the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO), in placing the university “firmly at the forefront of future developments in Australia’s nuclear related research”.
The Socialist Alliance supports the struggle for democracy in Burma, and stands in solidarity with the democracy movement activists, political prisoners and exiles bravely defying its military dictatorship.
On September 23, federal environment minister Malcolm Turnbull and industry and resources minister Ian Macfarlane announced a new national “clean energy target”.
What began on August 15 as protests against escalating fuel and transport prices and deteriorating economic conditions has developed into a mass uprising in Burma. From September 17, mobilisations by Buddhist monks and nuns emboldened thousands of Burmese to take to the streets in the largest protests since the pro-democracy uprising in 1988 that was brutally crushed, with over 3000 people killed, by the military regime that has ruled Burma since 1962.
Socialist Alliance members and supporters will be very busy over the next few months as the federal election draws near. We will be organising election launches, meetings, fundraisers, letterboxing and leafleting drives.
Farooq Tariq, the general secretary of Labour Party Pakistan — along with 10 other LPP members — was arrested for the third time in three months on September 27.