Write on: Letters to the editor
Tax treachery
Australia is a country destroyed by decades of political manipulation and treachery. This is exemplified in the deceitful booklet issued by the current Government entitled "Tax Reform, not a new tax, a new tax system", a grubby attempt to influence the populace towards a GST.
Page 3 contains the false statement: "The new tax system begins in July 2000." How incredible to state that the tax system will start when it has not even gone before Parliament, let alone been enacted.
Even worse is the hypocrisy of the statement on page 1 that "... there are many people who aren't paying their share at all". How can the Treasurer authorise such disinformation when company tax evasion is rife, as evidenced by the following facts.
1. The Auditor General stated in the Australian of February 16th that "40,000 companies may be avoiding tax by shifting profits off-shore."
2. Jim Killaly of the Australian Tax Office stated on ABC Radio National on April 3rd: "There are 4,300 large foreign corporations that pay no tax in Australia", and that "there are another 4,000 or so foreign companies that pay little or no tax in Australia by means of transfer pricing and various tax havens".
3. In the Sydney Morning Herald on the 28th October, 1996, Jim Killaly reported that since 1953, when the Double Taxation Bill was enacted, "multinationals have paid little or no tax".
4. The 1995-96 Taxation Revenue report from ABS demonstrates that Australians, while owning 10% of business, pay 91% of the tax burden, while foreign enterprises, which own 90% of business, only pay 9% of tax revenue.
The people of Australia are being treated with contempt while John Howard and Peter Costello serve their globalist masters.
Geelong Vic
[Abridged.]
Open letter to the union movement
The Australian union movement has the power to significantly affect uranium mining with a clear statement that it would oppose it, prevent any new mines from opening, and commit to closing down mining operations in Kakadu National Park.
Instead, you have assisted the Howard government by neglecting to review your uranium policy and saying nothing as the police arrest those courageous protesters camping near the Jabiluka mine site. You know that the mongrels who profit from uranium mining would be the first to attack workers' rights.
Help is needed to stop the miners from hacking down and poisoning Kakadu national park, one of Australia's most beautiful and diverse wilderness areas, an area which is inhabited by indigenous people and contains many priceless Aboriginal sites.
The cost of mining uranium in this area is higher than the price it was being sold for. Leakage and dumping of radioactive material from the site into the surrounding wetlands will contaminate the area for many thousands of years.
The Howard government has encouraged uranium mining because profit is more important than people.
Attacking uranium mining would be a fine way to show you are committed to the health and moral needs of not only Australians, but the people of the world. You could highlight the ignorance and savagery of the Howard government, which has rushed to plunder this deadly substance for a small, short-term profit, leaving the price to be paid by future generations.
I urge you to join the fight.
Byron Bay NSW
[Abridged.]
US political prisoners
While the Vietnam War and apartheid in South Africa may have ended, and political prisoners in some places released, in the USA there are still many political prisoners from this era in jail. They are there due to their political activities in support of the liberation struggles in Central America, South Africa, and elsewhere.
They include Ray Luc Levasseur, Tom Manning, Jaan Karl Laaman and Richard Williams.
Progressive and revolutionary-minded people can help them by writing to the US President Clinton, Washington DC, USA, urging that they be pardoned or given amnesty.
Without such support these people will continue to rot in prison, serving sentences that range from 45 to 53 years.
Hurstridge Vic
AESP and social justice
Francesca Davis' article (GLW, August 19) "Blaming the Wrong People" did just that, in blaming Australians for an Ecologically Sustainable Population for attitudes they do not hold.
Gordon Hocking's article strongly criticises our present economic system and its waste, as a major hurdle to international equity. AESP campaigns for fair societies with ecological sustainability the world over, and does not "choose to ignore international power relations". The only fair criticism of Gordon Hocking is that he thinks we have no right to preach to others what we are not already doing ourselves. Other AESPers think and act globally now.
AESP members actively push the justice campaigns Francesca accuses AESP of ignoring. AESP itself is a single-issue organisation — wide-ranging as that issue is. Like, say, the Local Governance Association, it is not a political party which must do something about everything.
All attempts at ecological sustainability should not be smeared as "racist" — as any attempts for social justice used to be dismissed as "communist". The issues of population and resources are not just global, they are national and, indeed, personal.
Australians should be setting an example and also helping other countries to be ecologically sustainable — instead of destroying the fragile resources that we have. It is the huge corporations that want incessant population growth, for mass markets and land profits.
Mount Waverley Vic
[Abridged.]
Immigration lifeboat
I was most reassured to read Geoff Grace's assertion (Write on, September 2) that it is "not racist" to limit immigration on the basis of ecological criteria, but is merely comparable to sensible management of a lifeboat from the Titanic.
Of course, if admission to the lifeboat were to be determined on the basis of skin colour, accident of birth or the ability to speak English, that certainly would be racist.
Accordingly, it would seem appropriate for Australians for an Ecologically Sustainable Population — and anyone else who claims that the Australian "lifeboat" can't take significant numbers of additional passengers — to recognise that they have had more than their fair share of time on board, and therefore to exchange places with some of the people from Bangladesh or Africa who have been treading water for quite a long time.
Sydney
Militant
I arrived early to the August 28 Resistance anti-racism walkout at the Melbourne GPO. What I encountered there I have never experienced in my 15 years as an activist.
The first spectacle was having Matt, a member of Militant and involved with Students Against Racism (though not a high school student), bragging about how he and other Militant members had managed to prevent Trades Hall and other union speakers from attending and supporting the rally against racism.
The second spectacle was witnessing Dave, another Militant member and unionist in his 30s, threatening Resistance members, high school students — primarily women — with physical violence if they did not, in effect, hand the rally over to Militant. This he termed "united front work".
Both argued that anti-racism actions should be in no way associated with socialists.
It is a very sad day when a supposedly socialist organisation brags about how it has kept the organised workers movement out of an anti-racist action, threatened other socialists with physical attack and argued that socialism and anti-racism must not be linked.
Congratulations to the Resistance members who kept their cool and were able to continue with a great rally despite the intimidation. You may have had to compromise in the face of these bully tactics, but your decision to do so in order to save the action speaks volumes to your commitment to fighting racism, as opposed to the Militant members, who seemed willing to wreck the rally "in order to save it" — from socialists.
Education Officer
Melbourne Uni Student Union