ALP
Kim Beazley's May 3 speech to the National Press Club confirms that Labor is just another conservative party. The address overwhelming focused on "middle Australians" who have "real and legitimate needs". Beazley specified that, by middle Australians, he meant those with a personal income around $55,000, or a family income of about $100,000.
$55,000 is roughly average full-time earnings. However, 50% of adult Australians don't have a full-time job. Somebody on $55,000 has more income than about 77% of Australian adults. That's way above the middle.
The Labor leader will support a budget that cuts the top marginal tax rate if most tax relief goes to his mis-defined middle. So where does this leave low-income Australians, or people overseas who really do have legitimate unmet needs? Answer: At the end of the queue under both the Coalition and Labor.
Brent Howard
Rydalmere, NSW
West Papua I
Clinton Fernandes' comment piece (GLW #665) only partially addresses a solution to the West Papua question. Certainly the UN has a responsibility to bring to the International Court of Justice, the Indonesian war criminals named in the East Timor CAVR report. Ultimately, the UN must take legal responsibility for reviewing the sham 1969 "act of free choice" held under its auspices. Electoral fraud, these days, is not tolerated by the UN and international community
except, of course, where the US favours the cheats. Their respective legal right to self-determination is the first principle of justice for West Papua, the Moluccas and Aceh.
Dr Vacy Vlazna
Sydney
West Papua II
Is it a promotion or a demotion to move from being the US's deputy sheriff to being Indonesia's sheep dog, rounding up the escapees from the genocide in West Papua? Essentially that is what Australia has done by launching the joint sea patrols with Indonesia to turn back people fleeing for their lives from terror.
Col Friel
Alawa, NT
Workers' rights
Petitions for workers' rights under the constitution have been launched. Many supporters of the Green Left Weekly have supported and signed the petitions and would like to know progresses of our campaign. Relevant information is at <http://www.upholdingworkersrights.blogspot.com>. If you and your friends consider this issue is important, and have an opinion about it, you are invited to express your opinion on the website.
Daming He
Via email
Work Choices
The company I work for proposes a pay decrease for some employees and a massive assault on our conditions, e.g., the proposal for myself is effectively a $9000 reduction in annual pay. I have worked for this company for 30 years — so much for loyalty. John Howard has a lot to answer for.
John Simpson
Via email
ANZAC
ANZAC day 2006 may go down in history as the day Australians reclaimed ANZAC from the politicians. Starting with Governor-General Michael Jeffrey at ANZAC cove, who reminded us "that we were not there to glorify war but to remember all those who had been killed by war" and finishing with sunset services across Australia in the memory of Hugo Throssell, a VC winner from Greenmount, Western Australia, who returned from war a dedicated peace campaigner. These services commemorated not only the soldiers killed in war but also their mothers and families along with all those innocent victims of war, those damaged by war, those killed by weapons of mass destruction in Dresden, Hiroshima and Fallujah, all children orphaned in war, all women raped in war and those Indigenous Australians and Papuans killed in war by and for Australia.
Dr Colin Hughes
Greenmount, WA
AWB scandal
US intelligence can listen to your phone calls, read your emails, contracts, tenders, know all through the Echelon spy satellite system and then pass this on to fraternal intelligence services in Anglo-Celtic UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
The UN Volker report and Australian Cole inquiry revelations show that US and UK intelligence must have known from the very start in the late 1990s about the AWB "wheat for weapons" scam that diverted US$250 million from the UN Oil-for-Food Program, killed up to 21,000 Iraqi infants through diversions from scarce food and medical funding, "funded the Iraqi insurgency" and "killed or maimed two divisions worth of American soldiers and countless thousands of Iraqis" (according to staunchly pro-American but anti-Iraq war Australian opposition leader Kim Beazley).
If Bush and Blair knew and did nothing, then they betrayed their own people, their Coalition allies and their own soldiers in the field.
Dr Gideon Polya
Macleod, Vic
From Green Left Weekly, May 10, 2006.
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