@letterhead = Anti-gun hysteria
After a sentence of TV News and the Sunday Mail, I opened the first copy of my renewed subscription to GLW and flicked through the July 3 issue looking for the DSP line on gun law reform. What a disappointment.
1. What is "bourgeois individualist" about individuals owning guns? We agree that the "right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed". Who are these "the people" but you and I, individuals? Like any right, it is earned with responsibility — if you are responsible enough to own a deadly weapon (and who decides that is a debate on its own), it is your individual right to own one to defend yourself. If you are a danger with a gun then it is the democratic right of every other individual that you are disarmed. If only criminals are armed, then how are the rights of the majority to be enforced?
2. You say you arm a "well-regulated militia"? This means you use a means of control and education, like a gun licence, to ensure that only those citizens responsible enough to be officially given a deadly weapon get one. Any history of domestic violence or dangerous mental instability should deny you a deadly weapon.
No matter how much you regulate the sale of guns, and they need to be regulated, some individuals are always going to have guns. Probably over 90% of those who already have them will be burying rather than turning them in. The only way to regulate individuals is by arming the majority so that they can defend themselves by shooting mad dogs.
3. But how can you defend yourself with "weapons stored at neighbourhood and workplace depots"? Once you have regulated who gets a gun, you deal with where they are kept. In a city there is a logical argument for neighbourhood and workplace depots closest to where most people are most of the time.
But why are we arming ourselves? If you are guarding against tyranny you don't make it easy for the tyrants to disarm you! What could be easier than sending the police in to confiscate all the arms from their depots?
If you are going to trust your workers' militias with guns, let them lock their guns away where they have ready access to them, for revolution and invasion and homicidal maniacs.
The kind of scum who would shoot their wife is not going to be restrained by law or regulation, and probably will get hold of a gun whether they are legal or not. The best defence is to arm that family. If women are going to live in fear, only empowering them to defend themselves is going to give them any real sense of security.
Elena Garcia
Agnes Water Qld
[Edited for length.]
@letterhead = Anti-social restructuring
The cold-blooded planned closure of 26 CES offices (to begin with, that is) by the dominant elites within the Liberal Party and our senior public servants must surely serve as a final indicator to the one-and-a-half million or so unemployed and marginalised Australians ... we are now completely on our own.
Long abandoned by the leaders of both the union movement and the Labor Party, our ranks are about to be swollen by more public sector workers who are being forced to accept "voluntary" departure packages.
At the same time, corporate executive incomes are now running in the millions of dollars per year, with their sycophantic subordinates rewarded with "packages" in the hundreds of thousands of dollars per year.
This anti-social and undemocratic outcome of a "restructured" Australian economy (society) will remain in place and worsen until enough fair-minded Australians join the struggle to change or overthrow the iniquitous politico-economic system under which most of us are forced to labour and, increasingly, languish.
The $8 billion black hole is a lie. So is the final victory or "success" of capitalism, with every "advanced" capitalist country in the world beset by a growing range of deepening economic, environmental, political and social crises.
Welcome back to the brave new world of nineteenth century lassiez-faire capitalism.
John Foster
Traralgon Vic
@letterhead = East Timor
The massacre at Port Arthur killed 25 people but in East Timor, which is nearer to Australia then Tenterfield is to Tasmania, at least 200,000 people have been butchered by our friends and allies, the Indonesians.
The UN has passed 11 resolutions calling for self determination for East Timor and refuses to recognise Indonesian sovereignty, unlike Australia which is the only country to recognise the 1975 Indonesian invasion as legal!
When General Tri Sutrisno — the Butcher of Dili — visited Canberra in 1994, the Keating government rolled out the red carpet and invited him to lay a wreath at the Australian War Memorial in spite of the fact that 40,000 East Timorese died supporting Australian commandos fighting the Japanese. What a way to say thank you and not a peep from the RSL!
On June 21, I attended the "East Timor: Its Future in Asia Pacific" conference in Sydney. It was great to see East Timorese joining with democracy loving Indonesians against a common enemy viz a bunch of fat-cat families (the Suhartos, the Habibies, for example) who rip off ordinary Indonesians and answer calls for democracy and a fair go with bullets and torture.
The conference called on all Australians to ask the UN and the Australian government to support a UN-supervised referendum in East Timor. If the people decide to be part of Indonesia so be it.
Our nearest neighbour and war-time ally needs our help. All it takes is a card or letter to your MP and/or Mr Howard asking that Australia works to secure a vote by the East Timorese to decide their own future. It's the least we can do ... lest we forget!
Gareth W R Smith
O'Connor ACT
[Edited for length.]
@letterhead = Euthanasia
The vicious attack on the Northern Territory's voluntary euthanasia law by an unprincipled group of people without compassion has now been joined by the Vatican.
Supporters of the Roman Catholic Church in Australia have led off with the monstrous lie that the church has always supported the sacredness of human life. They seem to have forgotten the European invasion and colonisation of the South American continent some 500 years ago when countless thousands of indigenous people were slaughtered over the following centuries with the blessing of, and at the behest of, the Roman Catholic Church.
Or even the infamous Inquisition where death was meted out to heretics and unbelievers in great abundance.
Dr Wake, President of the AMA in the NT, has stated that there is no such thing as the right to die. Some 6 billion people have proved him wrong over untold millennia.
In fact, it is probably the only basic human right that no government has been able to violate.
Then we have the Aboriginal spokesmen quoting traditional law while at the same time being so far removed from Aboriginal culture that they are ministers of the Christian religion which spent centuries stamping out pagan customs and Aboriginal culture.
Col Friel
Alawa NT
@letterhead = Century Zinc
Powerful interests have jumped on a disputed 11-12 vote of Aboriginal leaders from communities around the Gulf of Carpentaria to claim there is overwhelming support for opening the world's largest Zinc mine and a 250-kilometre slurry pipeline to Karumba. The ore from this $9 billion mine would then be barged to ships anchored in the Gulf.
Several Aboriginal leaders have made clear their opposition to the pipe line to the Gulf because of anticipated pollution dangers. They have said they would support the mine if the ore were piped to Cloncurry and shipped through Townsville. Century Zinc opposed this because they argue that it would add $30 million a year to the cost of transporting ore. The Mayor of Townsville supports shipment through his port and argues this would contain pollution and that the Century Zinc's estimate of costs is inflated.
The unholy alliance of Century Zinc, Queensland and Commonwealth Governments and the ALP demonstrates we have learnt little from 208 years of colonisation and nothing from the ongoing war in Bougainville. Century Zinc is a subsidiary of CRA whose private security forces and the Papua New Guinea Government armed services could not keep the Panguna Mine open and now over 5000 people have died as a result of this 7 year conflict.
A 250-kilometre slurry pipeline strongly opposed by a significant group of people will be an ongoing target. It will be impossible to guard and will be continually disrupted. If this is the best our mining executives, State and Commonwealth Governments can come up with we need new leaders.
John Tomlinson
Brisbane