Pressure from workers and students forced the University of Western Sydneys Board of Trustees to review its rejection of a $250,000 SRC funding proposal on November 29. The proposal is designed to help UWS Student Association (UWSSA) survive federal voluntary student unionism (VSU) legislation and came on the back of UWSSA having its budget slashed from $2.5 million to $450,000 for three years.
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On December 1, the anniversary of the 1961 raising of the West Papuan flag, 70 people rallied outside the Indonesian embassy in support of West Papuan independence.
In the lead-up to the November 7 US Congressional elections, President George Bush’s Republican Party tried to terrorise the US public into voting for the party responsible for leading the country into the disastrous Iraq war.
Despite increasing recognition about the problem of violence against women, most refuges, community and non-government organisations devoted to helping women and children in crisis, allocate a good deal of their stretched resources to writing submissions for limited funding. This is because both the state and federal governments have a piecemeal, short-term approach to the problem.
In a November 25 media release, Michael Anderson, a spokesperson for the Gumilaroi Nation, accused the federal and WA state governments of not having the intestinal fortitude to stand against the multinationals who seek to destroy Aboriginal culture. He was commenting on the threatened destruction of ancient Aboriginal rock art on the the Dampier Archipelago, resulting from the $50 billion Pluto Gas natural gas project by Woodside Energy on the Burrup Peninsula.
Final approval at the UN General Assembly of the declaration on indigenous peoples rights was blocked on November 28 by a group of African countries led by Namibia, and supported by Australia, Canada, New Zealand and Russia.
Last Friday, as I sat down to write this, a progress report on the Green Left Weekly fighting fund was emailed in from Will who heads our small but serious finance team. More than $16,000 came in from our supporters the previous week (donations and fund raising events), taking the total raised this year to $203,815.
The return of ALP leader Steve Bracks for a third term at the November 25 Victorian election was less a vote for the state ALP government than a vote against the federal Coalition government.
It was also a rejection of the legacy of former Liberal Premier Jeff Kennett, whose 1992-1999 government was responsible for wholesale privatisation and the slashing of public services. While Labor campaign ads reminded Victorians of the Kennett legacy, Bracks has not bought back into public ownership any of the privatised assets, including public transport. Labor won 55 of the 88 lower house seats.
On December 1, up to 2 million people attended a rally in Beirut called by Hezbollah and its allies to demand the resignation of US-backed Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Sinioras government.
As was widely expected, the year-long Cole inquiry, while finding that Australian monopoly wheat exporter AWB Ltd deliberately concealed from the UN $290 million in bribes it paid to Iraq in 2000-03 to secure wheat contracts, cleared PM John Howard and his ministers of any wrongdoing.
Early morning on September 5 security guards burst into the sleeping quarters of Colnbrook immigration detention centre in west London. The guards had come to take 32 Iraqi Kurdish men away. Barefoot, handcuffed, with the guards swearing at them, the 32 were taken to RAF Brize Norton airforce base. Their threatened forced deportation to Arbil in northern Iraq was imminent.
The Stern report makes recommendations that will allow for a temperature rise of around 3°C, but this is likely to be devastating for the planet. George Monbiot says that, Two degrees is the point at which some of the most dangerous processes catalysed by climate change could become irreversible.
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