The Story of Cap & Trade (below) is a fast-paced, fact-filled look at the leading climate solution being discussed at the climate talks in Copenhagen. Cap and trade is also variously described as “carbon trading'' and “emissions trading”. In Australia, the federal Labor government is trying to push a variation of this through the Senate called the “Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme”.
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SYDNEY — Fifty people gathered outside federal government offices on November 26 to protest the Northern Territory intervention against Aboriginal communities.
Results of the recent elections for branch council and senior officer positions in the Australian Education Union Victoria branch were released on October 29. The incumbent union leadership was challenged by the Teachers Alliance, a rank and file group of AEU members that campaigns for an active and democratic union.
FOOTSCRAY — On November 21, more than 200 inner-west Melbourne residents rallied against state government plans to build a tunnel, freeway and truck route through residential areas.
On November 25, the federal Labor government tabled legislation in parliament to allow the extension of the policy of “welfare quarantining” to unemployed people and single parents throughout the country regardless of ethnic background.
Raising My Voice: The Extraordinary Story of the Afghan Woman Who Dares to Speak Out
By Malalai Joya
Macmillan, 2009
278 pages, $34.99 (pb)
A national day of action in support of same-sex marriage rights took place on November 28.
You could be forgiven for missing the good news this month.
Bless-ed be O reverential Economy
Append another clause to Deuteronomy
To wit, Mammon updating Moses
Verily thou needst shit to grow roses,
On garden spread warm manure
Draw forth the bloom pure.
All hail our ubiquitous Economy
Before whom
The last of the 78 Tamil refugees who had protested for more than four weeks on board the Oceanic Viking walked off the Australian customs ship moored in Indonesia on November 17. For at least a month, they will be locked up in an Indonesian detention centre. They ended their protest after the Australian government promised to resettle them.
Professor Brij Lal is a Fijian historian and is part of the Division of Pacific and Asian History at the Australian National University. He was recently expelled from Fiji by the military government for speaking out against the regime’s expulsion of Australian diplomats on November 3.
The federal senate was bogged down in debate about Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS) in the last week of November. The proposed scheme, already condemned by most environmental NGO’s and climate action groups as a sham, was “browned down” even more after the Rudd government accepted a series of Liberal Party amendments.
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