The vanishing protest
The October 13 meeting of the Parramatta Your Rights at Work group received a visit from a young organiser from Unions NSW, whose lamentable job it was to report on the future of the campaign against power privatisation.
Parramatta YRaW has been involved in the campaign since the beginning of the year, collecting petitions, organising pickets and a public meeting, and building the demonstrations. We had expected the organiser to fill us in on plans to organise a work-time mobilisation against Premier Rees's November mini-budget and privatisation agenda — promised when the September 20 protest against privatisation was knocked on the head.
We were left disappointed.
While the organiser quoted from a report on a September 2 meeting of United Services Union (USU) delegates that called on Unions NSW to organise a protest of all unions in the power industry and the public sector to protest against the Rees government's plan to privatise the electricity retailers, no details for such a rally were forthcoming.
Unions NSW is "seeking the detail" of the privatisation from the government, we were told. The campaign was "in a holding pattern" and the organiser would "have to get back to us" on plans for a weekday rally, called for by USU delegates.
It was a win to stop the privatisation of the power generators, for sure. But to fail to fight the privatisation of the retailers at all, that would be a real loss indeed.
I wonder if John Robertson's selection for Michael Costa's seat has anything to do with it?
Graham Matthews
Liverpool, NSW
Recession and roads
Merely recalling the last time we had a recession, and hearing from a relative that Victoria had its driest September on record after 11 years, with a 40% decline in Melbourne's rainfall, just makes one fear what will happen next.
Back in 1992, Victorians turned to a conservative government that made cuts to essential services to balance the budget but wasted $6 billion and climbing to build roads that have dried out Melbourne's dams.
Instead, we must demand that any cuts are first of all in the $10 billion roads budget, whose wastefulness has already allowed carbon dioxide levels beyond the scientific "tipping point" for catastrophic climate change. The roads budget must be immediately cut to zero or converted to railway building.
Not only would the savings be immense and deficits eliminated, but Australia's appalling greenhouse emissions would achieve in one step bigger cuts than have occurred through all the policy steps of the last decade.
Julien Peter Benney
Carlton, Vic
[Abridged.]
For unity in the women's liberation movement
Kim Bullimore (Write On #771) asks if the Socialist Alliance has changed its position on supporting free abortion. As the three SA members who Bullimore referred to, we want to clarify the statements made in this letter.
First, some context. This was the second meeting called to organise a rally in support of women's right to choose, in the lead-up to the debate in the Upper House on the bill to decriminalise abortion. The first meeting had agreed upon the demand "we want unrestricted access to safe, affordable, and legal abortion".
The Greens were unable to attend the second meeting, and we could not be sure of their reaction to change the wording from "affordable" to "free". The intention was to keep the demands as broad as possible and to guarantee we could get support from Pro-Choice Victoria groups, which had more resources and a much wider network.
SA members argued that calling for unrestricted access to affordable abortion wasn't significantly different from calling for free abortion, given that unrestricted access implies that the cost isn't prohibitive.
Given that affordability was added in the context of the Medicare bill being debated by the federal government and that there wasn't a movement pushing for free abortion, calling for it at our rally was merely rhetoric.
Bullimore raised these points when the minutes from the meeting, which she herself typed up and posted to the organising group's email list, explicitly refute her claims.
The minutes read: "although [Trent Hawkins] personally thought it should be 'free', said that the demand should remain to be 'affordable' rather than 'free' because it will narrow down the amount of groups that would come behind the rally."
The minutes also quote Hawkins stating that the "Socialist Alliance position is not the rally position".
We have succeeded in taking abortion off the criminal code. The struggle remains for full access to abortion. We need to rebuild the women's liberation movement not on the basis of false differences, but by achieving the greatest amount of unity and collaboration possible.
Trent Hawkins
Yarraville, Vic, Fiona Roberts
Brunswick, Vic, & Kimberly Yu
Ascot Vale, Vic