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Five thousand people attended the vibrant Climate Emergency Rally in Melbourne on June 5. Grassroots environment activists and groups came from all over Victoria to protest numerous environmentally destructive projects currently underway or proposed, demanding action instead be focused on renewable energy and public transport.
Professor Ross Garnaut’s draft review of climate change policy options for the Australian government was released on July 4, with climate change minister Penny Wong due to release a green paper canvassing policy options on July 16. Garnaut’s report looks at the “costs” and “benefits” of mitigating drastic climate change through a carbon polluting trading scheme. It suggests tax cuts and “welfare reform” to compensate low-income households, which will be hit hard by energy price rises.
A Northern Town — With a third of Kempsey's population made up of Aboriginal people, the town is a hotbed of covert and overt racism on one hand, and Third World poverty and oppression on the other. SBS, Friday, July 11, 7.30pm. Message Stick:
According to the official website for World Youth Day (WYD), Sydney will “look different” from APEC. Really? With 600-plus areas now officially “declared areas”, not to mention proscribed airspace throughout July, and officials with the right to decide who is annoying and who isn’t, it doesn’t seem very different. If anything, it’s worse.
Indigenous communities have been underfunded and deprived of essential resources for decades because of faulty census data, a technical paper produced by Australian National University (ANU) academics has discovered.
David Rovics has been described as the musical voice of the progressive movement in the US. In this interview with Green Left Weekly’s Matt Clark, he explains his motivations, his influences and his take on politics today.
The last month in Afghanistan has seen the anti-occupation Islamist Taliban forces stage a jailbreak of 1200 of prisoners in Kandahar, threats by the US’s puppet Afghan President Hamid Karzai to attack Pakistan (the major US ally in the region), the killing of 11 Pakistani soldiers in a border clash with occupation troops, pro-Taliban insurgents reach the Pakistani city of Peshawar and the highest number of casualties for both US and other occupation forces for any month since the October 2001 invasion.
This article is based on a talk given by Naomi Rodgers-Falk to the closing session of the Resistance National Conference, held at the University of Technology, Sydney, on June 27 to 29.
A public meeting on June 24 against the proposed desalination plant drew 500 people. The gathering, 12 months after a 700-strong public meeting that kicked off the campaign, vowed to continue the fight against the energy-inefficient and costly non-solution to Melbourne’s water crisis.
The following statement has been issued by the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union.
On June 21, Indigenous affairs minister Jenny Macklin announced that her government would begin to end funding for infrastructure to remote Northern Territory (NT) Aboriginal communities that she deemed were “economically unviable”. This is the Rudd Labor government’s first major attack on Aboriginal land rights since taking power.
Around 80 people demonstrated under the banner of the National front for Indonesian Workers Struggle (FNPBI) outside the headquarters of ExxonMobil and the national parliament building to demand that the government cancel the increase in the price of fuel.