On March 13 the Victorian Legislative Assembly passed a bill to establish a relationships register, which will allow couples, regardless of gender, to be formally recognised under Victorian law. However, concerns have been raised that the proposals contain a number of serious shortcomings.
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The Tullamarine toxic waste dump is likely to be closed permanently after the Environmental Protection Authority (EPA) announced that from February 18 no more waste would be accepted at the site, pending an inquiry.
On February 26, Forestry Tasmania, the state-government-run corporation that manages TasmaniaÂ’s forests, revealed that it had signed a 20-year deal to supply wood to Gunns LimitedÂ’s proposed Tamar Valley pulp mill.
On March 20, a 40-strong community picket blocked trucks from entering the Coburg plant of Visy Industries, the world’s largest packaging and recycling company. The picket was to protest the sacking of George Kyridis, a member of the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union (AMWU) Visy is owned by the Pratt family and employs about 8000 people in Australia, New Zealand and North America.
The March 25 Sydney Morning Herald reported that the site of a planned supermarket development in the northern NSW town of Moree is an Indigenous burial site.
Members of the Stolen Wages Working Group (SWWG) walked out of a meeting with Queensland Indigenous affairs minister Lindy Nelson-Carr on March 25 when they were told that $21.2 million in promised extra compensation payments would be redirected to
SYDNEY — Hundreds of students from at least five university campuses joined the ’Demand a better future’ rally organised by the National Union of Students on March 19. The rally called on the new Labor government to increase education funding and to scrap the Voluntary Student Unionism legislation that has significantly undermined student organising. A speaker from the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union extended solidarity from the trade union movement. The march dwarfed a pro-VSU counter-demonstration organised by Liberal students. There was a rally in Melbourne of 150 people and actions in other cities on the same day.
The seven-member Bass Coast Shire Council, on whose land the Victorian Labor government plans to build a $3.1 billion desalination plant, voted on March 19 to drop its support for the project. In a March 20 media release, council CEO Allan Bawden
On March 20, the Sydney Morning Herald reported that federal immigration minister Chris Evans had agreed to “speed-up” the processing of 457 visas, which allow bosses to hire skilled workers from overseas to fill alleged skill shortages.
“It was lunchtime in one of Haiti’s worst slums, and Charlene Dumas was eating mud. With food prices rising, Haiti’s poorest can’t afford even a daily plate of rice, and some take desperate measures to fill their bellies. Charlene, 16 with a 1-month-old son, has come to rely on a traditional Haitian remedy for hunger pangs: cookies made of dried yellow dirt from the country’s central plateau.
On March 18, Peter Boyle, the national secretary of the Democratic Socialist Perspective — a Marxist tendency in the Socialist Alliance — interviewed S. Arutchelvan, the secretary general of the Malaysian Socialist Party (PSM), about the PSM’s electoral successes in the March 12 general elections. This interview was originally published by socialist e-journal Links at .
Events such as the April 11-13 Climate Change — Social Change conference occur very rarely in the intellectual and political life of an Australian city. This gathering in Sydney will bring together an extraordinary range of speakers to tackle the theme of social action to stop climate change.
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