A union activists’ meeting called by the Victorian Trades Hall Council on 20 May called for action against Abbott’s class war budget and demanded that the ALP and the Greens block it in the Senate.
A motion to call an all-union delegates’ meeting to co-ordinate strike action and mass protests was carried unanimously by the 250 people present. The motion was taken to the Trades Hall Executive, which met on Friday 23 May (after Red Flag went to print).
There was strong support from the union delegates present for the argument that organised workers had to take the lead in mobilising everyone who has been savaged in this budget.
Socialist Alternative union delegates from the RTBU, AEU and NTEU were among those who spoke from the floor.
Emma Kerin from the National Union of Workers reported that a northern area delegates’ conference had already voted for a general strike.
An announcement by ACTU President Ged Kearney that the ACTU is organising a national day of action in October was not well received. People don’t want to wait five months and watch everything fizzle out.
We have a real opportunity to defeat this budget if we act decisively and determinedly now.
Fifteen years ago, the John Howard federal Coalition government launched a military invasion and occupation of Aboriginal townships and lands in the Northern Territory. More than 600 military and police personnel, accompanied by a phalanx of government bureaucrats, entered 73 Aboriginal communities, placing them under the unilateral control of the Australian army.
In the late 1960s, cryptic notes began to appear on poles and noticeboards around Chicago, directing women who were pregnant and in trouble to “call Jane”. The number provided connected them to the Jane Collective (officially the Abortion Counselling Service of Women’s Liberation), an underground network of activists providing illegal abortions in the years before the 1973 Roe vs. Wade decision. This collective is the subject of The Janes, a new HBO documentary directed by Emma Pildes and Tia Lessin.
Around the US, tens of thousands have hit the streets slamming the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe vs. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that established abortion as a right. In Manhattan, a large crowd of young, multiracial activists marched, chanting “Fuck the Supreme Court!”
Anthony Albanese started his victory speech on election night with a commitment that his government would implement the Uluru Statement from the Heart in full, beginning with a referendum to create an Indigenous Voice to Parliament in its first term.
When a new government is being formed, the appointment of senior bureaucrats to the public service often tells you as much about how the country will be run, and in whose interests, as does the allocation of ministries to politicians.
It has been generations in the making but, on 19 June, the first ever leftist president of Colombia was elected. Gustavo Petro defeated his right-wing opponent, Rodolfo Hernández, in a second-round run-off with 50.4 percent of the vote against 47.3 percent. The traditional conservative and centre-left coalitions were both defeated in the first round, winning 24 percent and 4 percent of the vote respectively.