I woke up yesterday remembering the events of Easter 20 years ago. On that memorable Easter Thursday morning, 600 hardy souls had gathered outside the offices of mining company North Ltd in central Melbourne. It was the culmination of an ambitious four-day blockade, which had dominated the news every night of the week. 
For Melbourne, 600 people isn’t a huge protest. But 600 people at 8am, including a contingent of building workers who’d downed tools in support, after four days and nights of protest, is a bloody good turnout. North executives, who had been bussed in at dawn to give the appearance of business as usual, dejectedly watched our victory march from the upper floors of their building. 
To understand why this was such an important moment, I need to rewind to the dark days of 1996. The election of John Howard in March 1996 marked the end of 13 years of ALP government – the longest period of Labor administration in the history of Australia. Although the capitalist class had nothing to complain about from Labor in terms of making money, holding back unions and getting profits, there was a surge of excitement in boardrooms now that the bosses’ “A team” was back in charge. 
The Coalition immediately attacked: up-front university fees were introduced, restrictions on unions imposed, school curriculums rewritten and whitewashed and “bucketloads of extinguishment” thrown at the limited rights Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people had over their land. 
Australia’s giant mining companies – major backers of the Coalition – got their wish list. Howard immediately abolished Labor’s three mines policy, and the business pages crowed that “25 new uranium mines” were likely and possible. And in October 1997, then environment minister Robert Hill blew the dust off an environmental impact statement from 1979 that said mining at Jabiluka was safe. Approval of the mine quickly followed.
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The Jabiluka uranium deposit, just 20 kilometres from the Ranger uranium mine, is one of the richest in the world. The proposal was to build a massively bigger mine than that at Ranger, which would be underground and therefore more dangerous for the workers. It was projected to produce 19 million tonnes of ore over its lifetime, which would be trucked 22 kilometres through World Heritage listed wetlands. 
The Liberals hoped to make a point. After all, if you could put a uranium mine in the middle of a national park in the face of Aboriginal opposition, what couldn’t you do?
The fight immediately began. The traditional owners of the area, the Mirarr, were led by senior traditional owner Yvonne Margarula and the CEO of the Gundjeihmi Aboriginal Corporation, Jacqui Katona. They were supported by anti-nuclear campaigners around the country, most notably Dave Sweeney of the Australian Conservation Foundation, as well as a network of activist groups. 
The most important objective was to delay construction of the mine, scheduled to begin in 1998. To do this, the Mirarr called on activists to travel to Jabiluka in order to take part in a blockade of the proposed mine site until the onset of the wet season would make construction impossible. 
The blockade was immensely successful. Beginning on 23 March 1998, it continued for eight months, attracted 5,000 protesters and led to 600 arrests at various associated direct actions. Yvonne Margarula was one: she was arrested in May for trespass on her own land after she and two other Aboriginal women entered the Ranger mine site. 
The blockade also attracted high-profile environmental and anti-nuclear activists such as Peter Garrett and Bob Brown. This helped signal to activists that this was a serious fight. The sheer length of time the blockade lasted created a fantastic opportunity for the campaign in the cities. Activists were constantly returning from Jabiluka with a renewed determination to fight. 
The Jabiluka Action Group was key to building an ongoing city-based campaign in Melbourne, and the campaign was strongest there of any city. It held large – often more than 100-strong – weekly meetings, organised endless relays of buses to the blockade and took the fight to the bosses and corporations that stood to profit from the mine. 
We were determined to map the networks of corporate ownership and power behind the mine. But in the late 1990s, when the internet barely existed, this wasn’t as simple as just looking up a company’s corporate structure on its glossy website. It took serious, time consuming research. 
A careful tracing of the linkages of the North Ltd board members showed that they were very well connected – and not one but two of them were members and past chairmen of the Business Council of Australia (BCA) – one of Australia’s leading bosses’ organisations. So our June 1998 protest naturally headed to the Business Council of Australia. We occupied their office, and the two groups of anti-uranium protesters, 3,800 kilometres apart, exchanged messages of solidarity, courtesy of the office phones of the BCA.
We were also staggered to learn that the chairman of a company that owned two uranium mines and was Australia’s biggest exporter of hardwood woodchips was also a member of the Parks Victoria board, the national president of Greening Australia and the Victorian Environmental Protection Authority (EPA) board president!
The EPA, and corporate greenwashing in general, thereby became a target for the campaign. Another target was the Royal Society of Victoria, which made the mistake of inviting Sir Gus Nossal, a famous scientist and longstanding booster for the nuclear industry, to give a dinner address. We surrounded its building, and the organisers, somewhat mystified, cancelled the dinner. This action once again made headline news, helping to keep the issue of the Jabiluka mine in people’s minds. 
We held regular protests at the headquarters of North Ltd on Melbourne’s St Kilda Road. On the day that Yvonne Margarula was facing court on her trespass charge, a vigil was held overnight. When we heard she had been found guilty, the protest erupted in fury. Cans of red paint – not water-based – materialised, and the corporate facade of North Ltd received an unscheduled refurbishment. The Herald-Sun went berserk.
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The leadership of the Mirarr people gave this campaign a different focus from other environmental campaigns of the time. It was fundamentally about land rights, sovereignty and the right of Aboriginal communities to veto destructive developments on their land. In Melbourne, the Gundjeihmi Aboriginal Corporation appointed long-time Aboriginal militant and historian Gary Foley as their representative. Gary worked tirelessly to provoke and educate the many activists who turned up wanting to “support” or “do something” for Aboriginal people. 
At a time when “reconciliation” was strongly supported by liberals and much of the left, Foley told us that reconciliation was bullshit. He argued native title (supposedly a key achievement of Keating) was “the most inferior form of land title under British law”, and that the ALP was every bit as racist as One Nation – if not worse. He insisted activists must educate themselves about sovereignty and the struggles happening right here, not just those happening 3,800 kilometres away. The way the Jabiluka Action Group activists approached this challenge was an example of how people’s ideas change. Many came into the campaign primarily as environmental activists, but almost all left as committed fighters for Aboriginal rights. 
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When the blockade wound down at the onset of the wet season, it was an opportunity to fight on some other fronts. Representatives of the UN World Heritage Committee visited Kakadu in late 1998 and issued a declaration that the World Heritage values of the area were in danger. They called on the government to stop the mine. Yvonne Margarula and Jacqui Katona travelled to Paris to speak to the European Commission about the mine. 
John Howard, at the time mired in ministerial scandals and resignations, had called an election for September 1998, and there was hope in some quarters that Labor might win and stop the mine. But Howard scraped back in on only 48.3 percent of the vote, and it was clear that the fight on the ground would have to continue. 
In the meantime, an important legal loophole had been identified. North Ltd had failed to secure agreement for the Jabiluka ore to be trucked to the Ranger mine for processing. It turned out the Mirarr did have the right to refuse this, and by exercising this right they would increase the cost of the project by $200 million (the cost of building a new processing plant at Jabiluka). This, combined with the ongoing protests, became a huge problem for the company. 
Something we enjoyed doing at the time was monitoring North Ltd’s share price. It started out high when the Liberals took power. But after a year of protest and controversy, it had started to sink. The slump world uranium prices were going through didn’t help. But what the share price correlated to most closely was the major protests – it showed a drop after every single one.
Fund managers everywhere had absorbed the simple message that Jabiluka meant trouble, and early in 1999 this formerly prestigious blue-chip mining stock was described as one of the year’s “dog stocks”. Encouraged by this, the campaign launched its most ambitious action to date – the four-day blockade of North Ltd, from Palm Sunday until Easter Thursday 1999. This was the beginning of the end for the mine. In mid-2000, Rio Tinto bought out the struggling North Ltd. With no appetite for a brawl, the new owners quietly mothballed the Jabiluka project, signing a guarantee with the Mirarr to that effect. The campaign had won. 
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The Jabiluka campaign was one of those rare things – an outright victory. It was a win not just for the Mirarr people, but for every community threatened by a devastating radioactive mine. And it was a win for humanity as a whole, protected from more of this deadly substance. Our chant – “Hey, North, you’re running out of time! You’re never going to get your Jabiluka mine!” – for once came true.
The victory inspired a neighbouring traditional owner, Jeffrey Lee, single-handedly to challenge the development of the Koongarra uranium deposit, resulting in the cancellation of that entire mining lease. In Melbourne and other cities, the Mirarr resistance inspired sustained and creative campaigning from a wide variety of participants – from vegan Wiccans and revolutionary socialists to doof-doof rave organisers and corporate-philanthropist Women for Mirarr Women. The campaign was chaotic and argumentative, but united by a commitment to challenging corporate power and standing up for Aboriginal sovereignty. 
It still serves as an inspiration for anti-nuclear and anti-mining campaigns, such as the brave and determined opposition of the Wangan and Jagalingou traditional owners to the Adani mine. It stands as a great example of how blockades on country can nourish and inspire actions in the cities.

Fleur Taylor

Leave it in the ground: stopping the Jabiluka mine

Remembering Tiananmen Square

National Tertiary Education Union members and staff at Victoria University in Melbourne have defeated a second electronic ballot on management’s proposed non-union enterprise agreement. 
VU management have aggressively pursued a non-union agreement for nearly 12 months. They have torn up the existing union agreement, and their proposals, if successful, would strip university staff conditions back to Fair Work minimums in areas like consultation and being able to challenge a dismissal. 
Victoria University is relatively poor compared to prestigious institutions like Monash, UQ or Sydney Uni. It comprises both TAFE and higher education sectors, and enrols many students from Melbourne’s western and outer suburbs who are the first in their family to attend university. VU staff are already some of the lowest paid in the university sector. 
In addition, VU has been in a famously appalling financial position for the past few years, carrying a load of debt and lacking capital resources with which to buffer a drop in income from enrolments. 
Nevertheless, as union members, we should be sceptical when management cries poor. As usual, there is no cap on consultancies, executive pay or flight-of-fancy property investments. And in the last year, VU staff have delivered a massive transformation to the way courses are delivered. They’ve worked night and day to create the Block Model and the First Year College, in which a semester’s worth of subjects is studied in intensive blocks, one after the other, instead of being taken concurrently. 
The Block Model approach has been so successful for VU that its finances are now coming out of the red. And even if they weren’t, there wouldn’t be a Block Model at all without the dedication, creativity and hard work of VU academics and professional staff. We deserve to maintain our hard-won conditions, and to receive a real pay rise. 
Instead, VU management offer a deal that cuts the NTEU out, removes key conditions from the agreement and relegates them to “policy”, and would mean a pay cut in real terms. A non-union ballot in September 2018 was resoundingly defeated (77 percent voted No). Negotiations were suspended by the university just before Christmas, then in early February staff were suddenly confronted by wall-to-wall Yes propaganda from management. A second non-union ballot had been launched for the following week.
Disgustingly, management paid contract security staff, many of whom are union members, to put up their lying Yes posters around every campus, and rip down union material. Despite this, a determined core of union members and organisers kept on publicising the terrible offer and calling for another No vote.
The vote was an electronic ballot, conducted by Deloitte, whose representatives just happen to sit on senior university committees and function as regular consultants for the university. No scrutineering of the result was allowed. Apparently, 500 more staff voted than in the previous ballot, but the proportion of No votes dropped to 67 percent. This is still a heavy defeat for management, whether or not the figures can be wholly believed. 
Our challenge at VU now is to rebuild a union membership bruised from many years of restructuring and redundancies. We need to fight to preserve the working conditions that make university employment desirable – and win much better outcomes for staff on casual and fixed-term contracts. Importantly, we need to resist the narrative that says a university can’t find the money to pay staff what they need, deserve and are worth.

Management stymied at Victoria Uni

Two primary school students in outer Melbourne have stood up for workers' rights and against militarism.
Zola and Jet both participated in a workshop at the Marxism 2015 Kids Program, which discussed the real history of ANZAC Day, including the suffering and resistance of both soldiers and the populations at home.
Incensed by the constant barrage of ANZACkery at school, eight year old Zola questioned why only soldiers' deaths are remembered and glorified. Her mother, a socialist, mentioned the Stand for Safety campaign to honour International Workers' Memorial Day and encouraged her to email Australian Unions for ideas.
To her delight, Jess from the CFMEU wrote back straightaway suggesting that Zola and her class could take pictures of their shoes and pencil cases (their tools) as part of the nationwide social media campaign highlighting the thousands of workers injured and killed each year at work. They also sent union safety stickers for distribution in class. Zola's teacher, an AEU member, supported her proposal and Zola worked all weekend on a presentation for her class, with the result that all but two of her classmates joined in the photo shown above.
In the meantime, eleven year old Jet was furious that most of a whole school day was taken up by lie after lie about Gallipoli. Her class was solemnly informed that "We wouldn't be the country we are today if it wasn't for the Anzacs fighting in Gallipoli" and no mention was made of Turkish casualties or the fact that their country was being invaded. When the class was then required to spend two writing sessions writing a story from the perspective of an ANZAC soldier, Jet and a classmate asked if they could write from the Turkish perspective – and took to that task with gusto, Jet correcting all the omissions from the official account.
Stories like this show two things. Firstly, the oppressive nature of the school system and the one-sided school curriculum. Just as journalists can be sacked for tweeting their opinions about militarism, the school system rarely incorporates working class or internationalist perspectives into its teaching of history. Secondly, it reminds us that kids are capable of fighting for their point of view and relish the chance to argue for their opinions. Of course, not all kids will necessarily hold left-wing politics, but those who do should be celebrated when they have the courage and passion to stand up against the official narrative.
As their mother says: "We're bringing our children up to be class conscious and union proud. They already know which side they're on."
If you're in Melbourne on Sunday 3 May, march with the Socialist Alternative Red Bloc in the annual May Day march, where the kids will display the banner they painted at Marxism.

Kids shunning militarism in Melbourne

A mass meeting and rally of up to 1,000 kindergarten teachers and educators took place in Melbourne on Wednesday 22 October. Preschool staff – members of the Australian Education Union – took action as part of a 24-hour stop-work. Their aim is to achieve pay equality with their colleagues in primary schools.
The action came after two years of fruitless negotiations between the union and employer associations, which include the Municipal Association of Victoria as well as representatives of private and community-run preschools.
Despite wages for kindergarten teachers (who graduate with the same qualifications as primary school teachers) falling up to 9 percent behind primary teachers in some cases, employers have so far refused anything more than a 2.25 percent wage rise. This offer was resoundingly rejected by the mass meeting.
It’s never just about pay, though – especially for teachers. The meeting heard that, with ever increasing demands and regulations, a teacher employed for the usual 28 hours a week was doing an average of 14 hours a week of unpaid work. That’s 20 weeks of work that teachers are donating to their bosses, every year. And the situation for educators (kinder staff who have a diploma or Certificate III instead of a degree) is even worse.
When pay and conditions fall so far behind, it’s no wonder that kinder teachers are in short supply. If you can earn just that little bit more teaching prep than teaching kinder, it’s easy to see that new graduates face a difficult choice.
The future of the teachers’ pay campaign is uncertain. Although a motion condemning the Napthine government and the employers and foreshadowing a continuing campaign was passed unanimously, no date for any further industrial action was proposed by the AEU, and no questions were raised from the floor about the direction of the campaign.
Nevertheless, there is clearly a mood for action among preschool teachers. The ballot to take protected action – the first strike action from preschool teachers in 10 years – was voted for by 93 percent of union members. The union reported that, in the month leading up to the strike, 150 new members had been recruited. And the hundreds who marched, chanting loudly, from the mass meeting to state parliament were joined in spirit by members in Mildura, who had succeeded in shutting every non-council kinder in that town, and by council-run preschool members in Warrnambool, who gathered for an after-work rally outside the premier’s electoral office.
Neta, a teacher from Merrigum Kindergarten near Shepparton, told Red Flag: “We’ve had enough. The Napthine government [and the employer groups] have not listened to us. We want them to invest in our preschools, to look after the teachers, look after the conditions, and they’re just not doing that.”
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For more information about the campaign, visit <a href="http://www.protectourpreschools.com.au">www.protectourpreschools.com.au</a>

Leave it in the ground: stopping the Jabiluka mine

Remembering Tiananmen Square

Management stymied at Victoria Uni

Kids shunning militarism in Melbourne

Invest in preschool teachers – it’s ABC

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