Australian News

By Linda Waldron

On November 6, ABC Learning, which controls nearly a quarter of Australia’s childcare centres, went into receivership owing more than $1 billion to the banks. Less than two weeks later CFK, Australia’s second biggest childcare company, also went into receivership, after revealing it was losing $400,000 per month. ABC’s ruin accelerated CFK’s collapse as the negotiated $8.5 million sale of its centres to ABC fell through. The Rudd Labor government has advanced $22 million to keep ABC centres operating until December 31.

By Nick Everett

On November 25 — a day after the first anniversary of the election of the Rudd Labor government — deputy PM and workplace relations minister Julia Gillard introduced the government’s Fair Work bill into federal parliament. She said the bill would “sweep away” the Howard government’s Work Choices laws and deliver on Labor’s election promises.

By Hamish Chitts

After PM Kevin Rudd’s February 13 official apology to the Stolen Generations, media outlets around the world hailed him as a great humanitarian friend of Aboriginal people. That day’s New York Times reported that “Rudd opened a new chapter in Australia’s tortured relations with its indigenous peoples on Wednesday with a comprehensive and moving apology for past wrongs and a call for bipartisan action to improve the lives of Australia’s Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders.” In his official apology, Rudd spoke of creating a “future where this parliament resolves that the injustices of the past must never, never happen again.”

By Hamish Chitts

Many who voted for the ALP on November 24, 2007, did so thinking that a Rudd Labor government would end Australia’s involvement in the US-led war in Iraq. One year on and the Australian military under PM Kevin Rudd is still an active cog in the US-led imperialism war machine in Iraq.

By Kerry Vernon

In a media release on November 20, Edmund Rice Centre director Phil Glendenning said the response to a November 19 SBS broadcast of the new documentary A Well-Founded Fear had been overwhelming. The documentary, by Anne Delaney, highlighted the centre’s research into the fate of more than 400 asylum seekers deported from Australia. Centre staff tracked down more than 250 returnees in 22 countries whose claims for asylum were rejected by the Howard government. The film, shot in Afghanistan, Syria, Turkey, Iran and Canada, documents the deaths of nine refugees following their return to Afghanistan, although Glendenning believes there could be close to 20 such deaths.

By John Percy

John McCarthy, a Brisbane doctor who in the 1970s played a significant role in the development of the revolutionary socialist movement in Australia, died on November 1 after a long battle with cancer. While in Britain in the 1960s McCarthy joined the International Marxist Group (IMG), the British group supporting the Trotskyist Fourth International (FI). Returning to Brisbane at the end of the 1960s, McCarthy was a key figure in establishing the Labor Action Group (LAG) in 1970, which supported the FI.

By Shua Garfield

The rate of growth in global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions — 3% between 2006 and 2007 — has exceeded the “worst-case scenario” predictions of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the September 26 Los Angeles Times reported. According to Corinne Le Quere, professor of environmental sciences at the University of East Anglia and the British Antarctic Survey, these emissions levels put the world on track for a global average temperature rise of up to 6.1°C over the next century. According to Australian government climate change adviser Ross Garnaut, a rise of this magnitude and speed would result in the extinction of 48-100% of all plant and animal species.

By Hamish Chitts

The global arms industry is a very lucrative way for businesses to profit from death, destruction and oppression. It is estimated that each year 2% of world gross domestic product (GDP), or more than US$1 trillion, is spent on the military. Part of this goes to the procurement of military hardware and services from the arms industry.

By Kathy Newnam

A 400-strong rally was held in Brisbane on November 1 as part of the campaign to free Lex Wotton, an Indigenous community leader from Palm Island, who was found guilty on October 24 of “rioting with destruction” by an all-white jury in Brisbane’s District Court. Wotton was singled out for his participation in the protest on Palm Island that took place following the death in custody on November 19, 2004, of Mulrunji Doomadgee, a 36-year-old Palm Island man, at the hands of Senior Sergeant Chris Hurley. Despite admitting responsibility for the death, Hurley was subsequently acquitted of manslaughter by an all-white jury in Townsville on June 19, 2007.

By Jo Williams

On the afternoon of Friday, October 17, Victoria University vice-chancellor Elizabeth Harman sent an email to all staff describing her “unhappy” decision to proceed with 270 “voluntary and targeted” redundancies. This amounts to a quarter of VU’s academic staff and a further 100 general staff losing their jobs, in what is being described as the single biggest mass sacking at an Australian university. The primary justification offered was that the job cuts were to save money for an $850 million building program. Just who will be left to teach in the new buildings remains unanswered.