1334 August 29 - Communist Party of Australia

The Guardian
August 29
2007
$1.50
The Workers’ Weekly
# 1334
COMMUNIST PARTY OF AUSTRALIA
ISSN 1325-295X
Howard Govt
humiliated over Haneef
Bob Briton
The decision of the Federal Court to quash
the withdrawal of Dr Mohamed Haneef’s
visa is a humiliating and richly deserved
defeat for Immigration Minister Kevin
Andrews and the Howard Government.
The Minister has vowed to appeal Justice
Jeffrey Spender’s ruling right up to the
High Court in a bid to retrieve some of
his tattered reputation. The Minister
will also be seeking to justify the now
widely-questioned police-state powers
granted under the government’s arsenal
of “anti-terror” legislation. The potential
for abuse of those powers has clearly been
demonstrated in the case of Dr Haneef. No
doubt Howard & Co will now head back
to the drawing board to create a public
sense of looming national security threat
in time for the Federal Elections.
Andrews insists his motives for hounding
the former Gold Coast doctor have not been
called into question as a result of the hearing.
Very few agree with him. He also claims to be
even more suspicious of Dr Haneef than when
he was first picked up at Brisbane Airport on
July 2 and detained for 12 days of gruelling
interrogation.
The Minister now says his suspicions are
based on more than the two transcripts of the
police interviews released to the public by
Haneef’s lawyers, though it was the selective use of quotes from these transcripts that
Andrews used to smear the reputation of the
hapless visiting medico in the media.
“There is … a certain piquancy in the
present case. The minister has chosen to give
a selected part of what is said to be protected
information to the public by way of press
release, but has not sought to divulge to the
court any part of the protected information”,
Justice Spender wrote.
The judge criticised the Commonwealth’s
choice of grounds for attempting to ban Dr
Haneef from our shores. The argument under
Section 501 of the Migration Act that Haneef
was of “bad character” because of his “association” with his cousins in the UK was never
going to stand up. Justice Spender suggested
that the Minister would have been better off
arguing that the doctor’s visa should be cancelled because he was a person of interest to
British police and had been charged with an
offence in Australia.
Unfortunately for the Federal Government,
Haneef ceased to be a “person of interest” to
Britain’s Scotland Yard very soon after investigations began into the foiled terror attacks
in Glasgow and London on June 29-30. The
charge against Haneef of recklessly providing
support to a terrorist organisation was dropped
by the Australian Federal Police (AFP) on
July 27. His passport was returned but without
any apology. Among the facts that sunk the
charge were that:
• The SIM card given by Haneef to his
cousin Saleeb Ahmed 12 months earlier
was not found at the scene of the Glasgow
Airport attack
• Saleeb did not appear to have prior
knowledge of the terror attacks
• Haneef had lent the card to his cousin
in order that the could use some credit
remaining – Haneef cancelled the direct
debit facility on the card
• Haneef’s only “connection” to the attacks
was contact with Saleeb, not Kaleeb who
drove the flaming Jeep Cherokee into the
Airport Building
• The “project” referred to in a chat room
exchange with Saleeb was an exercise for
a PhD that Kafeel had been completing at
Cambridge University
• A photo of Haneef with his wife in front of
the Q1 residential tower on the Gold Coast
was indeed a family snap – not part of
preparations for a terror attack
• Haneef tried four times to contact Scotland
Yard to advise them of his travel plans
• The doctor had applied for – and been
granted – leave from the Gold Coast
Hospital to visit his newborn daughter in
India; he clearly was not desperately fleeing
Australian authorities
• Translations of exchanges between the
highly educated cousins in their native
Urdu – including ones deemed “suspicious”
by Andrews – read as if they were
conducted in broken English.
Justice Spender criticized the Government’s grounds
for trying to ban Dr Haneef from Australia
Many in the legal profession have distanced themselves from the heavy handed and
inept moves on the part of the government to
smash the presumption of innocence under
Australian law and to grab total, unaccountable control of national security matters.
Human rights lawyer Greg Barnes told
The Age the case “knocks off the head this
absurd view that a lot of conservative commentators have, that when it comes to matters of national security, the courts ought
to defer to governments”. Justice Spender
himself warned the government that it
The minister has chosen to give a selected part of what is
said to be protected information to the public by way of press
release, but has not sought to divulge to the court any part of
the protected information”, Justice Spender wrote.
2
page
Labor
pomise on
dental health
2
page
3
page
APEC:
Meet, rally
& march!
Gunns:
Cat amongst
the Liberals
4
shouldn’t consider itself above the law on
these questions.
Not all silks agree. Former head of the
Australian Crime Commission, Mr Peter Faris
QC, complained that the latest judgement was
“reached on highly technical grounds and is
highly artificial”. He predicted it would be
overturned on appeal. “It’s not a victory for
anything. Australia must have an absolute
right to determine arbitrarily who it permits
to come into the country and who gets to
stay. We can’t spend all our time litigating the
decision.”
Presumably when using the word
“Australia” in this statement Mr Faris means
the Federal Government.
While the old guard sides with the government and its right to total, arbitrary and
secretive use of its “anti-terror” legislation,
the public has been deeply shocked by the
Haneef case.
The Communist Party of Australia has
joined calls for Andrews’ resignation over
the scandal and supports the call by the parliamentary opposition parties for a judicial
inquest. 
page
Esselte
workers
stand strong
12
page
APEC:
Aims vs.
national
interests
2
The Guardian
August 29
The Guardian
Issue 1334
August 29, 2007
Haneef, Hicks and history
The decision of Justice Jeffrey Spender to declare that the
Federal Government’s action in revoking the working visa
of Dr Mohammed Haneef was wrong and should be restored
is a big defeat for the arbitrariness and vindictiveness of the
Government and PM Howard and Immigration Minister Kevin
Andrews in particular.
It was obvious from the very beginning to a large number
of Australians that the case against Dr Haneef was exceedingly
weak and had more likely been cooked up to continue to justify
the “war of terrorism”.
Federal Police chief Mike Keelty has willingly lent himself
and his office to this contrived episode. At one point he make
critical remarks about the Iraq war but he seems to have been
brought into line by the Government.
As soon as the story about Dr Haneef’s mobile phone sim
card broke the Federal Government and the AFP have been on
the back foot in attempting to justify their outlandish claims.
Their coward’s castle is the appeal to Australian “security”
which does not have to be justified by any evidence. They merely
expect to be taken on trust but that trust is rapidly dissipating.
A consequence will be to undermine future claims about
terrorists but this may impel the Federal Government and its
agencies to stage a major provocation during the APEC summit
conference in early September or when the world is watching
some other major international event being held in Australia.
Those who have been pushing the “war on terrorism” since
the events of 9/11 will stop at nothing to justify their dishonest campaign. After all, it is the whole policy of Bush, Howard,
Blair and their supporters that is at stake and its exposure as a
fraud will have long-term consequences for these governments
and the armament manufacturers and security agencies that
stand behind them and profit from their campaign.
Another very significant aspect of the Haneef affair is that
many among the Australian judiciary are standing up for fundamental legal principles and their obligation to defend them.
The right to innocence until proven guilty is fundamental but it
is this principle that Howard and Andrews violated when they
revoked Dr Haneef’s visa.
There have been other examples of the same stand. One was
the role of members of the judiciary in the David Hicks case.
The Government would like to remove this principle completely as it stands in the way of their dictatorship. All they
would then have to claim is that they acted on secret information and were defending Australia’s security. In effect they are
saying “Trust us”. Many Australians who have witnessed so
many lies from the Howard Government do not trust Howard’s
government any more.
One can reach further back in Australian history. As far back
as 1932 the Lyons Government made an attempt to declare the
Communist Party an “illegal organisation”. The High Court in
December 1932 by a majority of five to one quashed the conviction. Again in 1950 and 1951 when the Menzies Government
adopted legislation to ban the Communist Party the legislation
was overruled by decision of the High Court. Menzies then
went to a referendum on the question, being confident that the
Australian people would vote to ban the Communist Party but, in
perhaps the greatest victory for democratic rights in Australia’s
history, the referendum to ban the Party was defeated.
On every occasion the Party conducted a mass struggle for
its legality and this was a major factor influencing the High
Court to make its decisions.
These examples do not mean that the laws and the Constitution
that the legal profession is obliged to uphold and administer, is
not formulated to protect the interests of private property and
the social and economic system of capitalism. There is no reason
for any illusions about that. But, some democratic rights that
have been won and are now recognised as fundamental within
the legal system, are being upheld by many in the judiciary.
Those who uphold them should be encouraged and supported.
It is of some interest that a struggle by the judiciary in
Pakistan is also standing in the path of President Musharraf
who is attempting to overthrow the Pakistan Constitution that
imposes a separation of the military from civilian government.
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The Real Story of APEC
Dr Mike McKinley, well-known radio commentator on political events and Senior Lecturer in
International Relations and Strategy at the Australian National University, will speak about
the reality behind APEC.
6.30 pm, Friday, 7 September
Greek Community Club Restaurant, 206 Lakemba Street, Lakemba
Cost: $25, includes delicious Greek buffet, after dinner speaker and entertainment
Bookings essential: please ring Denis on 0418 290 663
Organised by Communist Party of Australia Sydney District Committee
Sydney Peoples’ Alternative
Rally & Festival
Hyde Park North
11am-2pm Friday September 7
YES for a nuclear-free, peaceful and
democratic Asia-Pacific!
Fair trade not free trade!
NO TO APEC!
Performances by Men from U.N.C.L.E,
Bolivarian Band and Korean drummers
Organised by All People for Environment & Community:
Anti-Bases Campaing; Australian Fair Trade & Inverment
Network; Australian Services Union;Chilean Socialist Party/
Oceania; Communist Party of Australia; Construction Forestry
and Mining Union; Inner-West Your Rights at Work; Korean
Resource Centre; Maritime Union of Australia (Sydney Branch)
SEARCH Foundation;
Contact: Peter Murphy 0418 312 301, [email protected]
www.StopBush.org
Phone: 0438 297 552
PRESS FUND
The NSW Government is arranging for a maximum number of
prisoners to be transferred from existing Sydney gaols or given
short release passes, in order to make space for the large numbers
of demonstrators who are expected to be arrested during the
September APEC meeting. How ready the Government is to
imprison its fellow citizens in order to please its masters! The Press
Fund really needs your support to maximize our coverage of this
and other important events, so please send in whatever you can for
the next issue (and preferably for the rest of this year’s issues as
well). This week we offer our sincere thanks to our contributors, as
follows:
A Attard $25, V Molina $20, Fred Rouady $20, “Round Figure” $15,
Bob Treasure $100.
This week’s total: $180. Progressive total: $8270.
2007
Sydney APRN Conference
To Oppose Free Trade Agreements: Making People Matter
Asia-Pacific Research Network (APRN) conference hosted by AID/WATCH
The conference coincides with the APEC ministerial meeting.
The workshop is open to the public and you can register for it through AID/WATCH
September 4-6
Sydney Mechanics’ Institute of Arts 280 Pitt Street, Sydney
Cost: Full: $75 for the three days, or $35 per day Concession: $45 for three days or $20 per day
More Info including program and registration: www.aidwatch.org.au/
Or contact: James Goodman, 95142714, [email protected]
The Guardian
August 29
Australia
2007
3
Gunns dispute –
a cat amongst the Liberals
Peter Mac
Last Tuesday the controversy over
Gunns Ltd’s proposal to build a
huge pulp mill in northern Tasmania
erupted within the Liberal Party,
when senior member Geoffrey
Cousins announced he would
campaign in the federal election
against the Minister for the
Environment, Malcolm Turnbull,
over his handling of the issue.
Cousins, a leading businessman, is a close friend of the Prime
Minister, who had him elected to the
Telstra Board before its privatisation. However, Cousins is also an
avid conservationist, which puts him
directly at odds with major sections
of the Howard establishment.
After having recently spent a
weekend with Greens leader Bob
Brown, Cousins described as totally unacceptable the Tasmanian
Government’s scrapping of the official approval process over the mill
proposal, and the tentative approval of the proposal by Turnbull’s
ministry.
Cousins, who combines a frequently aggressive negotiating style
with a very dry wit, bluntly criticised
supporters of the mill from both
sides of Parliament. He dismissed
Turnbull as “the Minister against the
Environment” and Peter Garrett, the
ineffectual Labor spokesperson for
the Environment, as “the Minister
who doesn’t cast a shadow”.
A bit rich!
He was particularly amused at
the statement by Turnbull, said to
be the richest man in parliament,
that he would not be bullied by rich
people about the pulp mill issue.
Concerning his own candidacy
for the seat of Wentworth, which
current opinion polls suggest that
Turnbull will only be returned by
a miniscule margin at the next federal election, Cousins noted with a
smile that “Malcolm Turnbull losing his seat is a very minor issue by
comparison”.
An enraged Turnbull subsequently phoned him and engaged
in a conversation which Cousins
wryly described as “animated”.
Turnbull then phoned Howard to
demand that Cousins be pulled
into line. He has since questioned
whether Cousins should be a member of the Telstra board.
He should have known better than to appeal to the headmaster. Howard would not relish the
prospect of taking on the tenacious Cousins, and in any top-
TASPEC press release:
Tasmanian Aborigines &
Supporters for the Protection
of Environment & Culture
We, a concerned group of Tasmanian
Aboriginal People from the Tamar
Valley Region, including Elders &
supporters endorse the West Tamar
& Flinders Island Council’s motion
of no confidence in the Pulp Mill
assessment process. The process
adopted denies our democratic
right to be heard and consulted.
The proposed Pulp Mill is to be
situated within Leitermarineer
Country on a site of socio-cultural
significance. Our major concerns
include the potential harm to a
land and seascape that nurtures
and supports:
• Plant Material used in fibre art
Pete’s Corner
• Shells for the ancient and
precious art of creating shell
necklaces
• Shellfish
• Oceanic bull kelp fields
• Krill – the food source for Mutton
birds
These are now scarce resources
within a Landscape that has sustained Aboriginal People for thousands of years.
Mutton birding continues to
be an important economic, social
and cultural tradition of Tasmanian
Aborigines.
We continue to have a strong
and robust connection with this land
that is a living testament to the survival of Tasmanian Aboriginal people. Our practices are amongst the
oldest in the world. Can Tasmania
afford to lose these rare and precious practices and resources?
This fast track process does not
only ignore the inherent right of
Aborigines to protect our Cultural
Heritage values, but it says that
Aboriginal values are secondary
to the rights and interests of big
business.
Fiona Newson
Spokesperson
TASPEC
[email protected]
level dispute he tends to take a
non-committal role, to let others
battle it out and then to claim that
he agreed with the winner’s position all along. To date he has merely commented: “Mr Turnbull is an
excellent Minister, and Mr Cousins
is an excellent bloke and director
of Telstra. I don’t have anything
further to say”.
Tasmanians
lose either way
But far more importantly, the
Liberal leadership is in a major
quandary over the Gunns proposal.
On the one hand they are ideologically committed to supporting big
business. And Gunns and the logging industry are very big indeed.
On the other hand, the Liberals face
significant electoral damage within Tasmania and in other electorates (as Cousins is demonstrating),
if Turnbull gives the project the
Ministerial nod.
Moreover, by opposing the project the Howard Government could
score political points against the
Tasmanian ALP regime, which has
broken all the rules in order to give
the mill project the green light, and
against the ALP federal opposition,
which has meekly agreed to it, albeit
with some minor grumbles.
The proposal also faces opposition from the tourism and viniculture
industries, and even from sections
of the timber industry, because the
squandering of vast quantities of
magnificent old growth timber for
woodchips has drastically reduced
the supply of first grade sawn
timber.
And finally, a report from
the Tasmanian Roundtable for
Sustainable Industries has found
that the economic benefits which
Gunns has claimed would flow to
Tasmania from the mill’s operation
could actually result in an economic
loss to the state.
The report found that Gunns
double-counted taxation benefits
to the state, failed to show $847.3
million in subsidies which exceed
the taxation benefit, did not take
into account the economic impact
of the increased risk of respiratory disease within the mill’s locality, and overlooked the opportunity
cost of agricultural land lost in the
mill’s construction. It also ignored
the $693 million risk to the fishing industry, with 700 potential job
losses, and the 1.1 billion risk to
tourism, involving 1044 jobs.
The Greens Tasmanian leader,
Peg Putt commented: “A churlish, dismissive response (to the
report) from Labor or the Liberals
will indicate that they are not interested in the facts and a balanced
view, merely in being Gunns’ cheer
squad”. 
Funding favours
private schools
The Australian Education Union
(AEU) said research released by
the Association of Independent
Schools Victoria last week confirms
the imbalance of federal education
funding, which sees the vast
majority of federal money spent
on private schools.
The research reportedly shows
the Federal Government in fact
spent $937 per public school student
and $4419 per private school
student in 2004/05.
This means that despite the fact
that almost 70 per cent of students
in Australia attend public schools,
the Federal Government has cut the
percentage of money it spends on
public education from 43 per cent to
35 per cent in the last decade”, said
AEU Federal president Pat Byrne
Ms Byrne.
“That is what the Education
Minister Julie Bishop should be
explaining rather than hiding
behind state funding figures in an
attempt to mask the dramatic cut
in the share of money the Federal
Government has allocated to public
schools.”
Ms Byrne said was “simply
ridiculous” to compare the direct
costs of schooling between the
public and private sectors.
“The cost of establishing and
maintaining a high quality public
education system across Australia
is far greater than the costs
associated with running private
schools. Public schools exist in
all communities and educate all
children, irrespective of their
backgrounds.
Public schools across Australia
are presently under funded by
approximately $2.9 billion per year
“Australia needs a federal
government which puts public
schools first; a government which
will prioritise federal funding to
ensure that all public schools are
properly resourced to enable all
students to reach their potential”,
Ms. Byrne said. 
4
The Guardian
August 29
2007
Esselte picket continues
After 10 weeks on strike, the 15
workers employed at Esselte at
Minto in Sydney’s south Western
suburbs have pledged to continue
their picket at the company’s
warehouse, protesting against
individual agreements and
demanding the employer negotiate
a union collective agreement.
The Esselte workers are taking a stand for all workers in
their struggle against the Howard
Government’s Australian Workplace
Agreements. For more than two
years the workers’ union, the
National Union of Workers (NUW),
has been trying to renegotiate an
Enterprise Bargaining Agreement.
The employer, Esselte a US-based
stationary manufacturer and distributor, the second largest in the
world, has refused to negotiate a
collective agreement and has insisted the workers sign AWAs. Under
the AWAs the workers would lose
between $50 and $60 a week.
The Esselte workers have first
hand experience of the bullying
tactics of the Office of Workplace
Relations. A number of them were
removed from the workplace prior
to the strike and intimidated by officials from the OWR in an attempt
to get them to say the union and its
delegate were standing in the way of
them signing AWAs.
Six weeks into the strike, unions
organised a solidarity rally on the
picket line with hundreds of supporters turning out. The employer
used the occasion for a media beat
up, claiming that a unionist in a
balaclava used physical violence
against a truck driver going into
the workplace. The media photo
appeared to be taken away from the
picket line: no one could recollect
any worker wearing a balaclava.
Everything pointed to the employer
setting up a scene to slander the
unionists as thugs.
Several weeks after this incident
workers found a listening device
and the employer admitted to using
electronic surveillance against the
picketers, despite the fact that the
picket line was on public land and
far removed from the company’s
premises.
As well as the picket line,
workers are campaigning at
Oficeworks, the main retail outlet that sells Esselte stationary
products. The workers are asking
Officeworks customers to boycott
Esselte products until the dispute is
resolved and they have a collective
agreement.
The public can support the
Esselte workers campaign by
targeting an Officeworks outlet
in or near your suburb, by
asking people to sign a postcard
committing to boycott Esselte
products.
Moral and financial support is
needed to continue the struggle
to a successful end. You can visit
the picket line at 395 Pembroke
Road Minto between 7am 4pm, Monday to Friday. You can
donate to the Esselte distress
fund care of the National Union
of Workers. 
Fosters’ workers fight on
Fosters’ brewery workers are
angered at the company’s continued
attempts to use the Howard
Government’s unfair and extreme
industrial relations laws to impose
a non-union agreement at its Yatala
site.
Now, thanks to the global federation of brewery workers, the
International Union of Foodworkers
(IUF), brewery workers belonging
to Unite, the UK’s largest brewing union, and the Canadian union,
CAW, are joining with the three
Australian unions at Fosters – the
LHMU, ETU and AMWU – to
demand fair treatment for workers
at Foster’s Yatala Brewery.
Having just won their struggle
for fair wages at a UK Fosters brewing plant, members from Unite (the
UK brewing union) and CAW in
Canada are preparing to support the
Yatala workers.
“We express out deepest solidarity with your campaign”, Mick
Pollek from Unite in the UK has
written to the Queensland brewery
workers. 
Do not allow the bosses to turn
Yatala Brewery into a sweatshop!
22 August 2007
Dear Sisters and Brothers at Foster’s Yatala Brewery,
Fraternal greetings from the Transport & General Workers Union
section of Unite in Great Britain.
The members who work at the Scottish Courage Brewery in Reading,
where they brew Fosters, urge all workers to vote to reject the nonunion agreement proposed by your bosses.
Do not let the management reduce your wages or terms and
conditions.
By voting for the Union you are not only protecting yourselves, but the
jobs for future workers.
Back in 1834 workers were transported from England to Australia for
trying to organise and create a Union. Don’t let this unjust law today
bring back the old days of poverty and low wages.
A national survey of CBD office
cleaners reveals cleaners are having
their hours cut but are still expected
to complete the same amount of
work – and sometimes expected
to do extra work in the shorter
hours.
This is the single biggest
complaint of these low-paid workers, the National Secretary of the
LHMU Cleaners’ Union, Louise
Tarrant, said.
Preliminary analysis of our
survey shows that the majority of
office cleaners are reporting that the
increased workload means they just
do not have enough time to complete the job.
A survey done in July shows
that 54 per cent of office cleaners
are expected to complete their work
in their own time.
“Low-paid CBD cleaners often
work two or more jobs a day to
make ends meet. Part-time cleaners are taking home on average just
$302 a week”, said Ms Tarrant.
The union’s Clean Start: Fair
Deal for Cleaners campaign is
surveying Australian cleaners to
accurately represent them during
talks with property owners and contract cleaners.
“We want to present these survey results at industry forums, so
we can build a new consensus of
improved service standards for our
industry. Office cleaners are being
asked to do more and more work
without increased hours – this is
leading to a crisis in the industry.
We know many property owners now acknowledge the crisis.
Cleaners need more hours to create
secure jobs and improve the service
to property owners.”
Across Australia there have
been reports of work rates varying between 650 square metres per
hour up to a staggering 1000 square
metres per hour.
The average Australian home
in 2005 was 228 square metres; in
comparison cleaners in Australia are
being asked to clean the equivalent
of 11 houses a night
In the United States, meanwhile,
cleaners in unionised buildings are
expected to clean no more than 350
square metres per hour. 
Do not allow the bosses to turn Yatala Brewery in to a sweat shop.
Stand and be counted – support your Union.
Mick Pollek
Regional Industrial Organiser
Reading, Berkshire, England
Redundancy pay:
workers on AWAs miss out
Workers on AWA individual
contracts employed at the South
Burnett Meatworks in Queensland
have missed out on tens of thousands of dollars in redundancy pay
after the plant closed. Workers on
a union collective agreement will
get their full redundancy entitlement, with some employees getting
up to $19,000.
But the collapse of the South
Burnett Meatworks, in Murgon, has
also exposed a major new loophole in the Howard Government’s
WorkChoices IR laws, with redundancy pay not protected by the laws
and not covered by the so-called
“Fairness Test”.
Over time, the lack of protection for redundancy pay in the
WorkChoices IR laws is going to
cause enormous hardship for thousands of working families across
Australia that are affected by factory
closures, company collapses and
corporate restructuring.
11 houses a night!
The unfair situation for workers
on AWAs versus workers on a collective agreement at this meatworks
has exposed a ticking time bomb in
the IR laws that could affect up to a
million Australian workers over the
next five years.
It exposes a gap in the WorkChoices IR laws with no requirement for redundancy pay to be
included in a workplace agreement
and no obligation for employers
under the so-called Fairness Test to
compensate workers for the removal
of redundancy entitlements.
The Federal Government’s
redundancy pay safety net scheme
(GEERS) – introduced after the
collapse of a company owned by
the Prime Minister’s brother, Stan
Howard – also does not cover workers that have signed an AWA individual contract that has no redundancy
pay entitlement.
The average period of unemployment for workers after they
are made redundant is nearly six
months. Statistics show that the
length of redundant workers remain
unemployed increases with age.
Welfare “reforms” the Howard
Government has introduced over
the last 10 years mean that without redundancy pay many of those
workers have nothing to tide them
and their families over until they
can find another job.
There are 230,000 workers that
are made redundant each year and
the increasing use of AWAs that
provide no redundancy entitlement
means more than a million workers
over five years could be affected.
Workers in industries affected by
natural disasters such droughts and
floods like the meat, food processing
and agriculture industry will be badly affected by the lack of redundancy
pay protection, as will employees in
the car industry, clothing, textiles,
mining and other sectors exposed to
downturns in production. 
Sticking it to Hockey
Fifty workers from the Cochlear
ear implant manufacturing facility
stuck giant post-it notes outside
the North Sydney electoral office
of Workplace Relations Minister,
Joe Hockey last week.
The workers were there to ask
him to explain why they don’t have
the right to union representation in
their wage negotiations.
The post-it notes, one of the
emblems of the $30 million taxpayer funded campaign to promote
WorkChoices, said: “Where do we
stand?”
Cochlear is using the Howard
Government’s WorkChoices laws
to refuse the workers union representation at the negotiating table,
telling them they must accept new
workplace contracts by November
6 or not turn up to work on
November 7.
“Cochlear workers are angry
that Joe Hockey is spending millions of tax payer dollars on an
advertising campaign that claims
no workers can be forced to sign
an individual contract”, said Tim
Ayres, NSW branch assistant secretary of the Australian Manufacturing
Workers’ Union (AMWU).
“Yet in his own seat, Cochlear is
using WorkChoices to force workers onto new workplace contracts
against their will.”
Under the new contracts workers could be left up to $80 a week
worse off if they don’t meet new
production targets. The workers
expressed their opposition to the
new contracts in a secret ballot run
by management two months ago,
said Ayres.
Meanwhile, messages of support
for the AMWU Cochlear internet
campaign continue to flood in from
around the world – with over 3,500
protest emails already delivered to
the company.
Messages of support have
been received in Turkish, German,
Norwegian, Spanish, French and
Russian. 
http://cpasa.blogspot.com/
Official blog of the CPA South Australia
News • Audio/video • Downloadable/Podcasts –
Reds Under the Bed news/views/arts/interviews in MP3and 3GP
The Guardian
August 29
Australia
2007
5
Electronic Frontiers Australia
appalled by filtering
Electronic Frontiers Australia
(EFA), an organisation opposed
to censorship, has put out
a statement on the Howard
Government’s intention to force
all Internet Service Providers
(ISPs) in Australia to provide
“fi ltered” Internet connections
upon request.
EFA says this “initiative”
is nothing more than a tiresome
repeat of previously announced
and abandoned policies, and comes
before the government has even
conducted their recently-announced
feasibility study of ISP-level filtering. The government has also failed
to implement their National Filter
Scheme, first announced in June
2006 and aimed at providing free
PC-based filters, and they have now
announced it once again.
The Minister has no credibility
in this matter.
“Internet censorship to ‘save the
children’ has always been a political
‘free kick’ for both sides of politics”,
said EFA Chair Dale Clapperton. “It
seems that in the lead-up to the federal election, the Howard government wants to be seen to be ‘doing
something’ to make the Internet safe
for children.”
“In Internet censorship, everything old is new again. This
announcement is a rehash of a Labor
rehash of a discredited Howard government policy; and when Labor
rehashed it, Senator Coonan rightly
denounced it as being a waste of
money.
“Unfortunately, ISP based filtering will not make the Internet safe
for children, and may even cause
harm in and of itself. If parents are
deceived into believing that a ‘filtered’ Internet service is safe for
children, they will be less likely
to take sensible precautions such
as supervising their children while
they use the Internet.”
Where filtering is necessary,
EFA has always endorsed the use
of filters by the end user, since
they provide at least some level of
control over content, and can be
customised to the particular needs
of each family. ‘Parents need to
ask themselves what criteria will
be used to filter these services”,
Clapperton continued.
“ISP-based filtering is a blunt
instrument, based on the assumption
that one size fits all, the government
knows best, and end users have
absolutely no control over what
material has been censored. Only
parents can decide what content is
appropriate for their children.”
EFA says a requirement to provide filtered services will impose
significant up-front and ongoing
costs on all Australian ISPs. It will
also expose them to legal liability when the filters inevitably fail to
block inappropriate material. These
costs will be passed onto consumers in the form of higher prices for
Internet access.
The proposal would also likely
cause a significant reduction in the
speed of Internet access. “Coming
so soon after the Government
announced its $1 billion project
to improve the speed of regional
broadband access, and at a time
when Telstra and the G9 consortium
are fighting to build a fibre-to-thenode network in built up areas, this
announcement, which threatens to
reduce the speed of Internet access
for all Australians, could not have
come at a worse time.”
“We are also gravely concerned
that this announcement is merely
the thin end of the wedge. Once the
government-mandated infrastructure is in place at all ISPs to supply
this ‘opt-in’ filtering, it is a very
small step to change it to an ‘optout’ system, or even a system where
each and every Internet connection
is censored by the ISP, whether the
customer wants it or not.
“Australians generally are
opposed to excessive government
control, and we believe they will see
through this latest announcement
as little more than a cheap political
stunt”, Clapperton concluded.
Right-wing religious groups
around the world have long campaigned for blanket censorship of
Internet content at an ISP level. 
Tobacco pushers target
teens at youth events
Health groups have accused the
tobacco industry of flying under
the radar to push their addictive
products to young people – and
have called on governments to
ban mobile tobacco selling and
promotional deals with event
organisers.
Health leaders say the industry
has turned increasingly to “below
the line” marketing at events popular with young people – including
music events such as the Big Day
Out - since more conventional
forms of tobacco advertising have
been banned.
Heart Foundation National
Tobacco Spokesperson Maurice
Swanson said: “In the last few
years, tobacco companies have
turned their attention to targeting teenagers at youth events, as
governments have been slow to ban
mobile sellers and sponsorship deals
between the tobacco industry and
event organisers.
“The Big Day Out is just one
of several popular youth events
attended every year by hundreds of
thousands of teenagers – some as
young as 13.
“The reportedly large sums
paid by these tobacco pushers buys
them prime near-stage locations
where they can set up tobacco tents
with smokers’ chairs and attractive
young models to promote their special brand.”
Anne Jones, Chief Executive
of Action on Smoking and Health
(ASH) Australia said: “The tobacco
industry knows that to compensate for the more than 15,000
Australians dying from their
products each year, new smokers
must be recruited – and they’re well
aware that 90 per cent of new smokers are under 18.
“This makes teenagers and
young adults the prime target of
these companies, and they’ve shown
they’ll stop at nothing to recruit
from this market.”
ASH and the Heart Foundation
have called on all Australian governments to end the delays over
banning remaining forms of tobacco
advertising, including:
• mobile and temporary selling of
tobacco products at both indoor
and outdoor events; and
• all forms of tobacco sponsorship,
licensing, marketing and
promotional deals between
tobacco agents and event
organisers. 
Sydney Film Premier
Constructing Fear
The film, Australia’s Secret Industrial Inquisition – Constructing Fear is the story of Australia’s little known industrial watchdog, the Australian
Building and Construction Commission (ABCC). The screening of is part of the alternate forum to the APEC leaders’ forum. The forum will
focus on people’s rights and workers’ rights. Constructing Fear visits all corners of Australia talking to the people who have felt the heavy
hand of the ABCC – like the 107 Perth construction workers now facing individual fines of $28,600 each after a strike over a sacked mate; of
Brodene, crane driver and single mother of three children, who was involved in a stopwork following a “near-miss” accident with a train on a
level-crossing construction site and threatened with jail if she didn’t appear before the ABCC.
Friday 31 August 5.00pm Guthrie Theatre – University of Technology Sydney (UTS)
Design Building (Building 6) Harris Street, Ultimo (near the ABC and the overhead footbridge)
For more info: www.constructingfear.com.au
You’d reckon that the Catholic Church – historically a bastion for gambling – would have foreseen the trouble they’ve
run into in wanting to take over Sydney’s Randwick Racecourse. The organisers of World Youth Day next year came to
an agreement with racecourse management to take over the
course for ten weeks to organise a papal mass. This meant
that Randwick trainers would have had to move 700 horses
that are trained there to other venues, along with expensive fitouts needed at other tracks to accommodate the extra horses.
The trainers jacked up, threatening either to refuse to move or
sue for $50 million for damages. They also pointed out that the
tens of thousands of people who will attend the mass will tear
up the track so badly that it will not be fixed for the spring carnival. This was followed by the church and course management
announcing that they would only takeover the place for three
days, a proposal the Randwick Trainers’ Association President Anthony Cummings called “despicable”. He said, “As we
understand it, it will take seven days to get the track back up
and running. It will take two days to decontaminate the place
and five days to replenish the tracks to be suitable for horses.”
While on the papal visit, the Cardinal of Sydney, George Pell,
has officially thanked John Howard for his government’s support for the event. Not surprising given that Howard has
handed over $35 million tax free to it. In addition, all those
registered to attend from overseas, 200,000 of them, will each
be given a three-month visa, free of government charges.
Malcolm Turnbull, “Minister for Stuffing Up the Environment”,
must surely be aware that his bleating about being challenged
in his Sydney seat of Wentworth by Geoffrey Cousins is ludicrous. “He’s going to use his wealth and influence to force
me out of the seat”, cried the merchant banker, who used his
wealth and influence to unseat the former member of Wentworth, Peter King, in 2004. Cousins is attacking Turnbull for
fast tracking the disastrous legislation to allow the Gunns
timber company to build a pulp mill in an environmentally
sensitive area of northern Tasmania. Wine growers, farmers,
fishermen and other businesses in the area are against the mill.
CAPITALIST HOG OF THE WEEK: is the above mentioned
Geoffrey Cousins. In the face of his action against Turnbull,
it turns out Cousins is a hypocrite. He has property in Crescent Bay on the Tasman Peninsula next to land owned by
millionaire businessman Dick Smith who plans to build a tourism lodge there. Cousins wants to cash in on the project and
has lodged a proposal with Tasman Council to subdivide his
land. The two plan to share an access road. But conservationists say areas set aside for buildings are too close to fragile
sand dunes, and that a track allowing access to Crescent Bay
passes through a highly fragile area. The Parks and Wildlife
Service has lodged similar objections with the Tasman Council.
6
The Guardian
Magazine
August 29
2007
Most of the war crimes were Israe
Jonathan Cook
August 16 marked a year since the end of
hostilities now officially called the Second
Lebanon war by Israelis. A month of
fighting – mostly Israeli aerial bombardment
of Lebanon, and rocket attacks from the
Shia militia Hizbullah on northern Israel
in response – ended with more than 1000
Lebanese civilians and a small but unknown
number of Hizbullah fighters dead, as well
as 119 Israeli soldiers and 43 civilians.
When Israel and the United States realised that Hizbullah could not be bombed into
submission, they pushed a resolution, 1701,
through the United Nations. It placed an
expanded international peacekeeping force,
UNIFIL, in south Lebanon to keep Hizbullah
in check and try to disarm its few thousand
fighters.
But many significant developments since
the war have gone unnoticed, including several that seriously put in question Israel’s
account of what happened last summer. This
is old ground worth revisiting for that reason
alone.
The war began on July 12, when Israel
launched waves of air strikes on Lebanon after
Hizbullah killed three soldiers and captured
two more on the northern border. (A further
five troops were killed by a land mine when
their tank crossed into Lebanon in hot pursuit.) Hizbullah had long been warning that it
would seize soldiers if it had the chance, in an
effort to push Israel into a prisoner exchange.
Israel has been holding a handful of Lebanese
prisoners since it withdrew from its two-decade occupation of south Lebanon in 2000.
The Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert,
who has been widely blamed for the army’s
failure to subdue Hizbullah, appointed the
Winograd Committee to investigate what
went wrong. So far Winograd has been long
on pointing out the country’s military and
political failures and short on explaining
how the mistakes were made or who made
them. Olmert is still in power, even if hugely
unpopular.
In the meantime, there is every indication
that Israel is planning another round of fighting against Hizbullah after it has “learnt the
lessons” from the last war. The new Defence
Minister, Ehud Barak, who was responsible
for the 2000 withdrawal, has made it a priority to develop anti-missile systems such as
“Iron Dome” to neutralise the rocket threat
from Hizbullah, using some of the recently
announced US$30 billion of American military aid.
It has been left to the Israeli media to begin
rewriting the history of last summer. Last
weekend, an editorial in the liberal Ha’aretz
newspaper went so far as to admit that this
was “a war initiated by Israel against a relatively small guerrilla group”. Israel’s supporters, including high-profile defenders like Alan
Dershowitz in the US who claimed that Israel
has been mostly ignored by the international
media.
One of Israel’s main claims during the
war was that it made every effort to protect
Lebanese civilians from its aerial bombardments. The casualty figures suggested otherwise, but increasingly so too does other
evidence.
A shocking aspect of the war was Israel’s
firing of at least a million cluster bombs, old
munitions supplied by the US with a failure
rate as high as 50 per cent, in the last days
of fighting. The tiny bomblets, effectively
small land mines, were left littering south
Lebanon after the UN-brokered ceasefire, and
are reported so far to have killed 30 civilians
and wounded at least another 180. Israeli
commanders have admitted firing 1.2 million
such bomblets, while the UN puts the figure
closer to 3 million.
At the time, it looked suspiciously as if
Israel had taken the brief opportunity before
the war’s end to make south Lebanon – the
heartland of both the country’s Shia population and its militia, Hizbullah – uninhabitable, and to prevent the return of hundreds of
thousands of Shia who had fled Israel’s earlier
bombing campaigns.
Israel’s use of cluster bombs has been
described as a war crime by human rights
organisations. According to the rules set by
Israel’s then chief of staff, Dan Halutz, the
bombs should have been used only in open
and unpopulated areas – although with such a
high failure rate, this would have done little to
prevent later civilian casualties.
After the war, the army ordered an investigation, mainly to placate Washington, which
was concerned at the widely reported fact that
it had supplied the munitions. The findings,
which should have been published months
ago, have yet to be made public.
The delay is not surprising. An initial
report by the army, leaked to the Israeli media,
discovered that the cluster bombs had been
fired into Lebanese population centres in gross
violation of international law. The order was
apparently given by the head of the Northern
Command at the time, Udi Adam. A US State
Department investigation reached a similar
conclusion.
Another claim, one that Israel hoped might
justify the large number of Lebanese civilians
it killed during the war, was that Hizbullah
fighters had been regularly hiding and firing
rockets from among south Lebanon’s civilian
population. Human rights groups found scant
evidence of this, but a senior UN official,
Jan Egeland, offered succour by accusing
Hizbullah of “cowardly blending”.
There were always strong reasons for
suspecting the Israeli claim to be untrue.
Hizbullah had invested much effort in developing an elaborate system of tunnels and
underground bunkers in the countryside,
which Israel knew little about, in which it hid
its rockets and from which fighters attacked
Soldiers at the scene of a bombing near Beirut.
more than 90 per cent – have been located and
Hizbullah weapons discovered there, including rockets and launchers, destroyed.
The Israeli media has noted that the Israeli
army calls these sites “nature reserves”; similarly, the UN has made no mention of finding
urban-based Hizbullah bunkers. Relying on
military sources, Ha’aretz reported last month:
“Most of the rockets fired against Israel during the war last year were launched from the
‘nature reserves’ ”. In short, even Israel is no
longer claiming that Hizbullah was firing its
rockets from among civilians.
According to the UN report, Hizbullah
has moved the rockets out of the underground
bunkers and abandoned its rural launch pads.
Most rockets, it is believed, have gone north
of the Litani River, beyond the range of the
UN monitors. But some, according to the
Israeli army, may have been moved into nearby Shia villages to hide them from the UN.
As a result, Ha’aretz noted that Israeli
commanders had issued a warning to Lebanon
that in future hostilities the army “will not
An initial report by the army, leaked to the Israeli
media, discovered that the cluster bombs had been
fired into Lebanese population centres in gross
violation of international law.
had no choice but to bomb Lebanon, must
have been squirming in their seats.
There are several reasons why Ha’aretz
may have reached this new assessment.
Recent reports have revealed that one of
the main justifications for Hizbullah’s continuing resistance – that Israel failed to withdraw
fully from Lebanese territory in 2000 – is now
supported by the UN. Last month its cartographers quietly admitted that Lebanon is right
in claiming sovereignty over a small fertile
area known as the Shebaa Farms, still occupied by Israel. Israel argues that the territory
is Syrian and will be returned in future peace
talks with Damascus, even though Syria backs
Lebanon’s position. The UN’s admission
Israeli soldiers as they tried to launch a ground
invasion. Also, common sense suggests that
Hizbullah fighters would have been unwilling to put their families, who live in south
Lebanon’s villages, in danger by launching
rockets from among them.
Now Israeli front pages are carrying
reports from Israeli military sources that put
in serious doubt Israel’s claims.
Since the war’s end Hizbullah has apparently relocated most of its rockets to conceal
them from the UN peacekeepers, who have
been carrying out extensive searches of south
Lebanon to disarm Hizbullah under the terms
of Resolution 1701. According to the UNIFIL,
some 33 of these underground bunkers or
hesitate to bomb – and even totally destroy –
urban areas after it gives Lebanese civilians
the chance to flee”. How this would diverge
from Israel’s policy during the war, when
Hizbullah was based in its “nature reserves”
but Lebanese civilians were still bombed in
their towns and villages, was not made clear.
If the Israeli army’s new claims are true
(unlike the old ones), Hizbullah’s movement
of some of its rockets into villages should be
condemned. But not by Israel, whose army
is breaking international law by concealing
its weapons in civilian areas on a far grander
scale.
As a first-hand observer of the fighting
from Israel’s side of the border last year, I
noted on several occasions that Israel had built
many of its permanent military installations,
including weapons factories and army camps,
and set up temporary artillery positions next
to – and in some cases inside – civilian communities in the north of Israel.
Many of those communities are Arab:
Arab citizens constitute about half of the
Galilee’s population. Locating military bases
next to these communities was a particularly
reckless act by the army as Arab towns and
villages lack the public shelters and air raid
warning systems available in Jewish communities. Eighteen of the 43 Israeli civilians killed were Arab – a proportion that
surprised many Israeli Jews, who assumed
that Hizbullah would not want to target Arab
communities.
In many cases it is still not possible to
specify where Hizbullah rockets landed
because Israel’s military censor prevents any
discussion that might identify the location of
a military site. During the war Israel used this
to advantageous effect: for example, it was
widely reported that a Hizbullah rocket fell
close to a hospital but reporters failed to mention that a large army camp was next to it. An
actual strike against the camp could have been
described in the very same terms.
It seems likely that Hizbullah, which had
flown pilotless spy drones over Israel earlier in
the year, similar to Israel’s own aerial spying
missions, knew where many of these military
bases were. The question is, was Hizbullah
trying to hit them or – as most observers
claimed, following Israel’s lead – was it actually more interested in killing civilians.
A full answer may never be possible, as
we cannot know Hizbullah’s intentions – as
opposed to the consequences of its actions –
any more than we can discern Israel’s during
the war.
Human Rights Watch, however, has
argued that, because Hizbullah’s basic rockets
were not precise, every time they were fired
into Israel they were effectively targeted at
civilians. Hizbullah was therefore guilty of
war crimes in using its rockets, whatever the
intention of the launch teams. In other words,
according to this reading of international law,
only Israel had the right to fire missiles and
drop bombs because its military hardware
is more sophisticated – and, of course, more
deadly.
Nonetheless, new evidence suggests
The Guardian
August 29
Magazine
2007
el’s
Brother Bill McKie –
Building the Union at Ford
By Phillip Bonosky
Reviewed by SDP
Bill McKie was from Newcastle England. He
paid a visit to the USA on family business
in 1927 and intended to stay for only a
short while. He went to Detroit the home
of the burgeoning American auto industry
– Ford, Chrysler, General Motors. He was
a competent sheet metal worker and went
to Ford for a job and was amazed to find
several thousand other workers looking
for a job packed into a bull-pen where they
milled around in expectation and hope that
they would be among the chosen ones for
that day. As a skilled sheet-metal worker Bill
was among the lucky ones. They gave him a
badge. He was employed. It was the time of
the T-model Ford and the vast, ever moving
assembly line that Henry Ford claimed was
the answer to capitalism’s problems.
“There’s no union here”
strongly that, whether or not Hizbullah had
the right to use its rockets, it may often have
been trying to hit military targets, even if it
rarely succeeded. The Arab Association for
Human Rights, based in Nazareth, has been
compiling a report on the Hizbullah rocket
strikes against Arab communities in the north
since last summer. It is not sure whether it will
ever be able to publish its findings because of
the military censorship laws.
But the information currently available
makes for interesting reading. The Association
has looked at northern Arab communities hit
by Hizbullah rockets, often repeatedly, and
found that in every case there was at least one
military base or artillery battery placed next
to, or in a few cases inside, the community.
In some communities there were several such
sites.
This does not prove that Hizbullah wanted
only to hit military bases, of course. But
it does indicate that in some cases it was
clearly trying to, even if it lacked the technical resources to be sure of doing so. It also
suggests that, in terms of international law,
Hizbullah behaved no worse, and probably far
better, than Israel during the war.
The evidence so far indicates that Israel:
• established legitimate grounds for
Hizbullah’s attack on the border post by
refusing to withdraw from the Lebanese
territory of the Shebaa Farms in 2000;
• initiated a war of aggression by refusing
to engage in talks about a prisoner swap
offered by Hizbullah;
• committed a grave war crime by
intentionally using cluster bombs against
south Lebanon’s civilians;
• repeatedly hit Lebanese communities,
killing many civilians, even though the
evidence is that no Hizbullah fighters were
to be found there;
• and put its own civilians, especially Arab
civilians, in great danger by making their
communities targets for Hizbullah attacks
and failing to protect them.
It is clear that during the Second Lebanon
war Israel committed the most serious war
crimes.
Jonathan Cook is a journalist based in
Nazareth, Israel, and the author of Blood
and Religion: The Unmasking of the
Jewish and Democratic State.
His website is www.jkcook.net
Information Clearing House 
7
One of his first questions after having
been introduced to a fellow worker was “What
sort of a union do you have here?” The answer
came swiftly – “none” and there was fear in
the comment: “There’s no union here”. The
foreman soon heard about his enquiry and
told Bill “you had better close your mouth
shut about that if you want to keep your job”.
It had been Henry Ford’s boast that he would
never have a union in Ford.
This was a challenge to Bill – to organise.
But where does one start with a totally unorganised workforce of 60,000, regimented by
fear of losing their jobs, with a plant riddled
with spies and purposely employed criminals
to enforce Ford’s every will and to report the
conversations of every worker?
All the employer tricks to keep workers
divided were used – white against Negro*,
pay differentials, ethnic group against ethnic
group. There was to be no talking on the line
– one worker was even sacked for smiling!
As one shift replaced another, the incoming
workers were lined up behind the earlier shift
and as the siren went they stepped forward and
took over without the loss of a single motion.
The line never stopped!
This was Ford production in 1927!
Only a madman would believe that this
industrial Goliath covering 12,000 acres and
employing 60,000 workers who had been so
cowed into silence and so afraid as not to lift
their heads could be unionised.
But Bill McKie was motivated by an
unshakable belief that among those 60,000
workers there must be others with union ideas,
that sooner or later the conflict between workers and management would break forth and
that the seemingly unassailable walls constructed by Ford would come tumbling down.
He understood the social laws that were at
play and the inevitability of the class struggle
building its strength.
Far from turning his back on this huge
task Bill McKie started to organise and within
12 years Ford workers were out on strike and
won their first negotiated agreement.
investments constituted the town. They took
no chances and controlled both major parties
(Democrat and Republican) … In company
towns there is no pretense of political choice
… Ford ruled openly with the job to be used
either as a reward or a threat.
“A curfew for Negroes was enforced in
the city, and any Negro caught out on the
streets after nine o’clock was beaten and
thrown in jail.
Deal. The working class was stirring. There
were stormy days ahead. It was time for Bill
McKie with all his accumulated knowledge
and experience to join more closely with those
who had fought in the struggle side by side
with him and had proven by their commitment and actions that they were not among the
opportunists.
Fear!
For Bill, however, it was logical that he
should join the Communist Party of the USA.
“How shall the workers win their freedom”,
he asked. “Who creates all the wealth and
who takes it?” He had learned through direct
struggle, not merely through observation and
study. He had heard all the theories claiming
that American capitalism was exceptional, different, unique and atypical and seen them go
up in smoke. He had concluded that American
capitalism was more typical, more brutal,
more rapacious … as it ate up other economies and countries, it grew fat. It cast a big
shadow, but it looked stronger than it was.
But it was this same capitalism that
made Bill McKie what he was and made
the American working class what it is. The
workers and farmers had fought with ferocity
against the banks and capitalists, giving up
their lives many times over in the struggle.
It was April 2, 1941. It was 5.30 am yet a
great army of men crowded the street. “The
plant’s shut down”, yelled Bill. Ford was out
– shut tight. The gates were welded. Nobody
could get through them in or out. It was a
closed shop! The workforce now numbered
80,000. It was a marvelously organised strike
and Henry Ford was forced to negotiate his
first union agreement 11 days later.
The workers sang:
Solidarity forever,
for the union makes us strong!
Brother Bill McKie – Building the Union at
Ford is available from SPA Books
“So they lived in Fear. Fear walked with a
man to work, crouched on his shoulders in the
shops, rode home with him again to his ghetto
at night”.
It is the same mentality as in today’s corporate world of globalisation – from company
town, to company nation to a corporate world
– and the weapons are similar – split and
divide the working class using the race card,
pay more to some and less to others, destroy
all trade union organisation and rights (today’s
IR legislation), use the fear of unemployment,
control the major political parties, use the
police and military forces against any action
taken by workers, infiltrate spies and police
agents into the ranks of the trade union movement and working class political organisations
and, when all else fails, use military force or
threaten military force against other nations
(the so-called failed states for example).
One of those Bill McKie and other dedicated trade unionists came up against was the
well-known Walter Reuther who eventually
became described as a “labour statesman” by
the bourgeois media. He commenced as a
militant having visited the Soviet Union and
saw the achievements of the Russian workers and the Communist Party of the Soviet
Union in the 1920s. While Bill McKie worked
with him he early on displayed the opportunist tendencies that eventually landed him in
the ranks of the right-wing of the American
labour movement.
It was 1935. Hitler had come to power in
Germany. Roosevelt had become President
of the United States and introduced the New
An amazing feat
This amazing feat in recounted in Phillilp
Bonosky’s book Brother Bill McKie – Building
the Union at Ford.
The book is a veritable treasure trove of
working class wisdom, of persistence and
dedication, of detailed planning, of tactics, of
underground work as well as legal processes,
of Negro and white together.
The idea was spread by Ford that he was
employing Negroes at a time when such a
step was the exception. Thousands of Negroes
came to Detroit on hearing the news. But Ford
had his own purposes – precisely to play off
one against the other in his plants.
Detroit at the time was a one industry
town. “To keep the mass of workers under
control, the political machinery had to be completely in the hands of those whose property
Henry Ford (1919)
Joining the Communist Party
74 Buckingham St, Surry Hills, NSW 2010
at $16 plus $2.50 postage and packing.
*Bonosky uses “Negro”, the accepted word
for referring to Africans at the time. 
8
The Guardian
International
August 29
2007
Hiroshima Peace Declaration 2007
For a nuclear-weapon-free world
Hiroshima Mayor Tadatoshi Akiba gave this speech on the
morning of August 6, the 62nd anniversary of the world’s
first nuclear attack. It was translated by the Mainichi,
Japan, Daily News.
That fateful summer, 8:15. The roar
of a B-29 breaks the morning calm.
A parachute opens in the blue sky.
Then suddenly, a flash, an enormous
blast – silence – hell on Earth.
The eyes of young girls watching the parachute were melted. Their
faces became giant charred blisters.
The skin of people seeking help
dangled from their fingernails. Their
hair stood on end. Their clothes were
ripped to shreds. People trapped in
houses toppled by the blast were
burned alive. Others died when their
eyeballs and internal organs burst
from their bodies – Hiroshima was
a hell where those who somehow
survived envied the dead.
Within the year, 140,000 had
died. Many who escaped death initially are still suffering from leukemia, thyroid cancer and a vast array
of other afflictions.
But there was more. Sneered at
for their keloid scars, discriminated
against in employment and marriage,
unable to find understanding for profound emotional wounds, survivors
suffered and struggled day after day,
questioning the meaning of life.
And yet, the message born of
that agony is a beam of light now
shining the way for the human family. To ensure that “no one else ever
suffers as we did” the Hibakusha
[atom bomb survivors] have continuously spoken of experiences they
would rather forget, and we must
never forget their accomplishments
in preventing a third use of nuclear
weapons.
Despite their best efforts,
vast arsenals of nuclear weapons
remain in high states of readiness
– deployed or easily available.
Proliferation is gaining momentum,
and the human family still faces the
peril of extinction. This is because
a handful of old-fashioned leaders,
clinging to an early 20th century
worldview in thrall to the rule of
brute strength, are rejecting global
democracy, turning their backs on
the reality of the atomic bombings
and the message of the Hibakusha.
However, here in the 21st century the time has come when these
problems can actually be solved
through the power of the people.
Former colonies have become independent. Democratic governments
have taken root. Learning the lessons of history, people have created international rules prohibiting
attacks on noncombatants and the
use of inhumane weapons. They
have worked hard to make the
United Nations an instrument for
the resolution of international disputes. And now city governments,
entities that have always walked
with and shared in the tragedy and
pain of their citizens, are rising up.
In the light of human wisdom, they
are leveraging the voices of their
citizens to lift international politics.
Because “cities suffer most from
war,” Mayors for Peace, with 1,698
city members around the world, is
actively campaigning to eliminate
all nuclear weapons by 2020.
In Hiroshima, we are continuing our effort to communicate the
A-bomb experience by holding
A-bomb exhibitions in 101 cities
in the US and facilitating establishment of Hiroshima-Nagasaki Peace
Study courses in universities around
the world. American mayors have
taken the lead in our Cities Are
Not Targets project. Mayors in the
Czech Republic are opposing the
deployment of a missile defense
system. The mayor of GuernicaLumo [Spain] is calling for a
resurgence of morality in international politics. The mayor of Ypres
is providing an international secretariat for Mayors for Peace, while
other Belgian mayors are contributing funds, and many more mayors
around the world are working with
their citizens on pioneering initiatives. In October this year, at the
World Congress of United Cities
and Local Governments, which represents the majority of our planet’s
population, cities will express the
will of humanity as we call for the
elimination of nuclear weapons.
The government of Japan, the
world’s only A-bombed nation, is
duty-bound to humbly learn the philosophy of the Hibakusha along
with the facts of the atomic bombings and to spread this knowledge
through the world. At the same time,
to abide by international law and
fulfill its good-faith obligation to
press for nuclear weapons abolition,
the Japanese government should
take pride in and protect, as is, the
Peace Constitution, while clearly
saying “No” to obsolete and mistaken US policies.
We further demand, on behalf
of the Hibakusha, whose average
age now exceeds 74, improved and
appropriate assistance, to be extended also to those living overseas or
exposed in “black rain areas”.
Sixty-two years after the atomic
bombing, we offer today our heartfelt prayers for the peaceful repose
of all its victims and of Iccho Itoh,
the mayor of Nagasaki shot down
on his way toward nuclear weapons
abolition. Let us pledge here and
now to take all actions required to
bequeath to future generations a
nuclear-weapon-free world. 
Saudi Arabia
Domestic workers murdered
The killing of two Indonesian
domestic workers by their employers
in Saudi Arabia highlights the Saudi
government’s ongoing failure to
hold employers accountable for
serious abuses. The brutal beatings
by these employers also left two
other Indonesian domestic workers
critically injured.
Seven members of a Saudi
family who employed the four
Indonesian women as domestic
workers beat them in early August
after accusing them of practicing
“black magic” on the family’s teenage son. Siti Tarwiyah Slamet, 32,
and Susmiyati Abdul Fulan, 28, died
from their injuries. Ruminih Surtim,
25, and Tari Tarsim, 27, are receiving treatment in the Intensive Care
Unit of Riyadh Medical Complex.
Saudi authorities have detained the
employers.
Approximately 2 million
women from Indonesia, Sri Lanka,
the Philippines and other countries
are employed as domestic workers
in Saudi Arabia. They are routinely
underpaid, overworked, confined to
the workplace, or subject to verbal,
physical, and sexual abuse. Despite
being victims of abuse themselves,
many domestic workers are subject
to counter accusations, including
theft, adultery or fornication in
cases of rape or witchcraft.
Sri Lankan domestic workers
were sentenced to prison and whipping in Saudi Arabia after their
employers had raped and impregnated them. Three months ago,
an Indonesian domestic worker in
al-Qasim province was sentenced to
10 years in prison and 2000 lashes
for witchcraft, a reduction from
an original sentence of death. The
Indonesian embassy did not learn
about the arrest, detention or trial of
the worker until one month after the
sentencing.
Whether as victims or defendants, foreigners confront several
serious problems in getting a fair
investigation or trial in Saudi
Arabia’s criminal justice system.
Many migrant workers do not have
access to interpreters, legal aid or
basic information about their cases.
The Saudi government often takes
months or years to inform foreign
missions if their nationals have been
arrested or hospitalised, preventing
them from extending badly needed
assistance.
Cases often drag on for years.
Nour Miyati, an Indonesian domestic worker, sustained serious injuries
and lost her fingers due to gangrene
in 2005 after her employer locked
her up, physically and verbally
abused her and deprived her of
food. She then faced a countercharge of making false accusations
against her employer, and was sentenced to 79 lashes. A court subsequently overturned that conviction
and sentence, but she still awaits a
final monetary settlement from her
employer and the ability to return
home to Indonesia after her ordeal.
A recent reform allowing the
Ministry of Labour to waive this
requirement if the employer fails to
pay three months of wages is insufficient to resolve these problems.
Saudi authorities and embassies
of domestic workers’ home countries
receive thousands of complaints of
labour exploitation or abuse each
year. Many more cases are likely
unreported, given domestic workers’
isolation in private homes, employers’ ability to summarily have workers deported, and migrants’ lack of
information about their rights.
The Indonesian embassy alone
currently has 300 women in its
shelter, predominantly domestic
workers complaining of abuse by
employers and recruitment agents.
In July, the shelter housed 500
women. 
An infant is held in the arms of its father – many who escaped death
initially are still suffering from leukemia, thyroid cancer and a vast array
of other afflictions.
Asia Roundup
VIETNAM: Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung has urged relevant agencies of Vietnam and Venezuela to be more active
to deliver on bilateral co-operation projects, particularly in oil
and gas exploitation. The government leader made the call
while receiving the newly accredited Venezuelan Ambassador to Vietnam, Jorge Rondon Uzcategui, in Hanoi on August
24. “Vietnam is keen to co-operate with Venezuela in industry, agriculture and aquaculture,” he said. PM Dung singled out
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez’s visit to Vietnam last year
and Party General Secretary Nong Duc Manh’s trip to Venezuela in May, 2007, as important milestones in further promoting
relations between the two nations. Ambassador Jorge Rondon Uzcategui said that co-operation projects in oil and gas
exploration have proven to be a solid foundation to expand
co-operative ties to other areas. The diplomat said Venezuela
President Hugo Chavez has been keen on Vietnam’s development and is eager to visit the Southeast Asian country again.
CHINA: More rural Chinese are to benefit from the basic living allowance system currently available to poverty-stricken
urban-dwellers as it will be fully extended to cover an extra 10
million needy rural people by the end of this year. The amount
of subsidies given by government varied in different areas according to their economic situations, but the basic requirement
is to provide food and clothing for needy peoples both in urban
and rural areas. Most of the funding comes from local governments, and the central government allocated funds to support
the system. “This year the central government has allocated
3 billion yuan (AU$500 million) for rural areas, but most of the
funds go to the relatively backward central and western regions. I believe, with China’s social and economic progress,
the basic living subsidy for needy people in rural areas will be
raised”, Li said, noting the average basic subsidy given by government per rural beneficiary was ¥28 (AU$4.50). “The ¥28 is
not a huge amount of money, but it has different values to different people”. He said the allowance in rural areas was less
than in urban areas because living costs in urban areas were
higher. Under the system, the average basic living cost in urban
areas nationwide is ¥170 per person per month and the average basic living cost in rural areas is ¥71. The subsidy equals
the basic living cost minus the individual’s average income.
The Guardian
August 29
International
2007
9
African unions urged to unite
The International Transport
Workers’ Federation (ITF) has
urged unions across Africa to
form a united front or risk defeat
in the face of regional and global
challenges.
The message was delivered
by Joseph Katende, ITF African
Regional Secretary, at the official
opening of the ITF West Africa
sub-regional workshop on the
implementation of the organising
globally strategy in Lagos, Nigeria
on August 8-9. Forty-four participants, representing both the English
and French-speaking West African
affiliates took part; they agreed to
jointly fund the event.
Two executive board members
from ITF Africa, Onikolease Irabor
and Halima Ibrahim, also attended and assisted in the discussions,
while Emmanuel Mensah, the West
Africa sub-regional chairperson,
chaired the event.
During his presentation, Katende
warned of the “chain of negative
developments at the global and at
the regional level” – including corruption, toxic waste dumping and
the plundering of natural resources
– that had wreaked havoc on transport trade unions.
“The only viable option in the
midst of those threats is to plan
properly for sustainable change
both in terms of the nature of work
and the methods to adopt towards a
more sophisticated coordination at
all levels”, said Katende.
Highlighting the “multiplicity
of unions under one employer”,
Katende warned: “The fragmentation, which has now intensified
has not done the workers any good
and is eloquent testimony of individualism rather than collectivism
on which trade unionism must be
founded.”
The situation could be overcome,
he said through “well-negotiated
trade union mergers in order to
give workers the chance to unite
and work for their freedom and
progress”.
He also called on unions to
take up the challenge of organising
globally, stating: “By adopting the
‘organising globally’ theme, the ITF
affiliates aim to fix those disturbing problems. ‘Organising’ literally
means ‘putting things in working
order’. ‘Globally’ means that the
global changes, good or bad, must be
taken into account as workers organise for recovery and progress.” 
CARE assails US food program
The charity organisation CARE has
announced that after 2009 it will
no longer accept US-donated food
aid to Africa. The announcement
has caused a stir among food aid
agencies and spotlighted a festering
controversy, especially in recipient
countries.
According to CARE and other
aid organisations, the US government – provider of half the world’s
donated food – should send money
to African nations to buy food from
local farmers, thereby supporting
the development of those countries’
agricultural skills, production and
marketing capabilities.
Instead the US government
buys surplus corn and other products from big US farmers – agribusinesses – already well off from
federal subsidies on top of their
sales receipts. This food is shipped
overseas at inflated prices in US
ships and donated to aid agencies,
who sell it abroad to raise funds
to pay for their programs. In the
process, says CARE, they undercut
local producers.
The US, accused by critics of
subservience to agribusiness interests, has refused to follow the lead
of Canada, Australia and European
countries in sending needy developing nations cash instead of food.
In May 2006, Eritrea stunned the
food-donating community by locking its door to donated food stocks.
The Eritrean government of Isaias
Afewerki indicated that 10 years
of dependency and paralysis of the
country’s own productive capacities were enough, and cash assistance would be a much preferred
alternative.
In Malawi, World Food
Program officials estimate that the
yearly cost, including overhead
expenses, of buying 8,800 tonnes
of US products used in a “corn
soybean blend” for food for school
children amounts to about US$737
per tonne. By contrast, the cost of
corn bought from Malawi farmers,
who had unsold surpluses on their
hands last year, would have been
US$280 per ton. The upshot is that
if US monetary aid had been available in place of food, the program
could have fed over twice as many
children.
An article in the UK Observer
on May 27 headlined “How
America is betraying the hungry children of Africa” quotes
Malawian food security analyst
Charles Rethman about the US food
program: “It’s very short-sighted –
it doesn’t make any sense. It’s going
to short-circuit the effort to improve
nutrition here, it undermines farmers, households. It’s not sustainable
and it won’t bring about any longterm change to malnutrition rates.”
A front-page New York Times
story on August 16 cited former
President Jimmy Carter’s opinion
that “it was a flawed system that had
survived partly because the charities that received money defended
it”. He was speaking for the Carter
Centre, which donates money to
African farmers to improve their
productive capabilities.
Faith-based charity World
Vision and 14 other groups protested CARE’s action, claiming “the
system works”, according to the
Times.
But other large charity groups,
including Catholic Relief Services
and Save the Children, and the
Government Accountability Office
agreed with CARE that the US
food donation system is inefficient.
However, the Times reported, “they
will not stop converting American
food into money unless Congress
replaces the lost revenues with
cash”.
That is an unlikely prospect in
view of the money-fuelled relationship between well-fed congresspersons and agribusiness power.
People’s Weekly World 
Long hours for civil servants
Almost half of British public
servants are being forced to work
over and above their contracted
hours, including five percent who
were working more than 49 hours
per week.
Over 1,700 civil servants took
part in the survey conducted by the
Centre for Industrial Relations at
Keele University in conjunction
with the Public and Commercial
Services Union (PCS).
The 24/7 Report supports the
union’s claim that workloads are
increasing as the Government
ploughs ahead with 84,000 civil
and public service job cuts which
is damaging the delivery of public
services.
Other key findings include:
• Half of all those working
additional hours do so in order
to keep control of their excessive
workloads. This compares to
a third in the private sector
delivering civil service contracts.
• Nearly 40 per cent had attended
work when ill to keep up with
workloads.
• More than half are experiencing
difficulties balancing work and
family/private life.
• Staff working in the private sector
delivering civil service contracts
are considerably less likely to
have work-life balance polices
available in their workplace.
• One sixth had cut their holidays
short and one third weren’t
able to take their full holiday
allowance.
The union is currently in the process of consulting with its 280,000
civil and public service members on
what forms future industrial action
could take as it looks to escalate the
national civil service wide dispute.
The dispute with the Government and civil service management has already seen two one-day
civil service wide strikes this year,
involving up to 200,000 civil and
public servants.
The survey, conducted by
researchers at the Centre for
Industrial Relations, Keele
University, was a national internet
based survey.
PCS general secretary Mark
Serwotka said: “This report clearly
illustrates that the government’s
drive to slash jobs is leading to
increasing workloads and embedding a long-hours culture in civil
and public services.
“With fewer people to do the
same amount work, staff are under
increasing pressure leading to corners being cut, which in turn damages the quality of service delivery.
Unions accused the government
of double standards as it went about
promoting “work-life balance” policies, when over half those surveyed
experienced difficulty in balancing
their work and family/private life.
Excessive workloads resulting
from job cuts and pay cuts in real
terms are all hitting the morale of
dedicated staff committed to delivering first rate service.
“The Government as a responsible employer needs to wake up to
the fact that decent public services
need enough people with enough
resources to deliver them”, said Mr
Serwotka.
New Worker, weekly paper of
the New Communist Party of
Britain 
The calls
from African
leaders for greater
continental unity
and resistance to
neo-colonialism
are growing
ever louder.
Global briefs
MAYANMAR: The International Committee of the Red Cross
(ICRC) issued a report recently criticising the military government of Myanmar (Burma) for abusing civilians and
detainees and violating international humanitarian laws.
“The exceptional step of making its concerns public” was
necessary, according to an ICRC spokesperson, because
Myanmar has ignored recommendations and blocked humanitarian access to detainees. Tuberculosis and malaria are
rampant, 25,000 new cases of HIV/AIDS appear annually, and
one-third of the children are malnourished. Health care consumes three percent of the nation’s budget and education
10 percent, while the military takes 40 percent, the Lancet
medical journal reports. Every year 106 of every 1000 children age five or younger die. In conflict situations, the army
often detains and kills medical workers, the report charges.
IRAQ: Iraqi trade unions have announced they will hold the
founding congress of the General Federation of Iraqi Workers (GFIW), which unites the three major Iraqi national trade
union centres, next month in Baghdad. In preparation, the
GFIW held a series of public seminars for unions in Baghdad
in July, which included discussions with heads of union committees on issues such as pay and working conditions, and
labour and social welfare codes. The decision to hold the
congress in the capital is itself an act of defiance and bravery. Many Iraqi trade unionists have lost their lives in recent
years. Today, the unions are battling the revival of Saddam
Hussein’s anti-union laws. At their congress, they aim to
create Iraq’s first democratic national trade union movement to address the burning economic and social issues
facing the country. GFIW international representative Abdullah
Muhsin has urged unions around the world to send messages of greeting to the congress. For more information go to
www.iraqitradeunions.org/en. Messages of support from Australian
unions should be sent to [email protected].
SOUTH AFRICA: Critical of African silence toward US plans for
AFRICOM, the new US military command structure for Africa,
Blade Nzimande, General Secretary of the South African Communist Party, issued a statement on August 14 calling upon
progressives to study, discuss and oppose the “brazenly unilateralist” project. AFRICOM, he suggested, is emblematic of US
militarisation of its foreign policies and a trend toward merging
development assistance and imperial strategies. AFRICOM
represents colonial intrusion into African multilateral initiatives,
in his view. Nzimande dismissed Senate testimony on August 1
by Assistant Defence Secretary Theresa Whelan justifying AFRICOM on grounds of efficiency. More relevant, he asserted, is
a 2006 State Department report on “National Security Strategy”
that “positions the US as the custodian of human civilization”.
SWEDEN: At the 17th World Water Week held on August 1218 in Stockholm, United Nations official Anna Tibaijuka told
an assembly of 2500 water experts from 140 countries that
“water is going to be the dominant world issue far into the current century” and the “social stability of the world” is at stake.
The UN reports that 1 billion people lack drinkable water and
2 billion lack sanitation facilities. Presently 20 percent of the
world’s population in 30 countries faces water shortages.
10
The Guardian
August 29
Letters to the Editor
The Guardian
74 Buckingham Street
Surry Hills NSW 2010
email: [email protected]
Whither the
Democrats?
I’ll miss them. For two decades they
stood as a force to be reckoned with
in Parliament. It’s kind of like that
article you had on the Japanese
Communist Party a few weeks
back: “The only reliable party”.
The Democrats were the only true
opposition to the two-faced coin of
the Labor/Liberal duopoly.
Now they’ve all dropped out
of sight – no-one seeks comment
from them, no mention of them
in the daily press, no image of the
once (and perhaps still) formidable Natsha Stott-Despoja grace
our television screens.
Who’s their parliamentary
leader? Buggered if I know.
How many Senators do they
have left? Not sure on that either.
Three maybe?
And whoever is left has no
doubt spent a long night in front
of a stack of paperwork and a calculator trying to determine how
much parliamentary pension they
will receive when they lose their
job after the next federal election.
I’m almost tempted to say:
“poor buggers”.
Unfortunately I can’t. The rot
that took hold in the late 90s was
left to fester.
Things were looking great.
Janine Haines had taken the Party
to great heights and even came
within a whisper of taking a seat
in the lower house.
Then came Cheryl Kernot.
Great public image, but helped
Howard pass his first package of
industrial relations “reforms”.
Cheryl then defected to the ALP.
Hmmm – not sure what whom that
says more about: Cheryl with her
unfettered political ambitions?
The Democrat Party for somehow
electing someone like that as leader in the first place? Or perhaps the
ALP, who accepted a Senator who
had just moments before voted for
a measure to which their Party was
opposed?
Then Meg Lees. GST. The
most regressive tax implemented
in Australia since Federation, the
one that John Howard promised
was dead, the one that Australians
clearly didn’t want – Meg gave us.
The public turned hostile
towards the Party, her own Party
membership turned hostile towards
her, so she spat the dummy and
stood down.
However, as sexist as this term
may be it can often be used well
to illustrate a point: “Hell hath no
fury like a women scorned”.
Natasha Stott-Despoja. Bright,
articulate, eminently likeable and
publicly adored, was tormented by
Meg and her “gang of four” to the
point where there was no point in
continuing her valiant attempt to
bring them back from the cold.
Culture
Life
by
&
Rob Gowland
It’s the Communist
bogeyman, again
Guardian readers as a group tend to be
atheists and rationalists, confidently basing
their thinking on science, secure in the
knowledge that although science does not
know everything (and presumably never
will, because the things to know are infinite),
nevertheless all things are knowable.
The prospects before us, like the boundaries of the human mind, are indeed limitless.
It is sometimes salutatory, therefore, to
come upon the outpourings of those poor
benighted people to whom the world is a truly
scary place. I refer, of course, to the religious
fundamentalists, especially the various flavours of evangelical Christians who see nothing inhumane about condemning the rest of
humanity to being burned alive in hellfire for
all eternity.
However, as Michael Moore showed in
his polemical Bowling For Columbine, it’s not
only evangelical Christians who live in fear in
the US: it’s the bulk of the population.
They are prey to a multitude of fears: fear
of foreigners, fear of strangers. Kids go to
school armed for fear of gangs or other kids
with knives or even guns.
Knocking on the door of a strange house
can get you shot as a “home invader”. They
are constantly terrorized by scare stories about
terrorism and reminders that Communists
want to take away their freedoms.
Some of their fears are very real: the fear
of losing your job and with it your house; the
fear of being hospitalized and saddled with a
crippling debt as a result.
They are human and some at least have
disposable income so they travel abroad. But
they do so in terror of not finding “American
2007
Having done her dirty dead
Meg then resigned anyway.
Which almost brings us to
now.
After all the damage they
had inflicted upon the Australian
people and themselves, at the last
election they committed one last
great act of political bastardry:
In Victoria they did a preference deal with Family First in
order to keep the Greens from
winning the seat. The ultimate
case of sour grapes.
(Note: the ALP and Liberals
also performed similar deals there
and elsewhere in Australia – which
just goes to show that the Party
can well be judged under the old
adage “by the company you keep”.
Howard, with the “independent-but-National Party nonetheless” Barnaby Joyce, and Steve
Fielding – the Family First stooge
– then gained full control of the
Senate.
Now they’re gone. They’ve
lost any scrap of respect that anyone at all may have had for them.
Their membership either defected
to the Greens or became disillusioned and dropped out of political
activity altogether.
On June 30 next year they will
vacate their seats for the last time.
Every single one of them. They
will then exit the building, no
doubt through a back entrance and
one of the most interesting chapters of late 20th-century politics
will draw to a close.
“Not with a bang but a
whimper.”
Mark Ovistroli
Lidcombe, NSW
food” or, even worse, not finding bottled
water.
I once came to the aid of a very polite
middle-aged American couple in the Rossiya
Hotel in Moscow who were in great distress:
it had been drilled into them by their tour
organizers that they must not drink the water
anywhere they went. But Soviet hotels did not
sell bottled water.
They did not sell it because excellent
drinking water was supplied out of the tap, and
bottling it for sale would have been immoral.
The two Americans took some convincing that
the tap water was safe: (they only came round
after I assured them that I had been drinking
it for two weeks with no ill effects, and as an
Australian I was not really a foreigner so I
could be trusted!)
So to some extent it is not surprising that
so many paranoid Christian fundamentalists
seek comfort in the simple device of dividing
the world into, on the one hand, a relatively
small number of people who believe as they
do (and hence have already been “saved” and
will go to a better place by and by) and, on
the other hand, the bulk of the global population, the swarthy hoards who will not be saved
(including you and me).
As we know, under capitalism the ruling class encourages that state of fear, for
widespread fear – either of specific things or
simply generalized – makes it so much easier
to divert people’s attention from the otherwise
glaring problems inherent in capitalism itself.
A state of fear also encourages something
else the ruling class favours and which we can
see plenty of at present: militarism. Not since
the outbreak of the Great War in 1914 has the
world seen such a welter of carefully orchestrated “patriotism”.
Anyone not supporting the war was
attacked then as an “anarchist” or a
“Bolshevik” and denounced as essentially a
traitor and a coward. Today, opponents of the
war on Iraq are identified in innumerable US
websites as “nut-heads” and, of course, the
ultimate pejorative term, “Communists”.
I came across one website that featured
photos of US anti-war marches, all the participants in which were labeled “communists”. To
the poor sod who made the web site, anyone
who failed to support “our boys” 100 percent
simply had to be a commie. And, to their dismay, there were obviously thousands of these
“communists” in America.
And, just as before, the tentacles of this
new “Communist conspiracy” are perceived
as reaching all the way up to the White House
itself. The religious right’s campaign to
defeat Hilary Clinton is already openly linking the defeat of Hilary with the defeat of
Communism.
The slogan of the religious right had been
“Anyone but Hilary Clinton”. Now they are
playing the communist card; can the antiChrist be far behind?
It’s ludicrous, of course, Hilary Clinton
is no more a Communist than FDR or JFK
were. But these religious cranks can’t tell a
Communist from a hole in the ground.
However, for much of “middle America”
Senator Joe McCarthy is clearly back in the
saddle. And this time the religious bigots who
supported him last time are now much better
organized, probably more numerous and certainly more assertive.
Nevertheless, alongside the angst-ridden
websites of the assorted right-wing “patriots”, there are almost as many left-wing sites.
Admittedly their positions are many and varied and display plenty of evidence of ideological confusion.
However, at the same time they exhibit
great passion and fervour in their opposition
to war and corporate greed. These sites are
marked by a very healthy hatred of hypocrisy
and cant, especially as displayed by George
W Bush.
The First World War was also promoted at
the time in the name of peace, as “the War to
End War”, so hypocrisy in that regard is nothing new.
Then, as now, it’s the people who stand
by their principles who will have the label
“Communist” hung on them. They can wear it
with pride. 
The Guardian
August 29
Worth Watching
2007
Rob Gowland
previews
ABC
&
SBS
Public Television
Sun 2 Sept –
Sat 8 Sept
J
ournalist and playwright
Jerome K Jerome wrote his
humorous classic Three Men in a
Boat in 1889. An account of a jaunt
up the River Thames from Kingston
Surrey to Oxford by Jerome and two
friends in a wooden skiff, the book’s
unassuming humour (“warm, unsatirical and unintellectual”) made it
an instant classic and it was translated into many languages. It is still
a very amusing read.
BBC2 have now produced a
filmic tribute in the form of an “actuality” series, Three Men in a Boat
(To Say Nothing of the Dog) (ABC
7.30 pm Sundays). Comedians Griff
Rhys Jones, Rory McGrath and
Dara O’Briain set out to re-create
Jerome’s trip in a replica of the vessel he and his friends used.
As a television show it’s a bit
of a mixed bag. The banter is not
all that funny or clever (but would
probably seem more so if it could all
be clearly heard).
On the other hand, the scenery
is very fine indeed as they stop off
at various picturesque sites along
the way and the historical footage
showing the late Victorian swells
and common riff raff alike boating in great crowds on the Thames
is fascinating. Talk about traffic
jams!
hirty years after the end of
the Vietnam War, there are
several million victims of Agent
Orange. The deadly dioxin has
worked its way into the food chain
and some argue, the gene pool, in
Vietnam with tragic results.
A letter to the American people
T
from Vietnam explains, “The use of
toxic chemicals is in brazen violation of international law and is thus
a war crime”. In a class action suit
against 32 US chemical companies,
the victims are seeking compensation and justice.
In a US federal court in
Brooklyn, their lawyers battle
against a phalanx of lawyers for the
chemical companies. Retired chemical workers and American Vietnam
veterans, who were exposed to the
same toxic herbicides, bolster the
claims of the Vietnamese victims.
The Last Ghost of War, screening in the Cutting Edge time slot
(SBS 8.30 pm Tuesday) introduces
viewers to four of these victims.
Most notable perhaps is the
absence of moral responsibility
on the part of the government that
engaged in the chemical warfare and
the equal absence of any corporate
accountability.
ersonality, episode two of
The Human Mind And
How To Make The Most Of It (ABC
8.30 pm Thursdays), is even less
satisfactory than the first episode.
Admittedly, the subject is tricky.
After all, the human brain is
probably the most complex object
in the world. The hundred billion
cells which make up the brain talk
to each other via electricity – travelling at 250 mph via 1000 trillion
neural connections.
Nevertheless, Professor Robert
Winston’s efforts in this episode
to reveal how our brains shape our
personality, at different stages of
growth from childhood to adulthood, seem excessively “dumbed
down”, as though Winston and his
team have no confidence in the
capacity of the audience to understand complex scientific subjects.
They resort to analogies that are
not overly illuminating or, in the
case of the “brain as an orchestra
conductor”, simply inaccurate and
hence decidedly unconvincing.
The overall impression the
program gives is that scientists are
doing some very interesting things
in researching the working of the
brain but that of course it’s too complicated for you simple souls to
understand so just watch the pretty
P
The Fabric of a Dream – The Fletcher Jones Story (SBS 7.30 pm Friday)
pictures and take our word for it on
the science.
As a result what could have
been a really enlightening and very
interesting program becomes merely
watchable but disappointing.
he Fabric of a Dream –
The Fletcher Jones Story
(SBS 7.30 pm Friday) is a very
revealing program for anyone at
all interested in the economics of
Australian manufacturing. The company was known to one and all as
simply “Fletcher Jones”, and I can
say from experience it was a wonderful store for service and quality.
But its full name was “Fletcher
Jones and Staff ”, and the last two
words were important. It was an
T
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attempt at a workers’ co-operative
under capitalism, and despite its initial successes and the loyalty of its
staff, it was the relentless pursuit of
profit under capitalism that finally
brought it down.
Fletcher Jones himself came
from a Christian upbringing in rural
Victoria. He saw poverty at first
hand in the early years of the 20th
century.
With the outbreak of WW1,
Jones joined up. The commentary
presents it as “he had to go and do
his duty”, which may well be how
he saw it, but the point is that, like
thousands of other young men, he
succumbed to the patriotic fervour
of the times and volunteered for the
great imperialist war.
He returned shell-shocked, eligible for a TPI pension. Instead, he
took a horse-drawn van and became
a hawker. His initial effort to open a
clothing store was financially disastrous and he only cleared that debt
after several years.
Self-taught (he left school at 12)
he was very taken with the ideas
of Japanese reformer Toyohiko
Kagawa, an advocate of worker cooperatives. Jones built up his clothing business with his employees
owning more of the business than
he did.
There was consultation at all
levels, with no management decisions being made without the workers involved in that section being
part of the decision-making process. During the post-WW2 migrant
boom, Fletcher Jones recruited staff
at the docks direct from the boat.
Those who got jobs with
“Fletchers” certainly landed on their
feet. The specially built FJ factory
at Warrnambool was laid out in a
garden setting, to make it a pleasant,
egalitarian place in which to work.
While Australian manufacturing was protected, by high tariffs
on imported goods, Fletcher Jones
flourished, but after the lifting of
tariffs companies that imported
products from low wage countries
(the only one mentioned in the program is China, of course) were able
to seriously undercut them.
The company went bust, the last
Jones (Fletcher’s son) was forced
to resign and the staff were told to
accept the sale of the company (a
company they owned, remember)
or lose their jobs. Their shares were
worthless.
At its peak, Fletcher Jones
encompassed 70 stores around
Australia and employed some 3000
people. At the end, some of them
had to be content with securing an
extra ten years or so of employment,
but most were just told to go, now.
The story confirms yet again
the impossibility of running an
enterprise as a collective under
capitalism. But, that said, Fletcher
Jones certainly deserved an “A for
effort”. 
POLITICS
in the pub
Sydney
The Guardian
Editorial Office
74 Buckingham St, Surry Hills, 2010
Ph: 02 9699 8844 Fax: 02 9699 9833
Email:[email protected]
August 31
The way forward for Indigenous Australians
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is taken by T Pearson,
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Olga Havnen, Dep CEO, Northern Lands Council, former indigenous adviser
to Clare Martin’s Northern Territory Government
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September 7
Public Holiday (APEC) No program
Every Friday 6pm ’til 7.45
Gaelic Club
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www.politicsinthepub.org
12
The Guardian
August 29
2007
APEC: aims vs. national interests
Anna Pha
Tentative beginnings
The first Asia Pacific Economic Co-operation
(APEC) conference was held in Canberra
in November 1989 on the initiative of Prime
Minister Bob Hawke (with a little behind-thescenes prompting from the US). Twenty-five
foreign and finance ministers from Australia
and 11 other countries – New Zealand, the
USA, Canada, Japan, Philippines, Indonesia
Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, South Korea,
and Brunei – participated. Eighteen years
on, Australia is again hosting an APEC
meeting, on this occasion with 21 countries
participating. New members include People’s
Republic of China (joined 1991), Russia,
(1998), Chile (1994), Vietnam (1998),
Mexico (1993), Papua New Guinea (1993).
India’s request to join is on the agenda at
this month’s meeting in Sydney.
The growing economic interdependency
of countries (currencies, interest rates, foreign
investment, financial flows, communications,
tourism and trade) was forcing consultation
and co-operation. At the same time competition was heightening.
The Labor Government of the day saw
Australia’s economic future global engine of
economic growth lying more with Asia than
with Europe and the USA: “The economies of
the Western Pacific Rim have for several years
now been the fastest growing in the world, and
the Pacific as a whole has already replaced the
Atlantic as the centre of gravity of world production”, Senator Evans, Labor Minister for
Foreign Affairs and Trade noted.
At the same time the Australian
Government feared that as the world was
being carved up into trading blocs, in particular ASEAN and the north American and
European blocs could become fortresses, and
Australia be left out in the cold.
The government saw APEC and economic
co-operation as a means of strengthening
the region’s voice in international economic
forums, much along the lines of the operations of the Cairns Group, which successfully
lobbied for agriculture to be placed on the
agenda of GATT (fore-runner to World Trade
Organisation – WTO) talks.
The first APEC meeting discussed how
to advance the process of Asia Pacific economic co-operation. It ended with general
agreement as to topics for further discussion
and agreement on some general principles
– and acknowledgement that there were a
number of questions around which there was
no agreement.
They agreed that “it was premature at this
stage to decide upon any particular structure
either for a Ministerial-level forum or its necessary support system... ”
They would consult on a regular basis
with a view to freeing-up world trade and presenting a united front at the Uruguay Round of
GATT trade negotiations to be held late 1990.
The commitment (unanimous) to removing all trade barriers (tariffs, etc) sat uneasily
with the practices of the US and Japan in particular. It was difficult to imagine that the US
would embrace free trade for itself, although
it was and still is a keen advocate of free trade
for other countries.
“Consultation should be based on non-formal consultative exchanges of views among
Asia Pacific economies...
“Co-operation should be directed at
strengthening the open multilateral trading
system: it should not involve the formation of
a trading bloc.”
ASEAN would play a major role in the
consultative process.
Apart from agreeing in principle to “free
trade”, talks would continue on sharing of
economic data, co-operation on research
and development, exchanging information
on technology, co-operation in training and
education, and on matters such as the environment, tourism, energy and trade promotion.
There were strong differences over who
might participate, in particular over the
People’s Republic of China, Hong Kong and
Taiwan.
There were trade conflicts between a
number of the countries – the trade imbalance
between Japan and the US, the US’s treatment
of Australia in relation to agriculture, arguments over alleged undervaluation of some
currencies, and so on.
These and other serious tensions and contradictions between the participants were
papered over to give the impression of consensus. Discussions continued on an annual
basis and various committees and research
bodies established.
Government’s agenda
One objective of APEC was analysis and
economic policy formulation, much along
the lines of the OECD. APEC could assist
less industrialised countries to develop the
services and other infrastructure required by
transnational corporations wanting to take
over their economies.
Japan initially proposed an economic grouping that did not include the USA.
However, the USA wanted its foot in the door
in Asia.
The US feared the significant role China
might play in an Asian grouping that consisted
of China, ASEAN and Japan.
Australia’s image was one of local bully,
a “deputy sheriff” and agent for US interests,
so it was not particularly welcome in ASEAN.
Australia proposed APEC as a vehicle for
advancing economic co-operation and free
trade and in the region, as well as assisting
structural adjustment of domestic economies,
which included Australia and the USA. This
would bring Australia and the USA into the
fold and if China joined would be consistent
with Australia’s policy of “embracing” China
and opening up its markets. At the time China
was not a member of the WTO.
At the time the Australian Government put
the proposal forward limiting it to economic
relations, but clearly it had hopes of APEC
becoming a trading bloc and an organisation
that moved into the political and military
spheres of co-operation.
Bogor Declaration
unanimous but …
At their meeting in Bogor, Indonesia, in
November 1994, the 18 participating countries
issued a Declaration adopting a “free trade
agenda”. The unanimously adopted Bogor
Declaration set an objective of “free trade”
between APEC member countries by 2020,
but left considerable differences of interpretation between countries.
“... we agree to adopt the long-term goal
of free and open trade and investment in
the Asia-Pacific. This goal will be pursued
promptly by further reducing barriers to trade
and investment and by promoting the free
flow of goods, services and capital among our
economies”, the Declaration said.
The Declaration “builds on the momentum” of global trade liberalisation generated
by the Uruguay Round of multi-lateral trade
negotiations which resulted in the formation
of the WTO. Based on consensus, as APEC
decisions are, Australia and the US certainly
did not get the fast access to third world markets that they were after. They were forced
to make concessions such as accepting a
Communist Party of Australia
Central Committee:
General Secretary: Peter Symon
President: Hannah Middleton
74 Buckingham St, Surry Hills, 2010
Ph: 02 9699 8844 Fax: 02 9699 9833
Sydney District Committee:
Andrew Jackson
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APEC meeting
in Shanghai in
November 2000.
The US is fearful of
China developing
closer ties with its
Asian neighbours.
differential timetable for countries depending
on their level of development.
Industrialised countries such as Australia,
Japan and the US are to open up their economies to imports and foreign investment
by 2010, as against 2020 for “developing
economies”.
Differential treatment
In practice trade liberalisation means
a transfer of the regulation of trade from
governments to transnational corporations.
It has little to do with genuinely free trade,
long gone in this age of monopoly capital.
It can seriously hinder less industrialised
countries attempting to establish new industries and without the fi nancial means to
compete with large US or Japanese corporations. Hence the principle of differential
treatment, a practice adopted by the WTO in
some agreements.
South Korea insisted that it be treated
as one of APEC’s developing countries and
therefore be given an extra ten years under
the Bogor timetable to lift protectionist measures and other barriers to trade with member
countries.
After the meeting, further evidence of
deep differences emerged.
Malaysia issued a set of “reservations”
and committed itself to further unilateral
trade liberalisation only “at a pace and capacity commensurate with our level of development”. It also insisted that the 2010 and 2020
dates were “non-binding on member economies”. Prime Minister Mahathir pointed to the
telecommunications, insurance, banking and
transport industries as areas where Malaysia
might not be able to meet the 2020 deadline
because it might not be ready to compete with
the big industrialised countries.
China also gained the extra 10 years of
preferential access to the markets of the developed member states, which upset the US no
end, as did the concessions to South Korea.
US President Clinton indicated that there
would be no “unilateral give-ups” by the US.
China, but only on its terms
China has taken a cautious approach,
determined to protect its national interests. It
made it clear that its involvement in the world
economic community would be on its own
terms. It has since been admitted to the WTO
and plays a progressive role working closely
with the less industrialised and non-aligned
groupings of countries there.
Given all the differences among the APEC
member countries – their stages of development, national agendas, interpretations of the
Bogor Declaration and the pace at which they
wish to proceed – there are no certainties as
to how or even if the Bogor timetable will be
implemented. The year 2010 is fast approaching. Will the US, Australia and Japan remove
trade barriers then?
Website: www.cpa.org.au
Email: [email protected]
Newcastle Branch:
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Newcastle NSW 2300
Ph: ah 02 4926 1752
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Ph: 02 4283 6130
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The government portrays APEC as being
about access to foreign markets. It forgets to
mention the other side of the coin – foreign
access to Australia’s markets and what that
means. As workers in the manufacturing
sector know, it means the export of jobs and
huge pressure in remaining jobs to reduce
wages and working conditions. WorkChoices
was brought in to assist employers in making
Australian workers more “competitive” with
and pit them against lower paid workers in
Asia and elsewhere.
Over the past 18 years APEC has discussed many issues and its various committees and bodies have carried out research,
policy development for the assistance of
members. At all times it works closely with
big business.
A meeting of APEC Economic Leaders
held in November 2006 there was agreement
to discuss the feasibility of a Free Trade Area
of the Asia-Pacific (FTAAP) region in 2007.
This will be on the agenda at the Sydney
meeting of government leaders. The push
for greater integration and a free trade area
is coming from APEC’s Business Advisory
Council. It is highly unlikely to gain unanimous support.
Finance ministers met in Coolum in
Queensland at the beginning of August.
Leading representatives from the IMF, WTO
and Asian Development Bank attended, along
with the chair of the APEC Business Advisory
Council (ABAC).
The US, Japan, Canada and Australia are
clearly not getting all they want from APEC.
The statement issued talks in generalities,
still papering over considerable differences.
The prominence given to the public sector
and state-owned firms (not just private) in
APEC statements does not reflect the views
of the US or Australian administrations, rather
concessions they have been forced to make to
keep APEC afloat.
Foreign Minister Alexander Downer has
raised the question of developing “A WTOconsistent free trade area for the Asia Pacific”
if the present round of WTO negotiations continues to fail.
Downer rejects ideas, such as ASEAN
plus three (Japan, China, South Korea) or
ASEAN plus three plus India, Australia and
New Zealand as forming the basis for new
institution in the region. These exclude the
USA.
He wants APEC because it includes the
USA. “The United States of America strategically plays a very important role in East Asia;
it has done for many years and will continue
to do so for many years… It helps to keep the
region suitably balanced. … And the role the
United States is important strategically and it’s
obviously important and beneficial, being the
world’s largest economy”, argued Mr Downer
at an Australian Chamber of Commerce and
Industry conference last month. 
Website: www.cpa.org.au/guardian/guardian.html
Email: [email protected]
West Australian Branch: Vic Williams
5B Jemerson St Willagee Perth 6156
Ph: 08 9337 1074
Brisbane Branch: David Matters
PO Box 33, Camp Hill, Qld 4152
Ph: Tim 0423 685 220
South Australian State Committee:
Bob Briton, Rm 5, Lvl 1, 149 Flinders St,
Adelaide 5000 Ph: 08 8232 8200