Ark Tribe, a building worker in South Australia, faces six months' jail for refusing to meet a special police force set up for the construction industry and give investigators names of other union members involved in getting up a petition on his site about health and safety concerns.

Riki Lane reports from Melbourne

Tuesday 10 February 2009

Pages from the diary of a relief worker from the Australian bushfires

Tuesday 10 February 2009

Australia may remind you of a lot of other movies – westerns, safari movies, even cartoons, since so much of the characterisation is overblown, even clownish.

The Builders Labourer, the journal of the Builders Labourers Federation of Queensland, carried this tribute to Bob Carnegie when he decided to step down as a full-time organiser with the BLF to return to worker on the sites. Bob is a supporter of Workers’ Liberty Australia.

Capital in crisis: we need a workers! plan! Plus: Scrap the ABCC; "Comrade Hand Grenade"; Private provision is a public menace; Support the PPSA; Islamism, Iraq, and the left; Fight university sackings. Download as pdf (see "attachment").

From "The Builders Labourer", journal of the Builders Labourers Federation of Queensland, a tribute to our comrade Bob Carnegie as he decided to step down from a full-time organiser job to return to work on the sites.

Ed Bland, Inner North Brisbane organiser for the Builders Labourers Federation, spoke to Martin Thomas of Workers' Liberty

Noel Washington [a leading official of the larger construction union, the CFMEU] is back in court on 2 December. The case arises from a meeting off the job.

On 22 October Glenn Stevens, governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia, said that the worst of the global financial crisis had passed. In the next few days the Australian dollar plunged downwards, reaching 58 yen where it was 104 yen earlier this year.

By Riki Lane
Noel Washington, Senior Vice-President in Victoria of the Construction, Forestry, Mining, and Energy Union (CFMEU) faces
six months prison for refusing to talk to industrial police about what happened at a union meeting outside work hours.

Australia today is characterised by the existence (for now at least) of coast to coast ALP governments.

Carbon trading is a threat to production and jobs in carbon emitting industries. The AWU has spoken particularly about workers at aluminium smelters.

Jalal: main issues in Iraq. 1 negotiations between US government and Iraq government, mostly in secret. US want to make length of occupation open. They will end when they want.

Martin: Since late 2006, stream of financial collapses. That's how the crisis has immediately presented itself.

Treasurer Michael Costa and Premier Morris Iemma resigned from the New South Wales Labor government on Friday 5 September. Fundamentally, it was a victory for the huge vote at the New South Wales Labor State Conference in May against their plans to privatise electricity.

Issy Wyner, one of the pioneers of Australian Trotskyism, has died. Read obituaries by John Percy, by Tony Stephens, and by Ruth Braham; and click here for a review of Hall Greenland's biography of Issy's close comrade Nick Origlass.

Noel Washington, Senior Vice-President in Victoria of Australia’s big Construction, Forestry, Mining, and Energy Union (CFMEU) faces six months prison for refusing to talk to industrial police about what happened at a union meeting outside work hours.

I hear from a BLF activist in Brisbane that construction sites across the country are likely to walk out on 12 September.

The strongest feature of this book is the detailed evidence it compiles of continued large variation in social conditions between the leading capitalist countries.

My younger daughter Molly is currently reading the Bible - reading it as a convinced atheist, for information and literary instruction - and I'm trying to keep up with her.

Robert Service; Orlando Figes; Jean-Jacques Marie; and Sam Farber on the Russian Revolution and the early Bolshevik regime. Richard Dawkins on God. R J B Boswell on Mussolini. Alfred Rosmer on the workers in World War 1. Jacques Texier on Marx, Engels, and democracy. Read on for links to the notes on each book...

About 150 of us marched through Brisbane city centre on 19 July, on the occasion of the Catholic Church's World Youth Day in Brisbane, to say "No To The Pope".

In July I attended the launch meeting in Brisbane of the Revolutionary Socialist Party, a group formed mainly by the former Leninist Party Faction of the DSP (Castroite) group.

Defend Noel Washington. Abolish the ABCC
30 July 2008
Riki Lane

The New South Wales Labor (ALP) Annual Conference on 3 May made it clear that Labor Premier Morris Iemma’s plan to sell off publicly owned electricity utilities goes against the clear wishes of the vast majority of labour movement. But the defeat on the Conference floor holds both promise and threat for those who support rank and file control by the labour movement of “their” party.

Anthony Main is the secretary of Unite Australia, a union for young fast-food and retail workers drawing inspiration from Unite New Zealand but operating in different conditions.

Kathy Black spoke for US Labor Against War (USLAW) at a meeting at Melbourne Trade on 12 March. Riki Lane summarises her speech.