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Wednesday, 22nd October 1997
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Have you signed the petition to the Prime Minister yet? If not, do it now!
On Tuesday a reporter from Channel 9's A Current Affair, Linda Rose, harassed a senior member of Pauline Hanson's One Nation trying to gain access to a branch meeting which took place last night in Queensland. She allegedly phoned about ten times that day to try to coax the member to let the television crew in.
The interest of Packer's mob was to film what they expected to be a break in the party with the formation of two groups... luckily, to date, common sense has prevailed and Ms Rose has been told that she will not be allowed access to the meeting.
The issue of interest is a minor internal party matter which is now resolved, but it doesn't take much for Channel 9 to smell blood.
On the 11th August 1988 Prime Minister John
Howard released the following statement headed:
"Immigration and One Australia" to the
press, "My argument with Multiculturalism is not that
it respects and tolerates diversity, but rather in many ways it emphasises
division and above all, we'll get Australia working again."
One can only wonder what the Coalition's stand is now on Multiculturalism...
and why it has changed?
However, political dishonesty is not just hidden in the shadows of time but
goes on day after day with the catch of the spring season (even trouncing
Cheryl Kernot's defection) going to the following statement by Opposition
Labor Party (ALP) leader Kim Beazley, who said yesterday,
"I will never place myself in a position where I
encourage in any shape or form threats to the Olympic
Games".
Now the statement is a blatant lie because the ALP have been at the
vanguard of promoting Lorenzo Ervin's (the Black Panther terrorist) plan
to establish an international boycott of the Sydney 2000 Olympics. The
link is the on-line web sites of the
ACTU
(Australian Council of Trade Unions) and their "national organisation" Left
Link.
To my regular readers this story will be old news... but for those of you
who have never heard about the Ervin boycott and have never read about the
link between the ALP and this on-line threat to the Sydney 2000
Olympics... you can quite simply blame the biased and dishonest Australian
media. Journalists I have spoken to at both Queensland's
Sunday
Mail and the
Courier Mail
have been shown the link, confirmed it and then done nothing about
it.... months ago.
In fact both the Prime Minister's office and SOCOG themselves have
been alerted to the post with clear directions by myself... but because it has been promoted by a member
of the ALP family no action has been taken against Left Link.
The troubled Left Link extremists have, in recent days, established what they believe to be a response to our expose of their hands-on promotion of the Sydney 2000 Olympics boycott. The page is headed, Pauline Hanson's online admirers with a number of links taking you to organisation we have never heard of, have no interest in and know nothing about. Left Link's interest? Well, apparently they have a link pointing to and I quote: "One Nation or to a version of Hanson's Maiden speech to Parliament. Many of these sites also include photos of the Member for Oxley."
Surprise, surprise they could not, despite exhaustive efforts find any links the other way around... there lies the difference.
Getting back to the story about the ALP promoting the boycott of the Sydney 2000 Olympics, the comment by Kim Beazley follows a threat by outspoken Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander (ATSIC) Social Justice Commissioner who said, "I don't know
if that's the correct tactic (establishing a boycott to the Sydney 2000 Olympics), but if that happens, if the Bill
(Howard's ten point plan on Wik and Native Title) gets passed and that's the way other nations feel about it, well, who do we have to blame?"
Dodson was launching his fifth and final report as ATSIC Commissioner arguing
that social justice was directly linked to native title rights.
A British parliamentary human rights group led by Labour MP Jeremy Corbyn
have picked up on the story saying, "What we are trying to convey to the
Government of Australia is that around the world, people have looked with
deep concern at the way in which Aboriginal people have been treated."
"Our concerns are quite fundamental," the press release from Corbyn says.
"Australia is well known as being a signatory to international agreements
protecting human rights, not the least of which is the
UN Draft
Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People. Did not Australia
play a leading role in the drafting of this document? Surely the
proposed Native Title Amendment Act is incompatible with this Declaration?"
His comments follow a threat to establish a boycott of the Sydney 2000
Olympics... a threat which is also being driven in South Africa by an Aboriginal
delegation visiting that country. The leaders of the South African delegation,
Michael Mansell, and ATSIC's Victorian commissioner, Geoff Clarke, have admitted
wanting to embarrass the Australian Government while in South Africa.
"We came here to brief the South African Government with the idea in mind
that someone had to make an approach directly to the Australian Government.
The purpose of briefing people was to make sure they understood what the
issues were and we came away pretty pleased with that," said the legal manager
of the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre, Mr Michael Mansell.
The delegation said they had received a "very good hearing" from the departmental
officials but were given no commitment that the matter would be taken up
with Mr Howard.
Asked whether they had deliberately set out to embarrass the Australian
Government abroad, Mr Mansell replied: "Of course we are - that's the whole
point of it.
"You can't embarrass someone if they've got nothing to hide."
Howard's only response? "Australians are never impressed when people go overseas
and dump on their country. Never, ever." And with that he headed off to
the Annual Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Edinburgh.
The alleged Inala drug lords, the Mai
family, appeared in Brisbane's Magistrate Court yesterday on a
charge of trafficking. The charges follow allegations that the Vietnamese
couple, Huu Tho Mai and Thi Dung Cao both aged 46 and their 21 year old daughter
Phuong Bich Mai had
been involved
in trafficking heroin from January 1995 to October 1997.
The court was told that police still needed time to work on the case as over
100 covert tape recording still had to be interpreted and analysed.
What do the major parties do when a bureaucrat stands up for democracy? You
change the rules and ensure that what should be a lifetime career in the
job becomes just a passing short chapter in his curriculum vitae.
The post, Clerk of the Senate, held by Harry Evans for the past thirteen
years is written into legislation as a lifetime career... until he retires.
However Evans has been having a go at the Coalition in the Senate and has
been an outspoken critic of the government when he believes that they are
not being accountable. With the
Trojan Horse of Australian
politics becoming little more than a glass cage the bi-partisan
Coalition/ALP government have smelt a rat....someone who could blow the whistle.
So he is being nobbled.
The restructured Democrats spokeswoman Lyn Allison said yesterday, "The ALP
that it will be in office at some stage, so this measure (shortening through
legislation his term as Clerk) would make it easier for them in Government."
The ALP said that they are concerned about plans to give the Senate President
Margaret Reid "powers to direct" which would be used to "gag" the Clerk in
the interim period. The ALP, according to spokeswoman Sue West, feels that
the Clerk should only be removed by a resolution of the relevant House of
Parliament. The legislation is to be introduced into the Lower House tomorrow...
so the glass cage has some curtains thrown over it...
The internationalisation of Australian companies goes on with renewed vigour.
Now I am not talking about Australian companies branching out overseas into
the "global" market, I am talking about Australian companies and Australian
resources now being plundered by foreign owners.... think of any key industry
in Australia now and you are talking about foreign ownership.
The mining industry is no exception where American style thuggery is now
being used to placate a dissident workforce fired because they refused to
negotiate with this company for lower salaries (higher profits for the foreign
shareholders).
The following letter in today's Courier Mail sums up my feeling very well...
heading: Welcome to American-style
confrontation:
I am one of the unfairly dismissed Gordonstone workers.
After the arrival of Arco's American manager and industrial relations leader,
its industrial agenda centered on continual confrontation with its workforce
and its duly elected officials.
This involved the old CRA tactic of deliberately provoking
a strike to get bans on the union, challenging the validity of our verified
agreement so it could offer individual contracts and challenging the power
and jurisdiction of any industrial or legal court to intervene in any
dispute.
Having been unsuccessful in these pursuits, even under
Peter Reith's industrial laws, I believe that Arco decided that the only
way to achieve a cowed, unquestioning workforce was to close the mine, disperse
the workers and re-open with new workers on Australian Workplace
Agreements.
At that point Arco used the usual American tactic in
industrial disputes - it brought in a private army.
In the Land of the Free, where the number of guns at
your disposal decide power, thugs are used to harass, intimidate and physically
assault the existing workforce and protect the scabs brought in to break
a strike.
So far, Tru-Gard Security has been used only to harass
and intimidate but how long will it be before this escalates to physical
assault? Does it mean that, if you have enough money, you can hire a security
force armed with weapons and ammunition that the police cannot carry?
This private army can wander the streets of this country
with concealed weapons while the police watch helplessly. If Arco is successful,
it means that any company can sack its workforce with impunity and hire heavies
to ensure displaced workers are not game to open their mouths for fear of
their own safety. As can be seen from the Moura tragedy, a coalmine can be
an extremely dangerous place if questions are not asked of management. We
ex-employees on the protest line, fighting what Arco have done, don't have
the luxuries of Arco's American leaders of hiding behind an Australian talking
head, Au$5,000 a day QC's or anonymous security guards.
By having the guts to put my name to this letter, as
is my democratic right, I will be marked on the "never to be employed"
list.
If this is what John Howard and Reith are going to
allow, the country and its workers have been sold out to the whims of the
multinationals.
Stuart Vaccaneo, Emerald.
Well said Stuart... you have guts!
Another perfect day in paradise.
Have a good one.
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