SLIDESHOW: No sell off of railway land

Pics from Tuesday's protest against NSW Labor government's plan to sell off railway land:


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VIDEO Fighting against water privatisation in South Africa

Currently Watching: Water is Ours (Amanzi Ngawethu)
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Authorship: Coalition Against Water Privatisation, Centre for Applied Legal Studies, Anti-Privatisation Forum, Friction Films, Unitarian Universalist Service Committee.

Please spread far and wide, show in your community, blog, link to your website and social networks. The films are updated as events unfold in South Africa. There are 10 minute, 2 minute and 5 minute edits, all showing on friction films.blip.tv. Downloads available. Many thanks.

VIDEO:No Sell OFF of Public Assets Rally -- Brisbane July 3, 2009

BRISBANE: Fifteen hundred trade unionists and their supporters marched through the streets of Brisbane on July 3 to oppose the sell off of Queensland public assets. The protest had been called by the Electrical Trades Union and later was supported by the Queensland Council of Unions.Addressing the rally were speakers from the QCU, AFULE, ASU and the Rail Tram and Bus Union.

Mick Carr from the Maritime Union of Australia told the rally that there was no upside for a one off fixing of the debt by selling off public assets. Peter Simpson , state secretary of the Electrical Trades Union, said that his union wont be putting one cent into the ALP coffers at the next election if this legislation is still on the books.

He said it was time to put a line in the sand.

David Matters from the Rail Tram and Bus Union told everyone that his union, with community support, had won their fight against the prisatisation of the Brisbane City Council bus service in the 1990s.To applause he said, that it was time to put Anna Bligh under the control of working people.

But the surprize from among the speakers came from ALP state president and Australian Manufacturing Workers Union Secretary, Andrew Dettmar, who said that his union will not be supporting any politician at the next state election unless they make a no privatsation pledge.

The rally was followed by a march to state parliament .

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New Party Projects and Greens and Qld Privatisation

If you check out the video of the Socialist Alliance organised public forum here on the Qld privatisation , Drew Hutton's argument for the Green's -- and he was in fact the only Greens member I know was there in a gathering of 70 -- engagement with the campaign was very much to the point.That the crime is that there are no Greens in the Qld Parliament.

While the Greens here aren't so sparky anyway what concerns me is that Drew may not be able to deliver labour to enrich the community campaign.

This was different in NSW I gather but here that's a problem for the rest of us.

And that's important I think when we pick through the various examples of alternative partying -- that at least in Qld -- without a Greens member on the parly benches there's not much substance to what the Greens can do as a party (although individual Greens do stuff of course)

And as we negotiate our way through the terrors of climate change I think there's a real challenge for the greens project internationally to deliver more than what they have so far.

In that sense I miss the ideological engagement that existed in their milieu in the nineties and this in stead has defaulted to a sort of argument which runs: "Look at the polls. We're the only real alternative to Labor because that's what the polls say."

And many on the left have played up to that in a sort of depressed state of resignation.

The complication is, as we saw, that in the lead up to the last federal elections, the ACTU et al allowed their ranks to vote Greens (and SA etc for that matter)but this hasn't been followed up by a stronger class allegiance by the Greens. 18 months on The Greens are way away from any campaign orientation to key working class and trade union issues,.. They voted for Gillard ABCC Lite of course...but I didn't see the Greens actually challenging the ABCC in real street or on the grass time.

What is at stake however, I guess, is the possibility of some trade union forays into trade union election campaign mode with Trade Union candidates but with perhaps sharp preference flows. In a sense this was the template offered by No2EU and Arthur Scargill.

When you look at it there's precious little room left for the trade unions to manoevre and for example , here the ETU has left the ALP Left but not the ALP and they are getting abused up hill and down dale while the left that rolled over for Bligh tries to cover its dirty deeds.

In contrast, the meeting last Tuesday was a showcase of unity. Amazing it was. Everyone was saying in effect the same thing: ETU, SA, David Matters, the Greens...and when the audience started up the only argument the far left groupuscules offered were complaints about no strike being a spontaneous response.

But you see, that's all they were: complaints. Where's the DIY?

Its' in situations like this you realize how friggin marginal the socialist left(and Greens too) is because while some 84% of Qlders are on side our resources have to be more than a few selected complaints or abstract options.

You also realize that even the ETU is isolated -- cynically and brutally isolated by the Laborist gang -- and that despite that, we're all in this fight together. And the ETU has stood its ground! Amazingly it has not relented on its commitment to fight these sells offs.

As for the ALP ranks -- "not happy Anna!". So there are wild cards perhaps. As for any everyday passer by -- I've heard it, and the state government is abused and maligned in terms that to my sweet ears are shocking.

Afterthought:
The irony is that the way forward is self evident but no one can see it for the trees. If the Socialist Alliance can bring together such a platform for such a discussion then there exists right there the sort of alliance building that's imperative to do...and the fact is that the SA is, for the moment, the only facilitator that can do it and is unconditionally willing to.

So all the hype and posturing you get about party options and the horrors of the polling day choices is "dealt with" not with angst and maybes but in the real time struggle of coming together. That's a lesson the left has not learnt and so far, in its little enclaves and tribal allegiances, has proven totally incapable of learning.

VIDEO:No Sell Off Public Meeting -- Brisbane June 30th, 2009

Video of a meeting organised by the Socialist Alliance to discuss a community response to the privatization of public assets by the Bligh state Labor government -- Brisbane, Qld Australia.

Formats available: Quicktime (.mov)

Anti-privatisation : campaigning regardless of who governs Qld

By Dave Riley

After Labor Premier Anna Bligh announced on June 2 that Queensland would be selling off $15.4 billion of the state’s assets, a June 17-18 Galaxy Poll conducted for the Brisbane Courier Mail found that 84% of people opposed the move.

The same poll revealed that, three months after the recent state election, support for the Labor government had collapsed and it would now be easily voted out of office.

The June 7 ALP state conference backed Bligh’s sell-off plans. Since then, only the Electrical Trades Union (ETU) has mounted a public campaign against the privatisation and has committed, regardless of who governed Queensland, to oppose the sale of public assets.

The ETU’s statewide Light on the Hill campaign against privatisation kicked off in Cairns on June 22. Since then it has been working its way down the coast, before a mass rally in Brisbane on July 3.

The campaign includes workplace meetings, rallies, public meetings in regional cities, radio, as well as newspaper advertising and literature drops.

It was only after the ETU’s campaign began that the Queensland Council of Unions (QCU) decided to support the July 3 rally.

Socialist Alliance state co-convenor Paul Benedek told Green Left Weekly that the ETU’s strong position against privatisation had shamed other trade unions and the QCU into supporting the July 3 action.

“That indicates that the pressure is there”, Benedek said, “not only from the ETU but also from the community, because the community is overwhelmingly opposed to this.

“So the potential for a strong campaign is there and the anger is there in the community. But those at the top in the trade union movement, who are also tied into the Labor Party, have tried to water down that potential.”

Benedek said the main challenge was to bring the combined force of the community, the ETU and the broad union movement to bear on the issue.

“The ETU has something like 80% of the population supporting what it is standing for”, he said. “The rest of the trade union movement will be isolated if it does not adopt a strong anti-privatisation position.”

But Benedek also sees a trap if the campaign doesn’t adopt a clear, across-the-board “no privatisation” position.

“We do not want to fight this on a case-by-case basis”, he said. “We do not want to fight in just one union against one particular privatisation, then have another one thrust upon us. We want to be opposed to the general principle of handing over public assets to the private sector and actually start to put the case for more public assets, for nationalisations, for bringing enterprises into the public domain for the social good rather than the bottom line. We want to deal rationally rather than gambling everything on the market only to watch the economic debacle we’re seeing now.”

Drew Hutton, a leader of the Queensland Greens, told GLW: “There needs to be a solid anti-privatisation coalition between the key unions and other organisations, including the Greens, which have a clear anti-privatisation agenda.”

Hutton said that, in state parliament, there was no political party opposed to privatisation. The Greens will be part of the community campaign against the privatisation plan.

Like the unions, the Greens are opposed to the privatisation of public assets on the grounds that “public assets are better structured to serve the public interest rather than private profit”, Hutton said.

“But we particularly emphasise that it is far easier to make a relatively painless and just shift to a low-carbon or zero-carbon economy when you’ve got your key assets like water, energy, transport and communications in public hands.”

David White, the Socialist Alliance’s national environment coordinator, told GLW that climate change was the biggest battle the world was facing at the moment and privatisation was going in the wrong direction. He agrees that the campaign to defend public assets should concern all environmentalists.

“The environment movement insists that the government take immediate and necessary measures to keep the environment under control”, he said. “It loses the power to do that by handing control over to corporations.”

[The “No Sell-Off” Light on the Hill rally will be held at noon on July 3, Emma Miller Place, cnr of Roma and Turbott Streets, Brisbane.]

VIDEO:John Pilger - Sydney Ferries Privatisation

Award winning author, journalist and documentary film maker John Pilger gives a candid account of the perils of privatisation threatening Sydney's Ferry Service.

Produced by Jamie McMechan Maritime Union of Australia Film Unit