Callout for Volunteers
Volunteers are needed to help hand out Unionists for Palestine leaflets at the Brisbane and Ipswich Labour Day events this weekend. This is an important opportunity to build support for the civil liberties campaign following the Crisafulli government’s limiting of political expression.
The Brisbane Labour Day event starts at Cnr Turbot & Wharf Sts on Monday 4 May, 10am. Leaflets can be obtained at cnr Turbot & Wharf Sts from 8:30am onwards. Volunteers are also needed for leafletting after the end of the Brisbane march on Gregory Terrace, adjacent to the RNA Showgrounds.
The Ipswich Labour Day event will be on the afternoon of Saturday 2 May at Timothy Molony Park, Woodend. Volunteers are needed to hand out leaflets at the Trade Unionists for All stall.
For more details email unionists4palestineqld@gmail.com or text 0409 877 528.
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Public Meeting – Next Step for the Not Our Law campaign
6pm Wednesday 29 April
41 Peel St, South Brisbane
Hosted by Justice for Palestine Magan-djin
Public Meeting – Next Steps for the Not Our Law Campaign | Facebook
We went to the May Day rally here at 1pm outside the ACT Legislative Assembly. It was much bigger than any union event in years, with the possible exception of the first rally after the CFMEU’s being put into Administration.
The numbers and calls are evidence of how the cost-of-living in biting – what Chifley called ‘the hip-pocket nerve.’ Wide range of unions but no sign of the AEU officials apart from my flag.
The core issue is the 3 percent pay offer from the local government – which is bankrupt – that’s another story – with its billion-dollar debt, and growing.
The demand was for ‘A Fair Day’s Pay, For a Fair Day’s Work.’
No sense that the pay-packet determines living standards – health, education, transport and housing all need to be made part of a social-wage. For years, these daily needs have been skewed in favour of the better-off, with tax regimes, including as flat-rate levies, funding of corporate health, and failure to implement Gonski as SOS documents every week.
Then there is the basis of how wealth is distributed. At the top, there are 170 billionaires who make off with seven dollars every second. That is possible because we never get the full value of the values we add. If we did, capitalism could not exist.
One more angle: assume that all workers got paid equal to the cost of our reproducing the one commodity we have to sell – our labour-power. How would he boss-class respond? As it always does. By intensifying the disciplines over the application of our capacities to add value. To talk about wages of any kind or degree, without dealing with time-theft is to give the bosses a free-kick.
The big absence was any wider perspective. No historical sense of where May Day came from – either in Chicago after a massacre, or celebrating the coming of summer for centuries as a promise of a better world.
Finally, we could gather today without fear of being shot because of the struggles our class has waged here over nearly 240 years. Our freedom of assembly was not a gift from Gina. Freedom of speech did not come from Mass Murdoch. Earlier generations died, suffered and were gaoled to give us the rights we enjoy today.
Everything is determined by the relative strength of the contending classes. That strength is the outcome of workplace organisation, ideological clarity, scientific analysis, and treating the state apparatuses as sites for struggle.
These thoughts are to focus of how we can move forward, step by step, which means more than emails and megaphones.
As Norm never tired of telling his members:
WHAT WE WON’T GET FROM THE COURTS, WHAT WE CAN’T HOLD AT THE GATE.
Peter and Humphrey
If it is a criminal offence in Queensland under s. 52D of the Queensland Criminal Code Act 1899 (specifically, Chapter 9A on Offences relating to public order).to publicly recites, publicly distributes, publishes or publicly displays the two “prohibited expressions” (a) “from the river to the sea” and (b) “globalise the intifada” with a Maximum penalty—150 penalty units or 2 years imprisonment related to events in the Middle East why is it not also an offence to jeer, scorn and abuse a First Nation welcome to country?