Australia’s biggest white elephant!

Wonthaggi - once a coal mining town - is legendary for two major strikes that led to national mining health and safety codes and better wages and conditions. They were led by the Miners Federation under the leadership of Bill Orr. Bill and many of the leading activists during these strikes were members of the Communist Party of Australia.

The first and most famous occurred in 1934. It was a 5 month strike in the middle of the depression to stop the then State owned coal mine deliberately sacking the most political and union conscious miners. This strike involved the whole community and has been immortalised in the great film ‘Strike Bound’. Over 90 years later, the mine is now a museum and while coal is now Australia’s leading export (in fact Australia is the world’s biggest exporter) it is the water crisis that has once again put Wonthaggi on the map.

By Simon Millar, Socialist Party

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Leaders fear inflation-driven revolts spreading beyond Middle East and North Africa

“It’s really something that can topple regimes, as we have seen in the Middle East.” This is the warning from economist Nouriel Roubini, discussing the surge in prices for fuel, transport and especially food, at last month’s World Economic Forum in Switzerland. Roubini was just one of many voices at the annual capitalist gathering who warned that rising food and energy costs are fanning political unrest and could push the global economy back into recession.

By Vincent Kolo, chinaworker.info

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Protect both jobs and the environment

Greg Combet, the newly appointed Labor Minister for Climate Change and Energy Efficiency has been quoted recently saying he wants to bring “common sense” to the debate on climate change. At the same time he has stated that the polluting coal industry “absolutely” has a future in Australia’s energy production.

By Ger Hughes, Socialist Party

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It’s been 18 months since Victoria was rocked by the Black Saturday bushfires which left over 150 people dead and thousands of homes destroyed. But despite government commitments to improve firefighting facilities, serious questions remain over whether the state is prepared for another scorching summer.

By Andrew Grant, Socialist Party

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“It is as enraging as it is heartbreaking, and we will not relent until this leak is contained, until the waters and shores are cleaned up, and until the people unjustly victimised by this manmade disaster are made whole”. These words of US President Obama on the ongoing catastrophe that is the Deepwater Horizon BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico won’t get him off the hook.

By Laura Fitzgerald, Socialist Party

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In 2007 the Labor Party was swept to power on a wave of enthusiasm. This enthusiasm was in part based on their promise to take radical action on global warming – a promise that has gone unfulfilled.

The Rudd/Gillard government announced the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS) with grand statements of leading the world. Rudd labelled climate change “the great moral and economic challenge of our time”, comparing sceptics to gamblers who “happily play with our children’s future”. However, in what has been called the “great moral back flip of our time” Rudd scrapped the introduction of the CPRS until at least 2013.

By By David Suter, Socialist Party

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Located in the heart of the Latrobe Valley, Hazelwood power station supplies Victoria with up to 25% of its base load electricity. The plant remains the highest polluting power station in Australia, releasing 17 million tons of greenhouse gases every year. This is the equivalent of 1.4 million households!

Hazelwood first began operations in 1965 as a Victorian state-owned business. Due to the excessive pollution it emits, it was supposed to be decommissioned in 2005. In 1996 however, the Kennett state government sold off the power station to a UK based private company called International Power.

By Corey Snoek & Anthony Main

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The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico following the fatal explosion on the BP leased Deepwater Horizon oil rig has exceeded the Exxon Valdez catastrophe of 1989, when eleven million gallons of crude oil devastated the pristine Alaskan coastline.

A White House energy official described the Gulf of Mexico spill as the worst environmental disaster ever to affect the USA. So far, all of BP’s efforts to plug the leaking well - located 5,000 feet below the surface of the sea - have failed.

By SP reporters

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As the Copenhagen summit approached last December, Scientific American ran a striking cover story, A Plan for a Sustainable Future. This showed how wind, water and solar power could supply the entire world’s energy needs by 2030. (November 2009) Renewable energy is superabundant. Authors Mark Jacobson of Stanford University and Mark Delucchi of the University of California show that accessible sunlight alone (excluding sunlight that falls on the oceans) could provide more than 40 times the amount of energy being consumed around the world today.

By Pete Mason, Socialist Party

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SP Newsletter No.302

Scandals over the past few months have given rise to people’s concerns about the reliability of scientific evidence on climate change. Recent polls have also suggested that concern about the threat of global warming is weakening in Australia.

In November it was alleged that a series of hacked emails from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia showed the manipulation and distortion of data. Then in January it was revealed that a report issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) included errors regarding the speed at which the Himalayan glaciers are melting.

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