Peaceful protests – Violent World Leaders

MUA - Sydney Branch

The Sydney Branch of the Maritime Union of Australia rejects entirely any suggested implication that demonstrating against the injustices of globalisation and war means support for violence.

"A recent police training video which featured MUA officials participating in legal non-violent protests is a disgraceful attack on democratic rights and the right of community members to oppose the injustices of globalisation and war" said Sydney Branch Secretary Warren Smith

"To highlight our union and other concerned members of the community in this way is a disgrace and should not be tolerated in a democratic society. This is about linking legitimate protestors to terrorism and violence. The real perpetrators of violence are among the participants of APEC who openly support the illegal war in Iraq" said Mr. Smith.

"If they want to see real terrorists they should be showing film footage of George Bush. If they want to see violence they should be looking at the devastation of the war in Iraq."

The MUA is unashamedly involving itself in the organisation of peaceful protests against APEC. It is these bodies of globalisation that are driving working people, including Australian maritime workers, to compete in a race to the bottom with the most exploited workers in the world.

This is what John Howard's WorkChoices is all about, forcing Australians to compete with third world standards. We are about raising third world standards not lowering Australia's standard of living.

The MUA calls on the police hierarchy to make public the so-called training video that they have already displayed to business leaders.

Contact: Warren Smith 0400 368 945

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Howard NT takeover 'sickening'

Speaking at the 2007 Garma Festival, deep in the heart of a stringybark forest in north-east Arnhem Land, former Northern Land Council president, Galarrwuy Yunupingu, called on people to fight the Howard Government's takeover of Northern Territory Aboriginal communities.

"I have got a political agenda to run," he said.

"This government is a worrying government, not worried about us but worried about himself (Prime Minister John Howard) and worried about his few rich people and business people that support the coalition that puts them back into government to run amok in the nation."

Aboriginal leaders, politicians, academics, judges and artists have gathered at Gulkula, a dry community close to the mining town of Nhulunbuy, for Australia's leading indigenous festival.

Now in its ninth year, the theme of this year's festival is Indigenous Health: Real Solutions for a Chronic Problem.

But Canberra's unprecedented emergency intervention to combat child sexual abuse following a damning NT government report took centre stage on the first day of the four-day event.

"We in the Northern Territory are about to be dispossessed of everything, everything that we've got left from the original dispossession of our land and lives.

"That I should go and change my lifestyle and become a white man is worrying, worrying and sickening."

Mr Yunupingu called the federal government move "the lowest of anybody's form of policy".

"I am just reminding people that this is a struggle.

"I appeal to you to stand beside us to fight the rottenness that is ... the sickness of this government setting out to simply take away what's rightfully ours."

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Howard "cheating on health"

Victorian Premier, John Brumby, takes on Howard:

"This business where the Federal Government is just shopping around Australia, trawling through marginal seats, finding a hospital that's struggling and saying, 'We'll bail it out' — it's the most appalling public policy I've seen in decades," he said. "It's an embarrassment."

"We have a good hospital system in Victoria — the best in Australia — but we don't have a hospital on every street corner," he said. "If you put a hospital on every street corner, you'll guarantee you will end up with a Third World hospital system.

"In recent years we've been cheated and robbed in relation to (Commonwealth) funding," he said. "For example, we're only getting 41 per cent of our hospital funding under the Medicare agreement. We're meant to be getting 50 per cent.

"So we need a better framework for federalism, in which to produce the best for the citizens of Victoria and Australia. But you can't do that if the Federal Government just bails out a hospital which is not viable."

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Get ahead: be a bad boss

How do people get ahead in the workplace?

One way seems to be by making their subordinates miserable, according to an Australian study released today.

In the study to be presented at a conference on management this weekend, almost two-thirds of the 240 participants in an online survey said the local workplace tyrant was either never censured or was promoted for domineering ways.

"The fact that 64.2 per cent of the respondents indicated that either nothing at all or something positive happened to the bad leader is rather remarkable - remarkably disturbing," wrote the study's authors, Anthony Don Erickson, Ben Shaw and Zha Agabe of Bond University in Australia.

Despite their success in the office, spiteful supervisers can cause serious malaise for their subordinates, the study suggested, citing nightmares, insomnia, depression and exhaustion as symptoms of serving a brutal boss.

The authors advocated immediate intervention by industry chiefs to stop fledgling office authoritarians from rising up the ranks.

"As with any sort of cancer, the best alternative to prevention is early detection," they wrote.

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