ATO Faces Jobs Axe

The Australian Tax Office (ATO) is planning to shed up to 900 jobs before the end of the financial year, blaming a range of factors including the abolition of the carbon and mining taxes.

Community and Public Sector Union national secretary Nadine Flood blames the Federal Government for the cuts.

"This is a massive blow for tax staff who are already stretched after previous cuts, what it will mean is significant delays in customers and small businesses who rely heavily on the tax office for advice," she said.

"There's no way around that.

"The tax office has clearly said these cuts come as a result of Government policy, including efficiency dividends, the planned reduction of thousands of jobs and the recruitment freeze - what we're seeing is the impact of Coalition policies."

Fukushima and UK Coverup Attempts

British government officials approached nuclear companies to draw up a co-ordinated public relations strategy to play down the Fukushima nuclear accident just two days after the earthquake and tsunami in Japan and before the extent of the radiation leak was known.

 Internal emails seen by the Guardian show how the business and energy departments worked closely behind the scenes with the multinational companies EDF Energy, Areva and Westinghouse to try to ensure the accident did not derail their plans for a new generation of nuclear stations in the UK.

"This has the potential to set the nuclear industry back globally," wrote one official at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS), whose name has been redacted. "We need to ensure the anti-nuclear chaps and chapesses do not gain ground on this. We need to occupy the territory and hold it. We really need to show the safety of nuclear."

Officials stressed the importance of preventing the incident from undermining public support for nuclear power.

The Conservative MP Zac Goldsmith, who sits on the Commons environmental audit committee, condemned the extent of co-ordination between the government and nuclear companies that the emails appear to reveal. "The government has no business doing PR for the industry and it would be appalling if its departments have played down the impact of Fukushima," he said.

Louise Hutchins, a spokeswoman for Greenpeace, said the emails looked like "scandalous collusion". "This highlights the government's blind obsession with nuclear power and shows neither they, nor the industry, can be trusted when it comes to nuclear," she said.

Free Trade Secrets: Negotiating Away Independence

Secretive TPP Negotiations Move Further Underground in Salt Lake City

As negotiations tasked with pushing the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) to conclusion gets underway in Salt Lake City, Utah, the Australian Fair Trade and Investment Network condemned worsening opportunities for public participation in an already opaque process.

“What was supposedly the last major round of TPP negotiations took place in Brunei in late August.  That round, and the 18 rounds before it, all contained formal opportunities for civil society and the public to register as stakeholders and interact with negotiators.  The Salt Lake City Round contains no official stakeholder process,” said Dr Patricia Ranald, Convener of the Australian Fair Trade and Investment Network.

“While the TPP negotiations have long been marred by secrecy about the details of the text, this is the first major round of talks without any formal opportunity for civil society to present their views to negotiators,” said Dr Ranald.  

“We know from the TPP text leaked last week that the proposals being discussed in Salt Lake City could change Australian laws and prevent current and future governments from regulating in the public interest in areas like medicines and copyright.  We know that corporations are advising negotiators on these matters, but other civil society voices have now been excluded," said Dr Ranald.

Negotiations for ten separate chapters are expected to take place, including environment, intellectual property, investment, labour, legal issues, market access for goods, rules of origin, sanitary and phytosanitary standards, state-owned enterprises, technical barriers to trade and temporary entry of persons.

Sydney Climate Change Demo

Sonnet 7: Demo

Ten thousand had, today in Sydney,
enough sense to stand in the rain
and twirl umbrellas, not stay hid. We
rallied, one link in a chain
of rallies all around Australia
crying out against the failure
of governments who play the role
of sycophants to Old King Coal.
Ten thousand stood with rain god Hughie,
sixty thousand nationwide
who’ll vote, divest, protest, decide
to use renewables, get more cluey.
There’s climate change, heat’s on the rise.
It’s time to change, to organise.

[Courtesy Jonathon Shaw]

Fire Fighters at the Rallies

Organisers say about 60,000 people participated in Sunday's mass rallies, at which emergency workers played a significant role in warning about the dangers of unchecked global warming.

In Brisbane, where an estimated 4000 people came together, firefighter Dean McNulty spoke of the huge concern climate change posed to his colleagues, who battle natural disasters from the front line.

Mr McNulty said scientists were clear that global warming would make extreme weather events more frequent and severe.
"To firefighters, it is not just numbers and statistics, it is very real," the United Firefighters Union (UFU) representative told AAP.

Before 30,000 people in Melbourne, Greens deputy leader Adam Bandt evoked the memory of the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires, while firefighters spoke of their fears of increasingly hotter days.
"There is no sceptic at the end of a fire hose," UFU secretary Peter Marshall told the Melbourne rally.

AMWU: Australian Manufacturing ...

Wake-up call as skilled workers feel squeeze 

By TIM AYRES Nov. 17, 2013, 9:44 p.m.

LAST week's news of at least another 43 workers retrenched from UGL's rail yards in Broadmeadow should be the wake-up call for the O'Farrell government to get serious about local manufacturing jobs.

These cuts were hardly a surprise. The industry has seen hundreds of skilled jobs lost over the last few months and we have been warning of a looming jobs crisis for two years.

Across the country manufacturing has been through the wringer of a high Aussie dollar, increased competition from overseas, and an uneven playing field in global trade.

But for Hunter workers the squeeze could have been largely alleviated by Macquarie Street.

In the case of passenger trains, the O'Farrell government has put off replacing the ageing silver "S" train sets beyond their initial life expectancy and delayed the refurbishment of the Tangara carriages. Bringing forward work on these trains could have prevented further job losses.

The government showed the same complacency when it decided to send key bus building contracts interstate, forcing coach builder Volgren to slash jobs from its Tomago plant. Similar cuts have been felt in Western Sydney.

Importantly the huge boost for local jobs from major rail projects - such as the north-west and south-west rail links - has gone unrealised because of the government failing to engage local industry.

The North West Rail Link will use more steel than the Sydney Harbour Bridge, but there has been no commitment to using Australian fabricated metal. It will also need new rolling stock yet industry fears trains will be sourced from overseas.

Last week the government made much of plans to extend Sydney's light rail network but those plans include importing trams from Spain. While the project will be a boon for Sydney commuters, apprentices in Europe not Newcastle will benefit from the jobs created.

Every example of government inaction is costing manufacturing jobs, and with much of that industry in the Hunter, workers there are hurting the most.

Some will say we should accept the decline of manufacturing, happy with Australia putting all its eggs in the resources boom basket.

However, this ignores the cyclical element of the commodity boom.

And the fact that manufacturing drives innovation and technological change; key factors in our productivity performance allowing us to achieve competitive advantage in global markets and supply chains.

Manufacturing creates high-skill, high-wage jobs; within the manufacturing sector but also across the economy, particularly in services that add value to products and processes.

It may be cheaper for the government to import cheaper product from overseas but price alone on major contracts is a false economy for taxpayers, particularly when it puts skilled locals out of work.

Government spending should boost, not undermine, our own industry capability.

Tim Ayres is Australian Manufacturing Workers Union NSW secretary.