The following articles were published in "The Guardian", newspaper of the Communist Party of Australia in its issue of Wednesday, February 16, 2000. Contact address: 65 Campbell Street, Surry Hills. Sydney. 2010 Australia. Phone: (612) 9212 6855 Fax: (612) 9281 5795. Email: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Webpage: http://www.cpa.org.au Subscription rates on request. ****************************** 1. BHP MINEWORKERS FIGHT FOR JOBS 2. Culture & Life: No limits to anti-communism 3. Out with the GST 1. BHP MINEWORKERS FIGHT FOR JOBS Company officials banging on the door at three in the morning, waking families and ordering striking workers back to the job while holding Federal Court injunctions under their noses and threatening that their very homes were at risk. Intimidatory Gestapo-type scare tactics by the company in the presence of the workers' families. by Anna Pha Harassment in the extreme, Rio Tinto style, but this time it was that job crunching exploiter, BHP. The workers are coal miners in the Illawarra in NSW who were taking part in a 24-hour national strike of BHP employees in the coal industry. It turns out that the court injunctions were not for the rank and file workers in any case. They were interlocutory orders, requiring the union and its senior officials to seek a return to work. The penalties for breach of the order are contempt of court charges carrying a maximum $10,000 fine or imprisonment at the judge's pleasure. The 24-hour national strike was in protest against a new low price for export coal set by BHP which would become the benchmark for the industry. BHP is the coal industry's biggest producer and exporter, employing about 25 per cent of the entire industry's workforce. CFMEU Mining and Energy Division General President Tony Maher said that BHP had negotiated a five percent cut in coking coal prices with its Japanese customers in return for an increase in its own market share. This follows last year's disastrous 18 percent reduction in the price of coking coal. "This $3.40 a tonne cut is a disaster for Australia. It sets a new low level that will push marginal mining operations over the edge and trigger a new round of mass retrenchments as BHP and other companies seek to offset the effects of the price cuts through cutting costs. �"This means sacking more mineworkers and attacking our wages and conditions." Mr Maher said that since 1996, 6,575 coal mineworkers have been retrenched in NSW and Queensland. This represents a staggering 26 per cent of the entire workforce. "Our members, our families and our communities are paying a devastating price for the Federal Government's deregulation of the coal export industry which allows companies like BHP to engage in an annual war of savage price cutting without any regard for the industry, the workforce or Australia." The Illawarra mineworkers began their 24-hour stoppage on Monday February 7, at 11pm. A mass meeting was scheduled at Bulli at 10am on the Tuesday. BHP obtained a court injunction around about the time the stoppage began, but were too late to stop it commencing. The meeting resoundingly opposed any return to work. There was a great deal of antipathy towards BHP over the company's attack on the unions and its members in the Pilbara in WA, where it is trying to force workers onto non-union individual contracts, as well over the pricing of coal which can be expected to hit the Illawarra mines hard. But when the meeting heard some of the stories of the harassment, anger boiled over, and a 24-hour stoppage specifically over that issue was called. Since then, BHP has continued to inflame the situation, threatening damage claims and contempt of court charges against the union and officials over the two stoppages. Last year the mineworkers delivered BHP productivity gains of between 20 and 30 per cent. BHP has thanked its workforce with harassment and job insecurity. Since BHP imported new management from the US and looked at co-operation with Rio Tinto on iron ore, it has increasingly taken the iron-fist approach to industrial relations. "They are making bad decisions. They made a very bad call in the Pilbara", Mr Maher told "The Guardian". "They have ended up with a split workforce [in the Pilbara], half union, half on contracts, an impossible mess to manage. "They have made a bad decision on prices. They have underestimated our reaction to that. They have underestimated the impact of that loss of goodwill between the employees and the company on productivity. "They'll be regretting those decisions for some years to come. "What can be freely given can be taken away", he warned. "What we are looking at now is a campaign of non-cooperation." END 2. Culture & Life: No limits to anti-communism Why is John Howard so keen to protect the "rights" of accused Nazi war criminal Konrad Kalejs? Robert Greenwood, QC, the former head of Australia's short-lived Special Investigations Unit that pursued Nazi war criminals in Australia, suspects Kalejs was an ASIO "asset". Could this be the reason? by Rob Gowland Or could it be Kalejs' fierce anti-communism and Howard's wish to keep on the good side of similar die-hard anti-communists among Australia's post-war migrants? After the end of the Second World War, Australia became a haven for former collaborators and quislings and fascist terrorists alike. Australian immigration officials were very sympathetic to anyone who could show that he or she was a "refugee" from communism, someone who had bolted with their Nazi friends from the pursuing Red Army and their vengeful neighbours. Under Labor's Immigration Minister Arthur Caldwell, it was Australian policy to give preference to accepting these people with a proven record of "fighting communism". The Chifley Government was engaged in its own exercise of "taking on the communists" in the late '40s (in the '49 coal strike, for example). Australia's unpublicised preference for proven anti-Soviet types would soon have become known among the "displaced persons" who had fought on Hitler's side: the Baltic Whiteguards, Slovak, Croatian and Hungarian clerical fascists, Vlasovites and renegade Cossacks from the USSR itself. Kalejs fled first to Denmark where he stayed for some time before moving on to the Western zones of Germany, where a pro-Nazi past was a positive asset. He arrived in Australia as a "displaced person" in 1950. The great military offensive to "roll back communism" was already under way. Whether the target countries had been bastions of capitalism or former colonies, the aim was the same: to reclaim them for capitalism and deny them to the "red scourge". The Dutch were fighting the Indonesian people. The British were fighting "communist bandits" in Malaya. There had been an attempt to overthrow the elected government in Czechoslovakia and replace it with a government of senior civil servants in 1948. Resolute action by the people led by the Communist Party thwarted that stunt. Germany was partitioned into east and west by the unification of the three western zones into one and the issuing of a separate currency, an attempt to cut off the rural east from the industrialised west of the country. The German communists held firm and established their own country, despite the economic difficulties. Britain and the US combined to savagely suppress the communists of Greece in support of a fascist monarchy and a Red-free Mediterranean. The British also launched a Bay of Pigs-style invasion of Albania, but Kim Philby, the agent they had co-ordinating the operation was secretly a Soviet intelligence officer. The anti- communist parachutists were rounded up as they landed. US troops intervened in China on the Nationalist side before the victory of the Chinese Red Army in 1949. They blocked Chinese forces from pursuing Chiang Kai-chek and clique to Taiwan. Before 1949 was over, the US was arming and transporting a Nationalist Chinese army in Burma to launch an invasion of China, to recommence the civil war and hopefully bring down the Communist government before it could become established. The invasion failed, but the US was not deterred. Offensive operations were stepped up from Taiwan and in 1950 a full-scale war began in Korea. The US fought the communist Huk guerrillas in the Philippines. And that's only some of the actions that characterised the period when Kalejs and others of his ilk were welcomed into Australia as future citizens. Kalejs, a senior officer in a Latvian Nazi "Auxiliary Security Police" commando that slaughtered thousands of communists, Jews and pro-Soviet villagers in Latvia and Russia, was given a position of authority in Bonegilla migrant camp in Victoria: he had the very useful responsibility of issuing identity cards to migrants who had no papers. No wonder it is suspected that he was recruited into the ranks of ASIO! Greenwood told the "Sydney Morning Herald" that "quite a few" alleged war criminals worked for ASIO - "we know that", he said. "ASIO had activity files on a significant number of the people I investigated", he said. Nevertheless, the Australian mass media has displayed a singular lack of interest in the prospect that there are a lot of former Nazis and pro-Nazi mass murderers in Australia. In fact, did you notice how quickly the initial articles expressing shock and horror at the idea of Kalejs being allowed back into Australia were joined by ones explaining how his pro- Nazi activities were merely a reflection of the prevailing anti- communism in his homeland, an anti-communism that, the articles implied or said outright, was fully understandable and was caused by the evil expansionist activities of the Kremlin. The stories were accompanied by tearful accounts of the "suffering" of whiteguard Latvians who were shipped off to Siberian villages so they couldn't form a fifth column for the Nazis. their hardships paled into insignificance against the horrors inflicted on the Soviet people (including pro-Soviet Latvians) by Hitler's forces. Once again, anti-communism is being used to justify anything, no matter how heinous. END 3. Out with the GST In a Press statement issued on Monday this week, the Communist Party of Australia called on the ALP to pledge to repeal the GST legislation when next elected. "Nothing short of the complete repeal of the GST will overcome the huge robbery of low-income earners, pensioners and others", said CPA General Secretary, Peter Symon. "Many will be forced into poverty", he said. "The CPA supports trade union demands for wage increases to compensate for the inevitable increase in prices that will be brought about by the GST. "We reject the claims of Ted Evans, Treasurer Secretary, and Ian Macfarlane, Governor of the Reserve Bank, that wage claims are unjustified and could jeopardise the economy", said Mr Symon. The problems arising from the GST are becoming clearer every day - the inevitable price rises, the unfairness of a GST on many items, the huge compliance costs imposed on businesses (which will be passed on to consumers) and on organisations are only some of the immediately apparent problems. "The claim by John Howard and Peter Costello that the GST is a `fairer' tax system is completely dishonest as is the claim that a `typical' family will be $40 to $50 better off. This is obvious nonsense", said Peter Symon. "The Government's arithmetic does not add up." The hard reality is that low-income earners spend almost all of their income on goods and services whereas those of higher incomes pay a much smaller proportion of their income on such purchases. Those with lower incomes will pay proportionately much more in taxes. In calling for the repeal of the GST legislation the CPA suggests principles for an alternative tax system which should include: (a) termination of any form of a general goods and services tax while recognising the justification for special taxes on luxury items; (b) restructuring of the tax system to ensure that those with high incomes, with unearned income from share dealings, company profits and property speculation, pay higher taxes while taxes on wages and salaries are proportionately reduced; (c) closure of corporate tax avoidance loopholes; (d) levying of normal taxes on profits earned in Australia but sent overseas; (e) an end to government handouts to the wealthy corporations in the form of direct grants and tax concessions; (f) maintenance and support for publicly owned enterprises; (g) a crackdown on family trusts which are used by high-income earners to avoid tax; and (h) raising the tax-free threshold from $5,400 to $13,000 ($250 per week). "There is no such thing as a fair GST", concluded Mr Symon. END -- Leftlink - Australia's Broad Left Mailing List mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.alexia.net.au/~www/mhutton/index.html Sponsored by Melbourne's New International Bookshop Subscribe: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]?Body=subscribe%20leftlink Unsubscribe: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]?Body=unsubscribe%20leftlink
LL:ART: GUARDIAN. MINEWORKERS, OUT GST, ANTI-COMMUNISM
Communist Party of Australia Tue, 15 Feb 2000 22:33:00 -0800
