Don’t forget to check Don’s earlier What’s On lists, below, where you will find events still to come but not all included again here.
AUGUST
Thursday 17 August: 5.45 p.m., Paperchain Bookshop, Manuka, Launch of Judy Horacek’s new crowd-funded book of cartoons.
Thursday 24 August: 5.30 p.m., National Library, Peter Stanley on “The Crying Years — Australia in the Great War“. Free, but RSVP 6262-1424
AUGUST
Till 3 Sept.: National Archives, “Gough Whitlam and his Century” exhibition.
Tuesday 8 August: 5.15 p.m., National Library, lecture by Bridget Vincent, “Judith Wright“. Free but RSVP 6262-1111.
Thursday 10 August: 6 p.m., National Library, Kenneth Myer lecture, Anne Summers, “Where is Australia Headed?”. Free but RSVP 6262-1111.
Friday 11 to Sunday 13 August: 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. each day, Woden Seniors Book Fair. Woden Seniors Club, 12 Corinna St, Woden, 6282 2573.
Monday 14 August: 6 p.m., Crawford Centre, ANU, Molonglo Theatre, “Live, Lead, Learn”, by Gail Kelly, former WestPac CEO. RSVP 6125-4144.
Thursday 17 August: Parliament House, Canberra. Accountability and the Law Conference 17, including The Case for a Federal Anti-Corruption Commission. Brought to you by the Australia Institute. Speakers: Nicholas Cowdery AM QC; Geoffrey Watson SC; Hon. Mark Dreyfus QC MP; Senators Richard Di Natale, Nick Xenophon and Jacqui Lambie; and more, see http://accountabilityconference.org.au.
Sunday 20 August: 9 a.m. to 2 p.m., Geoscience Australia Open Day. Corner Jerrabomberra Ave & Hindmarsh Drive, Symonston. www.ga.gov.au/open-day
Saturday 26 August: 6 p.m. at the Goulburn Workers’ Club, Dinner to commemorate the 1917 Railway Strike. Guest Speaker Rodney Cavalier. $75, contact Jane Timbrell, 6249-8657.
Tuesday 29 August: 12.30 at the Hughes Community Centre, “Future of the Australian National Botanic Gardens“. $2.
Wednesday 30 August: 6 p.m., Roland Wilson Building, ANU, Prof. Jean-Claude Guedon, University of Montreal, “Promoting Knowledge in the Age of Unreason: Toward the Internet of the Mind“. Free but RSVP 6125-8983.
NOW SIGN THE TREATY!
Today marks the first day of the Parliament’s spring sitting in Canberra. Vintage Reds joined ICAN this morning to welcome members of parliament and staff back to work: 
Photo: Jude Dodd
The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons had a historic success at the UN in New York this last month, when 122 countries signed a Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. Australia, though, squibbed; it voted against the 2016 UN resolution that established the mandate to negotiate a treaty, and did not take part in the Treaty process.
Anthony Albanese added his voice to our call on the government to think again, for heaven’s sake:
Photo: Anthony Albanese (@AlboMP)
Where to go for a quick bite and a good beer at the weekend?
These local joints have refused to cut their workers’ weekend penalty rates:
Bent Spoke in Gould St, Braddon;
PJ O’Reilly’s on the corner of West Row, Civic;
and the Wig and Pen at ANU Music School.
Vintage Red Jude D. (@sister_ratched) joined in the Penalty Rates Pub Crawl on Saturday 5 August and found a very nice brew, the WestBelconnen8 Belgian-style dark strong ale, winner of the 2016 Wig & Pen Trophy:
Pete Van Ness, from the Department of International Relations, ANU, spoke to the Vintage Reds on the topic of nuclear power.
Pete and Mel Gurtov are the editors of a recently published book, Learning from Fukushima: Nuclear Power in East Asia. (The book is available for free download from the ANU Press.)
The project developed from an ANU workshop which aimed to respond in a helpful way to the March 2011 triple disaster (earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown) in north-eastern Japan. It evolved into a collaborative investigation of whether nuclear power was a realistic energy option for East Asia
The focus was on the ten members of ASEAN, none of which have nuclear power plants; though at the time, Vietnam, Malaysia and Indonesia were all interested in getting one.
The book ends with nine reasons why nuclear power is a bad choice for any country which is not already a nuclear weapons power. These are: 1 the high cost of construction; 2 continuing need for very highly trained staff; 3 difficulty for a regulatory authority to be transparent, and lack of transparency that goes with high levels of security required around nuclear facilities; 4 huge liability in the event of an accident, frequently paid by the public; 5 cost of decommissioning, under both normal and crisis conditions; 6 the relationship between nuclear power generation and nuclear weapons; 7 the intractability of the problem of nuclear waste disposal (there is currently still no site for the permanent storage of high-level nuclear waste anywhere in the world; 8 the health implications of exposure to radiation, including much lower levels than previously believed; and 9 the insufficiency of nuclear power as an answer to concerns about climate change.
Mid-winter has passed by, and this means that Spring is on its way. It will come. Time to get out and feel the air!
Don looks around for the guides to what’s on in Canberra: BMA [Bands, music, action!] magazine, “Canberra’s Entertainment Guide”; film festival booklets from Palace Cinemas; and this month the third issue of Penguin Books’ free underline magazine, and the eighth issue of the Australian Ballet’s free fortnightly Balletomane magazine.
“The rules that made Australia fair are broken.” Sally McManus has called for people to join a union and change the rules.
Sally McManus urges unions to be ‘disrupters’ to fix neoliberalism’s damage to workers: ACTU head says the rich have too much power & the minimum wage
no longer keeps people out of poverty.
Gareth Hutchens, 26 June 2017, The Guardian
The head of the Australian Council of Trade Unions has called on Australia’s unionists to begin campaigning hard on the issue of inequality, warning workplace rules must be repaired to reverse the damage to workers caused by three decades of neoliberalism.
Sally McManus, secretary of the ACTU, issued the rallying cry on Monday during her opening address to a three-day union conference in Sydney.
She said “one group of people” had far too much power in Australia – pointing out the richest 1% owned more wealth than the poorest 70% – and old protections for wage workers had been so whittled down that the minimum wage no longer kept people out of poverty.
She said unions must recapture their role as economic “disrupters” with serious power, with secure bargaining positions at the tops of supply chains and “across industries”, so workers could once again be adequately paid for their time and energy.
“It has taken the right 30 years of union bashing and neoliberalism to take us where we are now,” McManus said on Monday. “Inequality is at a 70-year high. Wage growth hasn’t been this low since records starting being kept.
“The rules that were meant to protect our rights are now not strong enough. They need to be rewritten … we need to change the rules so working people have more power.”
Frank receives his Vintage Reds mug.
Dr Frank Bongiorno, from the ANU’s School of History, spoke to the Vintage Reds on the topic, “Labor, Labour and Australia’s 1980s”. His talk concentrated on the political and industrial dimensions of the decade.
The 1980s were a very successful period for the ALP. There were some major changes: deregulation; less protectionism. Most spectacularly, in December 1983 the dollar was floated; foreign banks could now operate in Australia, and financial markets grew more important. The Labor government subjected itself to these markets, as part of an effort to distance themselves from Gough Whitlam. There was less universality in welfare, instead the more targeted “No Australian child will live in poverty by 1990”. There was a squeeze on the middle for a decline in real wages for the prices and income accord. Medicare was an exception, a revival in 1984. Continue reading
Vintage Reds joined a rally held in Garema Place on 17 June to mark the drafting at the United Nations in New York of a treaty to ban and eliminate nuclear weapons.
A poll of a thousand Australians earlier this year found 73% in favour of our government supporting such a treaty; only 10% were opposed. The Turnbull government has chosen to go with the 10%.
Since then the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons has been finalized, with 122 countries in favour, out of the 123 which took part in drawing up the treaty (a total of 192 countries are represented at the UN).
Speakers were Alex White (UnionsACT), Barbara O’Dwyer (WILPF), Angela Chen Chen & Byron Knight (ANU), George Browning (former Anglican bishop) and Sue Wareham (ICAN).
The Table Reds sang John Brunner’s song, “Don’t you hear the H-bomb’s thunder”, composed for the first Aldermaston anti-nuclear bomb march by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in 1958. This choral group performed first at the Vintage Reds Christmas lunch some years ago and specializes in four-part a capella songs.
“Men and women, stand together; do not heed the men of war.
Make your minds up, now or never; ban the bomb for ever more!”
Photo: Bron King
A full room of the Vintage Reds were very pleased to welcome Dr Helen Watchirs, the ACT’s Human Rights Commissioner, and formerly (2004-2016) our Discrimination Commissioner.
Dr Watchirs spoke on the work of the Commission, which aims to engage and educate, and to provide accessible services.
Dr Watchirs said that not enough people were aware of their rights to financial support if they were a victim of crime. Very few applications are received.
In April this year, new or reformed grounds for protection against discrimination were introduced, including sexuality, immigration status, and being a victim of domestic violence.
The ACT’s Human Rights Act is powerful as a day-to-day check on legislation.