This year’s dinner was held at the QT hotel in town. Among the recipients of the expanded May Day awards was Janice Flaherty of the Vintage Reds, shown here with a black and gold T-shirt which must be very soon a collector’s item. Janice was responsible for our recent submission to the government on aged care.
For the first time in some years, Canberra unions rallied on May Day, as part of the Change the Rules campaign.
Two hundred people marched to the Fair Work Commission and listened to speakers on the theme of secure work, fair pay, and increasing casualisation.
Vintage Reds were delighted to welcome Tony Kevin to talk about
his book, 
Return to Moscow (University of Western Australia, 2017).
Tony worked for thirty years as a diplomat, including as ambassador to Poland and Cambodia in the 1990s. His first posting was in Moscow in 1969-71, and he made brief visits again in 1985 and 1990.
In 2016 he made a 4-week trip to Russia as an independent traveller. Tony is a Russophile, and gave a strongly pro-Russia talk. He believes that we are completely unaware of how overwhelmed we are by Western anti-Russia news. Whereas in other news story we presume some state of regularity, when the news is from Russia we presume irregularity. In the misinformation echo-chamber of the West it requires a huge effort of will and intellect to judge things from the outside. Continue reading
APRIL
until Sunday 29 April: Weber’s Circus, corner Isabella Drive & Clive Steel Ave, Monash.
until Sunday 29 April: Heritage Festival.
until Sunday 19 August: National Library, UK Suffragettes Exhibition.
18 April to 6 May: Palace Cinema, Spanish Film Festival.
Thursday 26 April to Sunday 20 May: The Spiegeltent.
Friday 27 April: 12 noon to 5 p.m., Queanbeyan Library Comic Fest. RSVP 6285-6255.
Saturday 28 April: 10 a.m., Workers Memorial Rally. Near the Carillon on the War Memorial side of King’s Avenue bridge.
Monday 30 April: 9.30 a.m., National Library, John Bell in conversation with Genevieve Jacobs in association with the Canberra International Music Festival.
Tuesday 1 May: 12.30, May Day Rally, corner Childers Street & University Avenue, Civic.
Amy Knox from the CPSU attended the Vintage Reds’ April meeting for a quick update on outsourcing and labour hire at Centrelink, part of the Turnbull government’s reckless privatisation of public service jobs.
Serco has been given a contract to staff Centrelink call centres, with another 1000 staff just announced. This is to address the crisis in unanswered calls to Centrelink (55 million in 2017); but rather than employ more trained, accountable public servants with job security and fair pay and conditions, there are instead casualised staff earning roughly half of what Centrelink staff get for performing the same work.
Amy reminded the meeting that only five years ago all service delivery work was done by employees of the Department of Human Services, and there were no casual employees in the department.
The CPSU is campaigning to scrap the arbitrary staffing level cap put in place by this government, which forces the privatisation of work out to consultants and contractors. This is a fight across the public service and help is needed.
Photo by Amy Knox, CPSU: Vintage Reds line up to fight privatisation of Centrelink.
Meryl Jackson from “Manus Lives Matter” spoke to the Vintage Reds at their March meeting.
Meryl has been involved with refugees for forty years. For the first twenty, she was proud of Australia’s welcoming policy. But the last years have been tough: dehumanising, no compassion shown, especially with the indefinite detention policy.
Some years ago the “Manus Lives Matter” group started doing phone card top-ups for the men, and sent parcels. Then they got to know the men, and made friends with a number of them. Meryl told stories about Nagaraj, a Tamil fisherman; Naeem, a 30-year-old Pakistani with an MBA in finance, a former bank and NGO worker, who has been in detention for four and a half years; and Shamindan, a 27-year-old Sri Lankan Tamil.
Continue reading
More events to keep you busy:
April 2nd to 25th: Palace Cinema, Seniors’ Film Festival.
Fri. & Sat. 13-13 April: Canberra History Bookfair, Curtin shops.
Tues. 17 April: National Film & Sound Archive, 12.30, the Beatles in “Yellow Submarine” (1968).
Wed. 18 April: Hellenic Club Comedy Night, “Straight out of Compo”.
Wed. 18 April: National Film & Sound Archive, 12.30, “Storm Boy” (1976).
Thurs. 19 April: National Film & Sound Archive, 12.30, “Singin’ in the Rain” (1952).
Fri. 20 April: National Film & Sound Archive, 12.30, “Fantasia” (1940).
27 April to 6 May: Canberra International Music Festival.
Vintage Reds are building a flag stockpile; here is a new one making its debut recently at a picnic by the lake. It goes nicely with the “Change the Rules” T-shirt.
Photo: Penny Lockwood
Website time-lag has meant that only those lucky people who received Don’s hand-out were notified about most of the events, festivals and book-launches happening across town since our last Vintage Reds meeting. But some gems are still to come: see below.
For six years, while the demands at work steadily increased, wages for cleaners at the Canberra Hospital were essentially frozen.
But after a long struggle, the hospital cleaners have won a pay rise from the contractor, ISS.
ISS, a global multi-national, claims to have made a profit last year of almost half a billion Australian dollars.*
The size of the cleaners’ pay rise is under a dollar, and the union is still working to bring their wages up to the ACT public service minimum of $24 per hard-working hour. But even this small pay rise couldn’t have happened without the solidarity of cleaning staff and their union. Cleaners have been active and noisy and have run campaign after campaign to get their voices heard. The photo at right shows a “Let them eat cake” stall in November last year outside the hospital. Photos: United Voice; Bill Rowlings.
*www.au.issworld.com/news/2018/02/22…