International Workers’ Memorial Day

“Mourn the dead: Fight like hell for the living.”

Four Vintage Reds attended the 28 April 2021 International Day of Mourning ceremony at 9 a.m. at the National Workers Memorial in King’s Park near the Carillon.

The gathering of around one hundred included members of the CFMEU, CPSU and the ETU. 178 white crosses were laid out below the Memorial to commemorate the 178 workers killed in the course of their work across the nation in the past year. Mick Gentleman read his speech from his smart phone. Most of the speeches mentioned friends or family who had not returned home from work due to a workplace fatality. The theme this year was “Mourn the dead: Fight like hell for the living”.

The ceremony concluded with a minute’s silence.

Rob P.

Photo: Rob P & Glenda J

Palm Sunday refugee rally 2021

Australia is holding about a hundred Medevaced refugees in hotels, and there are hundreds more people offshore in PNG and Nauru, caught in unimaginable limbo. Earlier in the month a vigil was held in Garema Place for the Murugappan family from Biloela, who have now been in detention on Christmas Island for over three years. Their many supporters in Biloela continue to call for their release.

The theme of this year’s Palm Sunday rally organised by the Refugee Action Campaign of Canberra was “Resist Cruelty“.

Union groups, religious groups, political parties were all represented. Speakers including former Canberra Times Editor Jack Waterford and Anglican Rev. Roberta Hamilton spoke to the crowd, which then marched out of Garema Place and around the centre of town.

Vintage Reds marched with the banner to show support.

Canberra Union Voices raised again!

Director Chrissie Shaw, a legend in Canberra theatrical circles, is back leading the Canberra Union Voices, starting with the year’s first practice on Wednesday 3 March 2020.

Every town needs a good union choir, and here is ours, for all interested singers to join. A recent quote from an anonymous singer:

“I have found it to be an incredibly pleasurable experience.  Chrissie teaches us how to breathe properly, and there are warm up scales and many wonderful union songs.”

Practices are at 2 – 3.30 p.m. at the Dickson Tradies Club. The cost is $20.00 per week or $75.00 for the term.

Contact: Andrew Blankensee 0421 193 794.

 Photo: Canberra Union Voices, 2010, from the archive.

“Women of Steel” — BHP in Wollongong

Film director Robynne Murphy came to one of our meetings in 2019 (read about this below), with news about her film “Women of Steel”, at that time still in the making.

Since then the film has been completed and last year it was a documentary finalist in the Sydney Film Festival. “Women of Steel” also won the History Council of NSW’s 2020 Applied History Award; and was a finalist in the 2020 ATOM (Australian Teachers of Media) Best Documentary awards, in the two categories of History, and Social & Political Issues.

Recently a number of Vintage Reds found they had all had the same excellent idea and booked tickets to see the film at Smith’s in Alinga Street. It’s a wonderful story, beautifully told, and the audience went away uplifted and impressed by what can be achieved by people coming together with a common purpose. It was particularly moving that most of the women were migrants and took on a reluctant and powerful company (BHP) in a second language.

Continue reading

Corona news, March 2020

Covid-19 has brought a lot of things to a grinding halt. The ACT’s first case was notified on 12 March 2020. Since then choirs, gyms, and Bunnings sausage sizzles, as well as public events (Seniors’ Week; International Workers’ Memorial Day, the School Strike for Climate rally), have been cancelled one by one. Vintage Reds shut down after its February meeting.

On 17 March there were 379 known cases in Australia at 7 a.m.; by 4 p.m., it was up to 413. Australians bought up big on toilet paper and baked beans, while in the US they bought more guns. We were urged to plant vegetables, and we did: broad beans, peas, cabbage.

By mid-March the Corona hot-line was sometimes backed up with a 5-hour wait. A friend said, this is our generation’s chance to step up and be heroic. But it’s her daughter who is heroic, a nurse working in a Melbourne hospital.

By the end of March Qantas and Virgin had closed down all international flights in and out of Australia. Qantas stood down 20,000 workers, without pay. (I had to check: its CEO Alan Joyce was on $459,000 a week.) In Melbourne, Myers department store, which during the 1930s Depression put on more workers and ran a food hall to feed them, had laid off 10,000 people.

Our Covid cases in the ACT were up, 22 of them from the Ruby Princess which had contributed a total of 440, 10% of all Australian cases. We had had a death in the ACT by this stage, and 78 cases. The ACTU calculated that a million people had lost their jobs.

Vintage letter writers

The fabulous Vintage Reds fired off a couple of good letters which topped the page today, as below:

Right-royal waste.
The expenses incurred in the Mountbattens’ proposed travel (carbon emissions!), their security entourage, ad-visers, general hangers-on & royalist political sycophants could be in the millions – & should, more appropriately, be devoted to bushfire victims’ wellbeing (“William & Kate to visit bushfire-hit regions”, Feb. 12, p3)
Albert M. White, Queanbeyan

Picking up the cheque.
So a couple of British ‘royals” are to tour Australia. I’m OK with that as long as they’re paying their own way. They are paying their own way, aren’t they?
Fred Pilcher, Kaleen

Letters to the Editor, Canberra Times

Vintage Reds members are a prolific source of informed comment in the letters pages of our local paper. Here is a selection, carefully gleaned online…

Canberra Times, 18 December 2019: Hemlock anybody?
Those criticising Greta Thunberg should note that Socrates said when the debate is lost slander becomes the tool of the losers.
Fred Pilcher, Kaleen

Canberra Times, 9 December 2019:
Scott Morrison says his just announced public sector changes will improve both services to the public and delivery efficiency. But he didn’t ask the public about what we need or the service about how they can improve delivery.

So who advised him? Was it political staffers, or perhaps business lobbyists? Or did a bunch of politicians just get together and make stuff up?

And would now be a good time to start feeling afraid? Or even very afraid?
Pauline Westwood, Dickson

Canberra Times, 27 November 2019: Why Westpac? Why?
Westpac has been accused of breaking anti-money laundering laws 23 million times and will ostensibly be fined for having done so.

That’s like accusing my lawn mower of cutting my grass too short and fining it some of the petrol in its petrol tank. Westpac is a legal entity composed of nothing but pieces of paper; it has no more capacity to break the law than my lawnmower has the capacity to choose the height of its blades.

While Westpac hasn’t broken any laws per se, the people running it who must take responsibility for what has occurred will walk away with little more than a reduction in their multi-million dollar bonuses.

It’s well past time we abolished the legal nonsense that corporations are “natural persons” which can be held responsible and punished for crimes resulting from the actions of executives and employees. Until the people who are actually responsible are held personally liable nothing will change.
Fred Pilcher, Kaleen

Canberra Times, 27 November 2019: Firefighters on welfare
I wonder how many of our wonderful volunteer firefighters are subjected to the cashless welfare card?
Pauline Westwood, Dickson

Canberra Times, 18 November 2019: Humpty Dumpty moment
This is Frydenberg’s journey “Through the Looking-glass”, where, like Alice’s Humpty Dumpty, words can mean anything, even more so in translation(!) in a subjective legal environment.  Time may subliminally foil “Enforceable conditions” imposed on Bellamy’s sale contract “supporting jobs in Australian” (Takeover deal no real threat, CT, 16 November, p.6).
Albert White, Queanbeyan Continue reading

Paul’s Canberra calendar, late August 2019

Comrades, here are political / activist events in or near Canberra (updated 19th August 2019).

#StopAdani Canberra:

Meetings, 5:45 pm every Monday. Organising to stop the proposed massive Adani coal mine in central Queensland. Conservation Council office, Ground Floor, Lena Karmel Lodge, 14/26 Barry Drive (opp. Watson St), Acton. Contact stopadanicbr@gmail.com.

Our politicians need to see, hear and feel community pressure everywhere they go. Join us to take action, in your community:
Join your local group:
▪Follow on Facebook:
▪Let your Federal MP know what you think.

GHD, don’t help Adani wreck our climate! 12:30 – 1:30 pm, Fri., 23rd August 2019, 16 Marcus Clarke St, Civic; and the following week, same time / place. Australian engineering company GHD is reported to be contracting to provide services to Adani. A strange choice for a company that prides itself on its environmental reputation. Please join our peaceful lunchtime gathering outside GHD’s Canberra office, asking the company for a public statement that it will not work on Adani’s “carbon bomb” coal mine. This will be our 5th week of peaceful events outside the office, part of the nationwide call to GHD to step away from Adani. Organised by #StopAdani Canberra and 350.org Canberra.

#BlockadeAdani Organising Space. Adani is on the move; we need to stop them! They are looking to build a train line to meet existing tracks which service their Abbot Point coal terminal. If this line gets built it will be very hard to stop this catastrophic project. We need you to join us up here on the blockade. Information on carpooling, convoying, and cheap tickets can be shared here. For updates, go to frontlineaction.org and take the pledge. ❤ Frontline Action on Coal (FLAC) Camp: (07) 47634032; flaccoal@protonmail.com. Continue reading

School Strike 4 Climate on 20 September

Canberrans old and young are organising to support the School Strike 4 Climate, on
Friday, 20 September in Glebe Park, Canberra, 12 noon till 2 p.m.

Students will be leaving school to attend; working people plan to walk out of their offices and work-sites to join them, hoping by force of numbers to get the message through to this government that all is not well. We demand action on this climate emergency. We urgently need a speedy transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy.

Not in town that day? Don’t worry, people across the country will be doing the same thing that Friday at noon.  (You can find out where at https://globalclimatestrike.net.)

This past July has just been the hottest month in the world’s recorded history. The global climate strike draws attention to the United Nations climate summit, to be held in New York three days later on the 23rd.

Vintage Reds will be there in our VR T shirts at Glebe Park: please join us, and help the students get their voices heard.

We have always lived through hot summers. But this is not the summer of our youth. This is not your grandfather’s summer.”
UN Secretary-General António Guterres