�鶹��ý

Staff at RMIT University held a 24-hour stopwork for a new Enterprise Agreement on November 20. Organised by the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU), the strike was called to reject a substandard agreement that offers a 3% pay rise with no improvements to conditions.  RMIT management wants to leave many vital entitlements in "policy" rather than the Enterprise Agreement because this gives them the "flexibility" to alter them at their discretion.

The National Tertiary Education Union released this statement on November 21. ***   The Minister for Education Christopher Pyne today introduced the Higher Education Support Amendment (Savings and Other Measures) Bill 2013 into parliament, a bill which in the minister’s own words will be damaging to the university sector.    The bill slashes more than $900 million from university grants over the next four years and will cost students almost $300 million in lost discounts for early repayment of their HECS debts.  

After the storm, the “shock doctrine”. This is what awaits the Philippines after the devastation wrought by Typhoon Haiyan. The familiar cycle of “disaster capitalism” allows wealthy and politically connected First World corporations to profit obscenely from the suffering of acutely vulnerable disaster-affected communities. Disaster profiteering is a parasitic tendency deeply embedded in the structures of the neoliberal global economy. It will degrade and corrupt the international “relief effort” under way in the Philippines.

Friends of the Earth released this statement on November 21. *** Friends of the Earth has welcomed today’s announcement by the Premier that the moratorium on the process of unconventional gas fracking will be extended at least until June 2015. Friends of the Earth campaigns co-ordinator Cam Walker said: “This is a good start. Pushing the moratorium out to 2015 will take some of the heat out of the community concern over new fossil fuel projects.

Qantas has announced the closure of its maintenance base for Boeing 747 aircraft at Avalon airport in Victoria. About 300 workers are to be sacked, most of them from the local town of Geelong. The Australian Licensed Aircraft Engineers Association has questioned company claims that the jobs will be transferred to the more efficient Brisbane maintenance base, suggesting that a shortage of skilled workers in Brisbane will mean the maintenance is mainly done offshore in south-east Asia. These job losses add to a long string of bad news for employment in Geelong.