Posts Tagged ‘electricity privatisation’
July 14, 2008
Bob Gould
It’s no secret that in the internal battle inside the DSP I have been, broadly speaking, more sympathetic to the minority that has now been expelled from the DSP and started publishing Direct Action. This sympathy was based on my estimate that, taken as a whole, they are a more serious group of people, particularly the younger ones, and more interested in Marxist theory, and to some extent the history of the labour movement.
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Tags:electricity privatisation
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June 28, 2008
The winter of our discontent
Bob Gould
This winter is the coldest in NSW for a long time. The practical effect of this is that Saturday morning stalls and protests against electricity privatisation, aren’t affected when it’s sunny, but evening meetings preparing for such activities are affected rather dramatically.
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Tags:electricity privatisation
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June 4, 2008
Parramatta meeting against electricity privatisation
Phil Sandford
The people of NSW have been betrayed over the proposed sell-off of the electricity industry, Unions NSW secretary John Robertson told a 60-strong meeting in Parramatta on 3 June.
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May 19, 2008
Jeff Angel gets his thanks from Morris Iemma and Mick Costa
Ed Lewis
Usually governments wait a decent time before, as quietly as possible, breaking promises, but the NSW government of Morris Iemma did the Total Environment Centre’s Jeff Angel no such courtesy last week when it made public its lobbying of the federal government for air pollution concessions to the state’s coal-fired power stations that would gut the emissions trading scheme being developed by the federal government.
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Tags:electricity privatisation, Jeff Angel
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May 13, 2008
Ed Lewis
The struggle against electricity privatisation in NSW has disappeared from the headlines as the two sides, the pro-privatisation Labor government and the anti-privatisation Labor-affiliated unions and Labor Party branch members, settle into trench warfare.
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Tags:electricity privatisation, Labor Party
Posted in Ed Lewis | 5 Comments »
May 8, 2008
Ed Lewis
Another banker weighs in on the Iemma-Costa side of the NSW electricity privatisation battle today, although it’s obvious Babcock and Brown’s Stephen Loosley is a bit better informed about the present state of the Labor Party than either Paul Keating or Bob Carr.
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Tags:electricity privatisation, Labor Party
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May 7, 2008
The popular front between Roger Raven, Mike Berrell, Bob Carr, Paul Keating and the World Socialist Web Site
Bob Gould
I’ve just come back from the semi-regular Wednesday evening meeting of the Power for the People Labor Party rank and file committee, set up to oppose the government’s electricity privatisation push. About 40 Labor Party members were present and 25 or so others, including people from the DSP majority, Solidarity, Socialist Alternative, some Greens, and others.
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Tags:electricity privatisation
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May 7, 2008
Ed Lewis
After last weekend’s revolt of the NSW Labor Party ranks on electricity privatisation, the media are suddenly full of praise for Morris Iemma, previously execrated by the very same media as an incompetent leader of a bungling and corruption ridden government. Iemma is urged play the strongman in opposing the Labor ranks and offered the carrot that this might his improve his dismal opinion poll figures, never mind the fact that he’s going against the opinions of something like 80 per cent of the state.
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Tags:electricity privatisation, Labor Party
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May 6, 2008
There’ve been a few comments on Leftwrites about the electricity privatisation struggle. Ablokeimet obviously has some serious understanding of the history of the Australian labour movement and some sense of the form of mass struggles, and I thank him for his pretty sensible observation.
I don’t want to be too hard on Tom O’Lincoln, but his response encapsulates the completely unscientific, and particularly the un-Leninist, notions and practice at the core of the permanent propaganda orientation of Socialist Alternative, to which Tom moved from the ISO a year or two ago.
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Tags:electricity privatisation, socialism
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May 5, 2008
Bob Gould
In her important and warm-hearted novel, Ride on Stranger, Kylie Tennant describes labour movement battles in Sydney in the 1930s:
The strange turbulence of the city, its careless ferocity, was perhaps due to the large strain of Scots and Irish in the population, but it seemed that if anyone wanted to start a fight, there were always plenty of strangers ready and willing to join in. If the thing had a political flavour, the unions would take up the case, the Labour Leagues [the old name for Labor Party branches] would take it up. Part of the duty of the UCDL was to be out addressing meetings of Labour supporters night after night in little drafty and dusty halls all over the suburbs, putting the case for this or that protest. It was as though Sydney was encompassed with a network of separate spider webs, the spiders might be suspicious and ready to eat each other; they might be connected by a single thread, yet if you touched a strand of that network, 100 spiders leapt and danced indignantly in their webs … The Sydney of the UCDL was a network of lawyer’s offices, of bare wooden meeting halls, of committee meetings, annual conventions.
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Tags:electricity privatisation, Labor Party
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May 5, 2008
Bob Gould
In a spectacular, bulging eyed, shrill-voiced, fist-shaking display of contempt for the Labor Party at the NSW party conference on Saturday, government Treasurer Mick Costa lashed out in a vituperative way at his old associates in the trade union movement and virtually the whole of the organised labour movement, who went on to vote him down on electricity privatisation by 702 votes to 107, about seven to one.
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Tags:electricity privatisation, Labor Party
Posted in Bob Gould | 2 Comments »
May 3, 2008
NSW Labor conference overwhelmingly rejects electricity privatisation
Bob Gould
11pm, Saturday evening.
I’ve just returned, very tired, from the traditional left dinner at the Labor conference. I arrived at it late because the privatisation debate went on into the early evening. I’ve been on the go since 7am, and myself and a couple of comrades have given out 1800 copies of my leaflet.
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Tags:electricity privatisation, Labor Party
Posted in Bob Gould | 5 Comments »
May 1, 2008
The issues involved in, and the consequences of, electricity privatisation
Bob Gould
The economic arguments advanced for electricity privatisation by Mick Costa, Morris Iemma and Ian Macdonald are completely unsound. They’ve been thoroughly refuted by the veteran public infrastructure economists, Bob and Betty Con Walker.
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Tags:electricity privatisation, Labor Party
Posted in Bob Gould | 2 Comments »