Dear Leftwrite readers,

Union Solidarity’s Dave Kerin, SP’s Anthony Main, and two meat workers officials were witnesses last week at the trial of a Melbourne boss who had driven his vehicle through a picket line, nearly killing workers. The boss got off scot free, but the blatant class bias of the judge is a sign of the times. Here is a report from a SP comrade who attended the trial.
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I arrived at the Flemington Racecourse with several Melbourne University students who had come along to show their support. We had a placard that read "Melbourne University Student Union supports cabbies". We were informed by someone called Alister Morley, that on orders from the Minister’s office, we had been asked to leave the venue. We refused, were threatened with charges of trespass, and still refused to leave.
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· What do you think about the Agreement negotiated by the current leadership?
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The withdrawal of the electricity privatisation legislation in NSW until the parliamentary sitting in September is a second victory for the anti-privatisation forces in a protracted war on the question.
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Mary Bluett, the president of AEU Vic, is defending a deeply divisive pay deal with gains won for those at the top and bottom of the scale by saying “you are a long time at the top".
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The Leninist Party Faction, a dissident minority expelled from the Democratic Socialist Perspective on May 13 and Direct Action, an organisation established by former DSP members in Melbourne and Geelong after they left the DSP in May 2006 have united to launch a new party, the Revolutionary Socialist Party (RSP) with members in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Canberra, Perth, Geelong, Adelaide, Newcastle and Cairns, and others currently residing overseas.
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I was browsing the ABC news site earlier today and came across this brief story.
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Major Jim Hammett is frustrated. What’s the point of being a tough-guy soldier if they won’t let you kill and be killed? Hammett has been to Somalia, East Timor, Tonga and Iraq, and now he’s an author. Writing in the Australian Army Journal, he has “deflated the boastful bombast that has characterized official versions” of Australia’s role in Iraq.
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