Anthony Albanese faces AUKUS submarine deal backlash at Victorian Labor state conference.
THE AGE 15/6/23:
Powerful unions want Labor’s rank and file to formally condemn the $368 billion AUKUS submarine deal this weekend, potentially setting up an awkward clash with Prime Minister Anthony Albanese when he addresses Victorian Labor’s first state conference in four years
Both the prime minister and Premier Daniel Andrews will deliver speeches to party faithful at the conference, according to several state and federal government sources.
The conference will be the first since 2019 – before the pandemic, Melbourne’s long lockdowns, and the federal intervention that followed revelations by The Age about branch stacking, especially by former Labor right powerbroker Adem Somyurek.
The 606 delegates will be asked to vote on a motion from manufacturing union the AMWU seen by The Age, slamming Australia’s decision to acquire a nuclear-powered fleet from the United States and the prospect of the Albanese government “dragging Australia into a new Cold War, rather than pursuing the labour movement’s longstanding commitment to a peaceful and independent foreign and defence policy”.
AMWU Victorian secretary Tony Mavromatis said he expected his motion would win strong support from the conference floor.
“We will push ahead with our motion, no matter who is at the conference, including prime ministers,” he said. “The AUKUS deal is a terrible arrangement for Australia. It lets down Australian workers, apprentices and trainees and Australian manufacturing. We should not be getting into nuclear.”
The AUKUS deal was initially agreed to by former prime minister Scott Morrison and later supported by federal Labor.
While Andrews is expected to receive a hero’s welcome after Labor’s resounding November election victory, the conference is the first opportunity for years for Labor’s rank and file to vent over the big issues facing the state, including the housing crisis.
…………… To be held at the Moonee Valley Racecourse, the conference will also be the first public display of factional muscle since the federal intervention.
………… Some party insiders also see the weekend meeting as an important preparation for the federal conference in Brisbane in August, where the AUKUS submarine deal and stage three tax cuts are expected to feature prominently.
Labor’s national executive has administered the branch since branch stacking revelations were aired in June 2020.
The state conference was traditionally the setting for often passionate public rows over policy and factional grievances, especially in the tumultuous 1970s and ’80s. Conferences have been more stage-managed in recent years.
The move follows a complaint to the party’s dispute tribunal by veteran Labor activist Eric Derricott about the factional control over elections at the conference, but will leave the results of the election unknown for some weeks.
After this conference all such elections will be held by secret ballot.
Current state Labor president Susie Byers said Victorian Labor had achieved much in the past three years, “not just with election victories, but reforms to our branch that have made the organisation one our members can be proud to belong to”. https://www.theage.com.au/politics/victoria/albanese-faces-aukus-backlash-from-victorian-labor-party-faithful-20230614-p5dgix.html
Australia’s Atomic Survivors want Prime Minister Albanese to sign treaty to ban nuclear weapons.
By Rudi Maxwell, June 14 2023 https://www.canberratimes.com.au/story/8232976/survivors-want-pm-to-sign-treaty-to-ban-nuclear-weapons/
Karina Lester (above) and June Lennon are still affected by the fallout from British nuclear tests on their country 70 years later.
The two First Nations women are part of a delegation of atomic survivors and relatives, which includes veterans, visiting Canberra to call on the government to sign an international treaty to ban nuclear weapons.
“We still see the craters and the scars that were left by those weapons tests, both at Emu Field and also at Maralinga Tjarutja,” Ms Lester, a Yankunytjatjara Anangu woman from north-west South Australia, said.
Greens Senator Jordon Steele-John and Labor MP Josh Wilson co-chair the Parliamentary Friends of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which heard from the delegation on Wednesday.
“It was so powerful to hear the stories of lived experience and direct connection to the impacts of nuclear testing,” Senator Steele-John said.
“That makes it viscerally real and really brings home the urgent need to eliminate nuclear weapons.”
Ms Lester’s father, the late Yami Lester, (above) went blind as a young man after the British tested atomic weapons in Emu Field.
“The scars are still felt on our country,” she said.
“And the scars are still evident on our people.”
The group of Australian atomic survivors and relatives are calling on Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to sign the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.
In 1953 the British initiated a program of nuclear testing in Australia at the Montebello Islands, off the coast of WA and in Emu Field in South Australia.
Two years later, the British government announced a larger site for the tests at Maralinga.
In October 1953 when the British detonated the Totem I and II nuclear bombs at Emu Field, Yankunytjatjara, Antikarinya and Pitjantjatjara woman June Lennon was only a few months old.
TODAY. Rafael Grossi – suffering a sort of “Schizophrenia” about nuclear so-called “safety?
No wonder that the poor guy is looking anxious lately.
It must have been kinda fun for Rafael Grossi, being Director General of IAEA, from 2019 to 2022, running around the world, promoting the nuclear industry and the safety of nuclear power plants.
He’s still got that task, but it’s probably not any fun any more.
The shit has hit the fan. Europe’s largest nuclear power plant is, as Grossi is forced to admit, facing “a dangerous situation”. Sitting in a war zone, run by exhausted Ukrainian workers, under control of Russia troops, repeatedly attackedby shelling, now with its essential cooling water threatened – the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant is in danger. That means that the region is in danger, Ukraine is in danger, the whole of Europe is in danger.
Grossi got to this top job at a “good” time. Everyone was forgetting the series of nuclear accidents large and small. Chernobyl, which radioactively poisoned large swathes of Europe, was over, wasn’t it? The fun time of midwiving a “nuclear renaissance’ was on – “nuclear to save the climate – blah blah”
Poor Rafael – his contradictory job is impossible – to persuade the world that nuclear power is oh so safe, while at the same time warning the world of its deadly peril.
The Voltaire Network on the collapse of Kiev. Ukraine -its past, and now
The collapse of Kiev, Thierry Meyssan, 14 June 23, Translation, Roger Lagassé
1 The fate of arms has decided. The moment of truth has spoken. The Ukrainian counter-offensive has failed miserably. NATO’s considerable armaments were useless. The battlefield is littered with corpses. All for nothing. The territories that joined the Russian Federation by referendum will remain Russian.
This “checkmate” not only marks the end of Ukraine as we have known it, but of Western domination that had staked its future on its lies.
The multipolar world may be born this summer at several international summits. A new way of thinking in which might no longer makes right.
This article was written on June 10. At that time, the only information available came from Russia and allied headquarters. Ukraine had imposed a total embargo on its counter-offensive. We should therefore have waited before publishing this text. However, we felt that if Ukraine had been able to break through Russia’s first line of defense, even if it hadn’t managed to get into the breach, it would have let us know. We are therefore publishing this analysis.
In six days, from June 4 to 10, 2023, the Ukrainian army launched its counter-offensive and suffered a terrible defeat.
During the summer, Russian forces built two defense lines in the part of Novorossia they liberated and in the Donbass. They prevent the passage of all armored vehicles.
Ukrainian forces have chosen a dozen points of attack to retake “enemy-occupied” territory. Their armored vehicles were unable to get through the first line of Russian defenses and piled up in front of it, where they were destroyed one by one by Russian artillery and suicide drones.
At the same time, the Russian army targeted missiles at command centers and arsenals inside Ukrainian territory and destroyed them.
The Ukrainian air defense system was destroyed by hypersonic missiles as soon as it was installed. In its absence, the Ukrainians were unable to carry out the maneuvers planned by Nato.
Russia did not use any of its new weapons, apart from its NATO weapons jamming system and some of its hypersonic missiles.
The border is now a long graveyard of tanks and men. Airports are full of smoking Mig-29 and F-16 wrecks.
The staffs of the United States, the Atlantic Alliance and Ukraine are passing the buck for this historic disaster. Hundreds of thousands of human lives and 500 billion dollars have been wasted for nothing. Western weapons, which shook the world in the 90s, are now worthless compared to the Russian arsenal of today. Strength has changed sides.
Two conclusions can already be drawn:
DO NOT CONFUSE THE UKRAINIAN ARMY WITH THE “INTEGRAL NATIONALISTS”
While there is no longer a Ukrainian army capable of high-intensity warfare, there are still the forces of the “integral nationalists” (sometimes called “Banderists” or “Ukrainian-Nazis”). But they are only trained for low-intensity warfare. Its leaders went to fight in Chechnya in the late 90s on behalf of the CIA and NATO secret services, and sometimes in Syria in the 2020s. They are trained in targeted assassinations, sabotage and civilian massacres. Nothing more.
They succeeded
1. In sabotaging the Russian-German-French-Dutch Nord Stream gas pipeline, plunging Germany and then the European Union into recession on September 26, 2022.
2. In sabotaging the Kerch Strait bridge (known as the “Crimean Bridge”), on October 8, 2022.
3. In attacking the Kremlin with drones, May 3, 2023
4. In using drones to attack the Ivan Kurs, the intelligence vessel defending the Turkish Stream gas pipeline in the Black Sea, on May 26, 2023.
5. In sabotaging the Kakhovka dam to split Novorossia in two, on June 6, 2023.
6. In sabotaging the Togliatti-Odessa ammonia pipeline to destroy the Russian mineral fertilizer industry, on June 7, 2023.
Just as in the two World Wars and the Cold War, they proved their terrorist capabilities, but played no decisive role on the battlefield.
Now more than ever, we need to distinguish between Ukrainians who thought they were defending their people, and the “integral nationalists” [1], who don’t care about their compatriots and have been trying for a century to eradicate Russians and their culture.
THE UKRAINE WE KNEW IS DEAD
Until now, Ukraine has been above all a power of communication. Kiev succeeded in making people believe that the 2014 coup d’état that overthrew a democratically elected president in favor of integral nationalists was a revolution. Likewise, it has managed to make people forget the way it crushed its citizens in the Donbass, refusing to give them access to public services, to pay civil servants’ salaries and pensions to the elderly and, ultimately, bombing its cities. Finally, it succeeded in convincing Westerners that Ukraine was a homogenous country with a single population living a common history.
As in most wars, there is also a “civil war” aspect [2]. Today, everyone can see that, contrary to what was claimed, Vladimir Putin’s analysis was not a reconstruction of history, but a factual truth. The people of Donbass are profoundly Russian. The people of Novorossia (including Crimea) are of Russian culture, albeit with a different history (they have never known serfdom). Ukraine has never existed as an independent state in history, apart from one decade, during the periods 1917-22 and 1941-45, and three other decades, since 1991.
During these three experiences, Kiev never stopped purging its people and massacring its citizens when the full nationalists were in power (1917-22 with Simon Petliura, 1941-45 with Stepan Bandera, and 2014-22 with Petro Poroshenko and Volodymyr Zelensky). In total, over the course of a century, the “integral nationalists” – as they call themselves – have murdered more than 3 million of their compatriots.
During the First World War, the people of Novorossia had already risen up around the anarchist Nestor Makhno; during the Second World War, the people of Donbass and Novorossia rose up as Soviets; while this time, they are fighting against the “integral nationalists” in Kiev with Russian forces.
The only way to stop these massacres is to separate the “integral nationalists” from the population of Russian culture they want to kill [3]. Since Nato staged a coup in 2014 and put them in power, there’s no other way but to note the country’s current division and leave them in power in Kiev. It is the Ukrainians, and they alone, who will have to overthrow them.
Current military operations have already done so. The part of the country liberated by the Russians voted in a referendum to join the Federation. However, last year’s Russian advance was halted by President Vladimir Putin as part of negotiations with Ukraine, conducted first in Belarus, then in Turkey. Odessa is still Ukrainian in law, even though it is culturally Russian. Transnistria is still Moldavian, even though it is culturally Russian.
The war is technically over. No offensive can alter the current borders. Admittedly, the fighting may drag on and a peace treaty is a long way off, but the die is cast. There is still a problem in Ukraine and Moldavia: Odessa and Transnistria are still not Russian. Above all, there remains a fundamental problem: in violation of their oral and written commitments, the members of the Atlantic Alliance have stockpiled US weapons on Russia’s borders, jeopardizing its security.
Antinuclear 