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This year’s May Day solidarity brigade to Venezuela, the seventh brigade from Australia to be organised by the Australia-Venezuela Solidarity Network (AVSN), had 12 participants representing various unions. One of those was Chris Spindler, an organiser for the Victorian Australian Manufacturing Workers Union (AMWU). Spindler was sent on the brigade as an official AMWU representative, to report back on how the Bolivarian revolution being led by President Hugo Chavez’s government was improving the lives of workers and the poor. On June 11, the Victorian AMWU voted to affiliate to the AVSN and to send a message of solidarity and congratulations to the workers of the giant steel plant Sidor — which was nationalised in April following a long struggle by its workforce. 91������̳ Weekly’s Trent Hawkins spoke to Spindler about the his impressions of the revolution.

On June 12, the South Australian-based manufacturing company Clipsal announced it would sack 200 permanent workers and close its Nurioopta plant based in the Barossa Valley. The company indicated that there would likely be unspecified “flow on” job cuts in its labour hire workforce.

Noel Washington, vice-president of the Victorian branch of the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU), is to appear before the Geelong Magistrates Court on August 8 for refusing to attend a compulsory Australian Building and Construction Commission (ABCC) hearing.

In a blow to the Northern Territory intervention policy, the Australian Medical Association (AMA) announced on June 15 that it will pull out of recruiting medical staff for the program, which it argued the government was dramatically underfunding.

The ZANU-PF government of President Robert Mugabe has its origins in the liberation struggle against the white supremacist Rhodesian regime of Ian Smith. How did a government that emerged from a mass struggle for liberation degenerate into the dictatorship that exists today?