Sri Lankan Asylum Seekers - Urgent Action

The Australian navy recently intercepted a boat carrying 83 Sri Lankans and 2 Indonesians. After some time aboard the HMAS Success, these men - who on the face of it may have a good claim to refugee or humanitarian protection - have been taken to Christmas Island for initial checks.According to numerous media reports, Australian officials have been in discussions with Indonesia and Sri Lanka regarding the return of these men to Indonesia and from there, possibly, to Sri Lanka. Australia’s primary obligation to refugees is not to refoule them - that is to return them, directly or indirectly, to a country where they face persecution. To engage in discussions with the governments of the very countries these men have fled sets a dangerous precedent.

Email the Immigration Minister

Please use the following points to email the Immigration Minister, Kevin Andrews - Kevin.Andrews.MP@aph.gov.au calling on him to ensure that the rights of these men are protected and their safety ensured..

News Sources

The following is a small sample of media stories relevant to this action:

• We’re Ready to Repatriate Boat People: Sri Lanka
• Jakarta offers help for Sri Lankan asylum seekers
• Asylum Seekers to be returned to Sri Lanka
• Group transferred to Christmas Island

TEAR’s advocacy information and resources are online at www.tear.org.au/advocacy
Advocacy and campaigning issues are also discussed at Ben’s Blog

JustAct Action: Marketing that Kills – the selling of breastmilk substitutes throughout the world

Action

Refuse to support companies whose marketing practices endanger the lives of mothers and babies world wide, breaking the World Health Organisation’s international code of practice!

How

Gather evidence and boycott! And let the companies know you are refusing their products and why.

THE ISSUE

• This action is about choice, freedom of information and the lives of babies across the world.
• It is about multi-national companies using false and manipulative information and restricting choice of parents through their marketing of breast milk substitutes, endangering the health and lives of babies and mothers world over.

In the Philippines

In the Philippines alone, 16,000 babies die each year because of inappropriate feeding. Often they are fed breastmilk substitutes (that is any food, including formula, which is given to babies in replacement of breastmilk) from a very early age. Only 1.4 percent of 6month olds are exclusively fed breast milk throughout the Philippines. The World Health Organisation and UNICEF have found that the fierce marketing of baby milk formula throughout the country, and indeed the world, misleads parents into believing infant formula is equivalent or superior for their child. This sophisticated marketing of breastmilk substitutes creates millions of dollars profits for multinationals at the expense of the health of babies, which contributes to low breastfeeding rates and higher rates of death among babies.

Unfortunately this is not an isolated occurrence!

The UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre estimates that 2 million infants die around the world every year because they are not adequately breastfed. Where water is unsafe a bottle-fed child is up to 25 times more likely to die as a result of diarrhoea than a breastfed child.

TAKE ACTION

Visit JustAct for more information and which companies we are targeting!

Cafe-Praxis @ Dangerous Stories 2 (9-11Mar)

Hi Guys Cafe-Praxis will be making another appearance in a downsized form at
Dangerous Stories 2 - Forge National Summit

There will be a swarm of speakers at this event and we will be there serving fair trade coffee, promoting UCA, justice causes and trying to get people to sign a wall full of political petitions like the “anti cluster bombs”, “no detention centre on Christmas Island” and you know whatever we have wall space for. It doesn’t look like we will be running any programmed content/workshops but we will have discussion papers on nuclear energy, religious vilification, work rights etc to pick up. And of course we will have Zoriah’s photos and video interviews about social issues on the walls.
So look out for us.

(If your keen to help contact me as things are still being organised)

Oh and the big news for Cafe-praxis fans is we now have our own coffee machine!!!
And… Yes, it will be available to hire (fair trade stuff only… of course)
and I will get to work on making a bit of an “instant cafe church pack” with reflections on social issues to come for the ride.
I’m thinking you could politicise your church fete or something

Age

3500 disabled Australians worse off

Since the July 2006 Commonwealth ‘welfare to work’ changes the rules for people with disabilities have changed. People with disabilities who are evaluated as being able to work a minimum of 15 hours a week (rather than the previous 30) are no longer entitled to a disability support pension. In November 2006, The Australian newspaper lamented that the Commonwealth Government was failing to reach its ‘welfare to work’ target set for the number of people with disabilities to be placed on lower social security payments and forced to look for employment. At the time only 2,500 people with disabilities were placed on lower payments, instead of the Government target of 8,600. Subsequent to this, The Age (15/01/07) reported that since the July 2006 policy changes, more than 3500 disabled Australians have been put onto unemployment payments, rather than the pension, and forced to look for part-time jobs. Those forced onto the unemployment benefit suffer a cut in support payments of $46 or more a week, depending on their circumstances.

[Read more]

‘Welfare to Work’ laws under the spotlight again

The JIM Unit has been highlighting the negative impact of the new Commonwealth Government policy called ‘welfare to work’ for some time now. The Government continues to face near universal criticism from welfare and church groups over the new welfare rules in place since 1 July last year. Recently, the Sydney Morning Herald (24/01/07) reported that a pregnant woman had her welfare payments cut off for eight weeks but was not given any extra financial help because she was not considered “vulnerable”, prompting the Vice-President of the National Welfare Rights Network, Kate Beaumont to say: “The Government has got its policy antennae in a mess when they cut all payments from a woman with an unborn child yet shower her with a $5000 baby bonus when the baby is born”. The young woman, who lives in regional NSW, was receiving the youth allowance payment but it was suspended after she breached the new requirements. The Australian (05/01/07) reported that almost 5000 unemployed people have now been cut off from unemployment payments for the maximum eight weeks since July. An estimated 14,000 are expected to lose payments for breaking welfare-to-work rules.

[Read more]

Christian Face of Bali (Aug 3-14 2007)

Join a fully escorted 10 day tour to Bali. Visit Christian churches, schools, orphanages and villages. Learn of the contextualization of the church in a Hindu culture. Stay at the church-owned beach resort for 7 nights, a homestay in a Christian village, and 2 nights at a beach resort on the north coast of Bali. Plenty of free time available for private shopping or sightseeing etc.

Price - approx AU$ 2000 pp - includes accommodation, air fares, taxes, transport and most meals.
Tour leaders are Rev Brian and Lorraine Niblock who have had 3 placements as volunteers in Bali with the Protestant Christian Church in Bali, a partner church of the Uniting Church in Australia. They are returning again in August 2007.

Expressions of interest by end of March.
Contact: Rev Brian and Lorraine Niblock, tour leaders, Ph (03) 5981-8716, email lb.niblock@optusnet.com.au, or
Sandy Boyce, People in Mission Coordinator,(08) 8236 4240, sandy@sa.uca.org.au.

This trip is jointly coordinated by Rev Brian and Lorraine Niblock and the People in Mission program.

Rev Sandy Boyce
People in Mission Coordinator
http://www.uim.uca.org.au/peopleinmission

Getup Action - David Hicks Action

Dear friends,

That’s what Australia wants, and last week John Howard publicly admitted he has the power to do it. But year after year he refuses. He’d rather see David Hicks tried under a sham system of justice, destined to be challenged in US courts for years to come. We’ve tried everything, but sometimes the only way to get results is to speak to politicians in the language they care about. Our Prime Minister didn’t care about David Hicks’ basic legal rights until the opinion polls told him he should. So today we’re reaching out to the one group John Howard can’t disregard - and asking you to write to them personally. Use our newest technology to send your own message to a resident of John Howard’s electorate of Bennelong, in Sydney’s North, asking them to join the call for justice.

We’ll compile every personal message and hand-deliver an individual letter to every home in Bennelong. We’ll also give every resident there a Bring David Hicks Home postcard to fill in and send straight to the Prime Minister’s office. Since the Prime Minister is determined to play politics, we know our democracy is the best and only way to hold him accountable. And when he starts receiving thousands of postcards urging him to bring David Hicks home, he’ll know they’re from voters in his own marginal seat.

www.getup.org.au/campaign/AussieToAussie

So that’s what we look like….

You may have noticed over the last 12days this map on the front page just below “your feeds”. In the same spirit as the feeds it is another web based “get to known you game” It shows the location of visitors to the front page (so that means all our rss feed friends will have to visit the home page to make a dot). Basically it is a way of us seeing who we are and where we are. Cool hey?

It is updated daily and the little dots are 1-9 people; the bit bigger dots are 10-99 people and the big dot is 100-999 people.

Is there a dot for you?

(Oh and I found (19/2) a button that shows smaller clusters …. see)

CPT - Hebron Reflection: We are the Message

CPTnet: 15 December 2006
by Jerry Levin

I recently received a question from a reader who wanted to know, “What is CPT doing over there to share the Gospel of Jesus?” The following was my answer.

“I’m not sure exactly what you mean. I thought our reports made it clear that we share the Gospel of Christ by trying to exemplify its meaning. It’s something we do every day. By our actions, CPTers witness [to] what kind of followers of Jesus we are trying to be. In so doing, we demonstrate, we hope, the power of nonviolence, the power of Gospel love, sacrifice, and hope to the terribly oppressed Palestinians, as well as our solidarity with
and thanks to the many Jewish Israelis with whom we work who are standing up along with us in the West Bank for their Palestinian neighbors. They too are demonstrating that they understand His message.

“But that’s only part of what we do. Through our reports we hope that fellow followers of Jesus elsewhere in the world will take seriously to heart the words and pictures we send back of the desperate conditions under which Palestinians are obliged to live debilitating minute by debilitating minute. We hope that these readers in turn will be encouraged to take part in the struggle in their home countries to influence an end to the oppressive occupation that is tragically so similar to the Roman occupation two thousand years ago and the Crusader conquest a thousand years after that.

“Some of the Palestinians we are trying to stand with, by the way, are Christian. But can you imagine? Where Muslims with whom we interact daily are concerned, we don’t have to say a thing about the Gospels. By our willingness to risk standing with them, they get the message powerful and clear.

“Here’s something else that may be difficult to imagine; but it’s true. Many many of the Muslims whom we try to help are already living the kind of life that Jesus taught. They put their trust in God [Allah] unhesitatingly. They admire, respect, and love Jesus greatly (They call him Issa.) They pray much more often and regularly than many Christians do. And when they do pray, they seem to be far less interested in what God can do for them and much more in what they can do for God. Powerful sentiments for a people in the Holy Land from whom much has been taken with nothing given back in return.

“Finally our experience here and what we know is taking place in the United States convinces us that an extremely fertile ground for sharing the Gospel of love is back home amongst millions of Christians, some of whom are the nation’s most powerful political and religious leaders. By their actions, they are tragically complicating the lives dangerously of the very people here in Palestine and Israel whom they would like to see become followers of Jesus too. Clearly a self-defeating process.

“I hope this explanation helps.”

Bubble - Energy Vision

We haven’t had a bubble for a while and I found this graphic for free at http://www.antinuclearaustralia.com/index.html
BTW- if you missed it in the rss feeds - Ben has a great reflection on the “We always had a climate policy” of the government. Here

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