Australia’s prime minister promised yesterday to create 50,000 “green” jobs and apprenticeships to combat climate change and unemployment simultaneously.
Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has prioritized environmental legislation this year even as his government forecast that Australian unemployment would rise to 8.5 percent next year from the current 5.8 percent because of the global downturn.
“The government I lead will not stand idly by while thousands of young Australians have their hopes crushed by a global recession not of their own making,” Rudd told the Labor Party conference.
The “green” jobs package includes 30,000 apprentice positions that offer training in environment-friendly building practices, such as installing solar energy panels and water recycling systems, and retrofitting homes to be more energy efficient.
The program will also create 10,000 positions in a national Green Jobs Corps that will provide environmental training for unemployed people aged between 18 and 24, and employ them in public works projects, such as planting trees and restoring walking tracks. Money would also be poured into another 10,000 jobs that encourage sustainability and green building practices.
Rudd said the A$94 million (US$77 million) job creation and training program was aimed at helping youth obtain new skills “that will be highly relevant to a lower-carbon economy in the future.”
The announcement was welcomed by Sharan Burrow, president of the Australian Council of Trade Unions, who called it “a great step forward.”
“It’s a recognition that here is a prime minister who is determined to act on unemployment,” Burrow said.
Funding for the two-year “green” program will come out of money already budgeted for vocational education, a press release issued by Rudd’s office said.
Rudd has focused heavily on the environment this year and is pushing tough legislation to curb Australia’s emissions of carbon dioxide. Most opposition parties oppose the legislation, which goes before the Senate next month.
In the sweltering streets of Jakarta, buskers carry towering, hollow puppets and pass around a bucket for donations. Now, they fear becoming outlaws. City authorities said they would crack down on use of the sacred ondel-ondel puppets, which can stand as tall as a truck, and they are drafting legislation to remove what they view as a street nuisance. Performances featuring the puppets — originally used by Jakarta’s Betawi people to ward off evil spirits — would be allowed only at set events. The ban could leave many ondel-ondel buskers in Jakarta jobless. “I am confused and anxious. I fear getting raided or even
POLITICAL PATRIARCHS: Recent clashes between Thailand and Cambodia are driven by an escalating feud between rival political families, analysts say The dispute over Thailand and Cambodia’s contested border, which dates back more than a century to disagreements over colonial-era maps, has broken into conflict before. However, the most recent clashes, which erupted on Thursday, have been fueled by another factor: a bitter feud between two powerful political patriarchs. Cambodian Senate President and former prime minister Hun Sen, 72, and former Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, 76, were once such close friends that they reportedly called one another brothers. Hun Sen has, over the years, supported Thaksin’s family during their long-running power struggle with Thailand’s military. Thaksin and his sister Yingluck stayed
Kemal Ozdemir looked up at the bare peaks of Mount Cilo in Turkey’s Kurdish majority southeast. “There were glaciers 10 years ago,” he recalled under a cloudless sky. A mountain guide for 15 years, Ozdemir then turned toward the torrent carrying dozens of blocks of ice below a slope covered with grass and rocks — a sign of glacier loss being exacerbated by global warming. “You can see that there are quite a few pieces of glacier in the water right now ... the reason why the waterfalls flow lushly actually shows us how fast the ice is melting,” he said.
RESTRUCTURE: Myanmar’s military has ended emergency rule and announced plans for elections in December, but critics said the move aims to entrench junta control Myanmar’s military government announced on Thursday that it was ending the state of emergency declared after it seized power in 2021 and would restructure administrative bodies to prepare for the new election at the end of the year. However, the polls planned for an unspecified date in December face serious obstacles, including a civil war raging over most of the country and pledges by opponents of the military rule to derail the election because they believe it can be neither free nor fair. Under the restructuring, Myanmar’s junta chief Min Aung Hlaing is giving up two posts, but would stay at the
RSS