He visited East Timor in November 2005 for Union Aid Abroard - APHEDA. He is also involved with the ACTU's Your Rights at Work campaign, delivering speeches at rallies such as the Australian industrial relations legislation national day of protest, 2005.

Tim is a graduate of the University of Sydney and was a director of the University of Sydney Union.

Lori Wallach, Director, Global Trade Watch

Lori Wallach is Director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch division. Global Trade Watch is a leader in the global citizen movement for fair trade and investment policy. Wallach has played an important role in fostering the growing debate about implications of different models of globalization on jobs, livelihoods and wages; the environment; public health and safety; equality and social justice and democratically accountable governance.

A Harvard-trained lawyer, Wallach has promoted the public interest regarding globalization and international commercial agreements in every forum: Congress and foreign parliaments, the courts, government agencies, and the media. Described as “Ralph Nader with a sense of humor” in a Wall Street Journal profile, “the Trade Debate's Guerrilla Warrior” in the National Journal, and “Madame Defarge of Seattle” by the Institute for International Economics, Wallach has testified on NAFTA, GATT-WTO, and other trade issues before over 20 U.S. congressional committees, numerous other countries’ legislatures, the U.S. International Trade Commission and the Office of the U.S.

Wallach has served as a trade commentator on CNN, ABC, CNBC, C-SPAN, and regularly appears on such programs as All Things Considered and The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. Wallach’s most recent book is Whose Trade Organization? A Comprehensive Guide to the WTO (The New Press, 2004). She has also contributed to numerous anthologies including Alternatives to Economic Globalization: A Better World Is Possible. She also is a founding board member of the International Forum on Globalization, on whose board she also serves.

Sharan Burrow, President of the ACTU and ITUC
In May 2000, Sharan Burrow became the second woman to be elected President of the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU and then in December 2004, Sharan was the first woman to be elected President of the world union body, the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU), which represents 148 million workers in 231 affiliated organisations across 150 countries. In October 2000, Sharan also became the first woman to be elected President of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions Asia Pacific Region Organisation.

Since then the ICFTU has merged with the World Labour Congress to create the International Trade Union Confederation, and Sharan Burrow is its first President.

She is currently President of the International Centre for Trade Union Rights, a member of the Governing Body of the International Labour Organisation and a member of the Stakeholder Council of the Global Reporting Initiative. As part of her ILO responsibilities, Sharan chairs the Workers' Group of the Sub-Committee on Multinational Enterprises.

Yuri Munsayac, Asia Partnership for Human Development

Unfortunately Yuri Munsayac has come down with a serious illness and is unable to attend the Forum.  To speak in his place will be:

Melville Fernandez, Caritas Australia's South Asia Program Coordinator, Advisor to Asia Partnership for Human Development (India)

Don Henry, Executive Director, Australian Conservation Foundation
In the 1980s Don Henry campaigned for the protection of Moreton Island, Great Barrier Reef Islands, the rainforests of north Queensland, and Cape York.

As Director of the Wildlife Preservation Society of Queensland and the editor of Wildlife Australia he succeeded in generating grassroots support for conservation among both rural and city people.

He has served as a Commissioner with the Australian Heritage Commission, President of the Australian Committee for the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and the Moreton Island Protection Committee.

In 1991 he was awarded a Global 500 Environment Award from the United Nations Environment Program. From 1989-92 he was the Australian Director of World Wide Fund for Nature. He was then based in Washington DC with World Wildlife Fund, working as Director of the South Pacific program (1992-95), the Asia-Pacific program (1995-96) and the Global Forest program (1996-98).  He co-chaired a global forest initiative with the World Bank designed to conserve 250 million hectares of forests.  In 1998 he returned to Australia to take up the position of Executive Director of ACF.

Professor Jane Kelsey, University of Auckland and Action Resource Education Network of Aotearoa

Professor Jane Kelsey is an academic and activist. A professor of law at the University of Auckland, Jane has written a number of books and many articles on the New Zealand neoliberal experiment and on globalization, especially the WTO, GATS and bilateral free trade agreements.

John Sutton

Is the National Secretary of the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union. He is also the International President of the Trade Union International of Building, Wood and Building Material Industries (UITBB). He is on the Australian Council of Trade Unions Executive and is has a B.Econ (Hons.) from the University of Sydney.

Kelly Dent, Advocacy Coordinator of Labour Rights, Oxfam

Kelly Dent has been a labour activist for the past 22 years. Kelly has lived and worked extensively in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Thailand and Indonesia. Her work has involved supporting mostly women workers in the garment industry to organise though building training programs, international campaigning and research work.

Prior to Asia, Kelly worked in the Australian trade union movement with the Australian Social Welfare Union and then, after amalgamation with the Australian Services Union (ASU) as an Organiser and Industrial Officer.

In 2005/2006 Kelly co researched (with Tim Connor) a major Oxfam report ‘Offside! Labour rights and sportswear production in Asia’. Offside! Focused on workers rights to form and join unions, in the sportswear industry in Asia.  Kelly currently works with Oxfam Australia as an Advocacy Coordinator of Labour Rights.

 Athena Ronquillo-Ballestros (Philippines), Greenpeace International

Athena Ronquillo Ballesteros has been the climate and energy campaigner for Greenpeace International for 13 years.  Based in Manilla, in partnership with local communities and other NGOs, Athena has led the long fight against 3 of the largest proposed coal-fired power plants in Southeast Asia (2 in Thailand, 1 in Pulupandan, Negros) and successfully won 3 of them by the end of 2002.  

She is a founder and steering committee member of the Climate Action Network Southeast Asia and International.  A Founder and Advisor of the NGO forum on the Asian Development Bank, Founder and Steering committee member of Global IFI Watch and is a Steering committee member of REN21, Global network of public and private sector energy experts. 

Athena is passionate about making change happen on a local as well as global level.

Dave Sweeney, Australian Conservation Foundation

 Dave Sweeney has been active in the uranium mining and nuclear debate for two decades through his work with the media, trade unions and environment groups on mining, resource and indigenous issues. He currently works on the Australian Conservation Foundation’s national nuclear campaign and holds a vision of a nuclear free Australia that is positive about its future and honest about its past.

Elmer Labog, Chairperson, Kilusang Mayo Uno (May First Movement) Labor Center, Philippines

Elmer labog is also Vice President, Bagong Alyansang Makabayan or BAYAN (New Patriotic Alliance of the Philippines) and Auditor, International League of People’s Struggle (ILPS).

Elmer “Ka Bong” Labog was elected Chairperson of KMU in 2003. He is a veteran of the Filipino people’s arduous struggles against the “reign of terror” of the martial law years in the Philippines and the tsunami-like effects of the progressive mass movement and ‘people power’ in the Philippines, and today’s painful period of military death squads killing progressive activists, including union leaders, across the country.

KMU is the largest trade union centre in the Philippines, upholding genuine, militant and nationalist trade unionism, and it is a major component of BAYAN, a multi-sectoral organisation of the national democratic movement, with millions of supporters. KMU is a founder member of ILPS, formed in Europe in 2001.

In the last years of the 1960s, at the Los Banos campus of the University of the Philippines, Elmer joined the Samahan ng Demokratikong Kabataan (organization of democratic youth), one of the most prominent radical youth organizations in the country at the time. When Martial Law was declared on September 21, 1972, almost all the democratic organizations were banned and he was among the many workers, peasants, students and urban poor who were jailed. Once released he studied again, moving to UP Diliman campus in Manila because he had to work his way through college as a bartender at the Manila Hilton Hotel.

At the Hilton Hotel, he led the mobilization of casual workers into mass action and fought for their permanency. Their struggle for wage and service charge hikes infuriated the management and Ka Bong was sacked.

After college, he moved to the Regent of Manila Hotel, where he worked as a bar supervisor and within a short time as bar captain. He became one of the organizers of the union and became the local secretary and was later elected as its President. He was also elected to the national leadership of the National Union of Workers in Hotel, Restaurant and Allied Industries or NUWHRAIN.

In 1982, the Marcos dictatorship arrested over 100 KMU National leaders. As a result, Ka Bong was requested to work fulltime as an organizer and officer of the KMU, which he continues to this day, now as Chairperson.

Elmer Labog has visited Australia several times as a guest of the trade union movement, most recently in October 2006 for the ACTU Congress.

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