Tonight's industrial trouble that's costing millions, Western fears about Iraq's military
might and slaving over a hot stove to stardom.
Good evening, thanks for joining us.
Being late edition tonight, the meat industry ral that's costing us a million dollars a
day in lost exports.
Rural affairs reporter Ian Baker says the dispute over award restructuring is seriously
damaging overseas markets.
For nearly a year, major Victorian abattoirs have been bedeviled by industrial trouble
in the run up to a new award.
In this now idle plant and its twin across the way in Brooklyn, a total of 65 days and
about $100 million in export earnings have been lost.
Now the workers have walked off again, maybe for a fortnight.
Japanese are now seeing Victorian suppliers as being very unreliable and I think that's
one of the biggest hurts that's happening with the whole thing.
What's behind the trouble is employer attempts to shift from payment by the number of animals
processed to payment according to tasks.
It's an unpleasant, dangerous job and the workers are used to good money and getting
their way.
The issue has been languishing in the industrial relations commission for seven months.
It has, because of the delay, has caused frustration on both sides.
Meanwhile, $1 million a day is not being earned in exports.
The prime stock are waiting processing, are having to be fed and found pasture or moved
to other abattoirs that at least for the moment are still working.
We don't know what the union will do next week in other plants but we would assume that
they will be attacked as we have been.
The issue will go before the full bench of the industrial relations commission next Friday.
On the election front, Janine Haynes says her aim is to break the two party system and
she believes that will be achieved by the turn of the century.
At the National Press Club today, she outlined the Democrats hit list including privatisation,
further deregulation and what Janine Haynes believes is inevitable, a continuing crackdown
on the welfare sector.
Her problem is that for these issues, the balance of power has no power with both major
parties supporting such changes.
Her real goal is long term.
My aim is to win Kingston this election and in 1993 to build on that so that by the end
of this decade we are a sizeable and influential and important and much more importantly long
term thinking opposition party with an aim to break the two party system next century.
Ms Haynes hopes that sort of response will be reflected here at the National Tally Room
in Canberra in eight days time.
The polls give the Democrats 14% support.
Their preferences will be enough to determine the outcome.
Laurie Connell and two other former directors of the failed Rothwells Merchant Bank have
been released on bail to reappear in court on Monday on conspiracy charges.
Today was the second time Laurie Connell has been charged in connection with the affairs
of Rothwells which collapsed in November 1988 owing hundreds of millions of dollars.
Last year, Connell was charged with four counts of making false written statements in annual
reports published by Rothwells.
Today former Rothwells director Peter Lucas and former company secretary Thomas Hugel
were also charged with four counts each of making false written statements.
The further charge of conspiracy to defraud was laid against all three men today and relates
to offences allegedly committed between 1983 and 1988.
Corporate affairs investigators laid the charges under the criminal code.
Laurie Connell who is due to appear in court next month on last year's charges today addressed
the media after being bailed from the lock up.
This charge along with the others will be bitterly fought to the finish.
I'm innocent of any charge and undoubtedly I'll have that opportunity to establish that
in court.
My legal team is confident that we'll win on every count.
Connell was released on bail of $200,000 while Hugel and Lucas were released on bail of $1
million.
To finance now and higher commodity prices helped boost Australian share markets today
with strong trading in the resources sector.
Western mining and BHP both performed well and the banks continued to regain some of
last week's losses.
The all-ordinaries rose 12 points and the dollar hold firm.
Overseas now under Muslim extremist groups threatened to kill free American hostages
and attack airports and planes if the migration of Soviet Jews to Israel isn't halted.
The Islamic Jihad also wants Palestinians to be released from Israeli jails.
Iraq is organising anti-British demonstrations this weekend following condemnation of the
hanging of journalist Fazad Bezoft.
The British government attacked Iraq for the execution of Bezoft, an Iranian-born freelance
journalist who was on assignment for the Observer newspaper.
Iraq said Bezoft had confessed to spying for the Israelis.
He was arrested last September while checking reports of an explosion at a military complex.
And American defence analysts are becoming alarmed at Iraq's growing military capability.
Much of the technology for that development is coming from the West.
This is the rocket that took the world by surprise.
When it hurtled into the sky last December, American intelligence experts were forced
to revise their conclusions about Iraq's military capability.
The government of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein can now manufacture its own medium-range ballistic
missiles capable of reaching Iran, the Soviet Union and Israel.
That gives Iraq a long-range delivery system for the chemical weapons that it has already
developed and used during its war with Iran.
These photographs and construction plans obtained by ABC News show three sites for missile development,
production and testing near the Iraqi capital Baghdad.
Nearly all the technical equipment and support for the missile programme come from companies
in the West.
This, despite an agreement signed by the US and its allies to stop exports that could
enable other countries to obtain ballistic missiles.
An Austrian engineer who worked in Iraq and whose identity is concealed because he fears
Iraqi retaliation says engineers from companies like Siemens in West Germany knew they were
helping Iraq to develop its missile programme.
US officials confirm that Iraq is building a plant to produce the uranium needed for
nuclear bombs.
Experts say that Iraq will not have a nuclear warhead for five to ten years, but as the
surprise rocket launch demonstrated, the experts can be wrong.
Libya's Colonel Gaddafi is now blaming West Germany for the fire at a pharmaceutical plant
that the Americans believe produces chemical weapons.
Earlier he claimed the CIA and the Israelis were responsible for the blaze.
Hundreds of branches of the Bank of Ireland in the Republic, Kholsteryn, mainland Britain
have been placed on alert following a $4 million extortion threat reportedly from the IRA.
News of the security alert broke late this afternoon when the Bank of Ireland's Dublin
headquarters issued a statement that unspecified threats had been made in a telephone call
to one of the bank's Ulster branches.
A report to be published in tomorrow's Irish Times claims that staff at over 300 banks
in the Republic, Ulster and mainland Britain have been warned to be on their guard in the
coming weeks.
They have alerted their staff that they need to exercise extra vigilance in the weeks ahead
and my security sources here tell me that it's the next two weeks that could prove to
be the most dangerous period.
Security forces north and south of the border are now investigating but they're not revealing
whether the threats made were against bank staff or of direct attacks on bank premises.
The Bank of Ireland stressed again tonight that although they were taking the demand
seriously there was no question of the bank paying up.
Brazil's youngest president, Claude Mello, has vowed to eradicate that country's galloping
inflation.
Claude was inaugurated in Brasilia before a host of American luminaries including Cuba's
Fidel Castro.
Fidel Castro is now very much the odd man out and that was a point the Americans were
quick to seize on today.
Vice President Dan Quayle said the rest of the Latin American leaders in Brasilia were
there because people had voted for them.
Castro must in fact change and sooner or later change will come to Cuba.
I am convinced of it.
Defending his position, Castro said communist Cuba had the right to choose its own political
style.
Castro and Quayle did not meet face to face at the swearing in of Brazil's new leader,
Fernando Calour de Mayo.
The 40 year old Calour is the first president elected by popular vote here since 1960 after
years of mainly military rule.
There's a new star in the culinary sky.
Michelin has given its highest rating, that's three stars, to a Monte Carlo restaurant that's
been open for only three years and is run by a chef who's just 33 years old.
Bon vivant, Pierre Salinger didn't need much persuasion to do this assignment.
Like all the great chefs of France, Alain Ducasse goes to the local food markets early every
morning to check the quality of the products.
Those that pass his inspection go to his restaurant, the Louis 15th, in Monte Carlo's elegant Hotel
de Paris.
What makes Alain Ducasse so special is that at 33 he is overtaking the giants of French
cuisine nearly twice his age, like Paul Bocuse, Pierre Trois-Groves, and Paul Aberlain.
And he's doing it by launching a bold new way of cooking.
There are two distinctive aspects to Ducasse's techniques.
He is opposed to the thick sauces that have dominated French cooking for years.
My big point is no cream, he told me.
I want to produce more refined, tastier dishes without heavy sauce.
And he believes that he should concentrate on the products of his region, the French
Mediterranean coast in northern Italy.
And what chef could go wrong with this extraordinary wine cellar underneath his kitchen?
It contains 250,000 bottles of wine and champagne, worth $10 million, largely owned by Prince
Renier of Monaco.
The Michelin three-star is awarded for superb cooking, fine wines, faultless service, and
elegant surroundings.
Now the national weather.
A few showers for Brisbane, showers developing in Hobart, a late storm for Darwin, and mainly
fine in Sydney and the other capital cities.
And the American capital is experiencing an early spring.
We're going to leave you with Washington's cherry blossoms, so do have a good weekend.
That's a safe one.
Until Monday night.
Good night.
I can feel it coming in the air tonight.
Oh, Lord.