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published in "The Echo" newspaper, Byron Bay, 11th September.2001 How naive and amnesiac are we? We see one sparkle on Howard's tidal wave of disaster and we stand on the shore bemused by it. Electricity costs 60% more as a result of privatisation and this rise will be reflected to varying extents in all utilities and services privatised recently and in the near future. GST was supposed to be 10% but the impact on the average pocket is far greater as we have all discovered, especially the unemployed who only got a 3% increase in benefits. A child must have well-heeled parents to get a basic education in an environment free of violence and drugs. Our bright, young, tertiary students starve to study on an allowance 33% below the poverty line. Aboriginal kids die in droves before puberty due to lack of commitment to community health care and education while the money assigned for those purposes is diverted into classy real estate along the way. The favoured career option for vast numbers of teenage schoolgirls is single motherhood, knowing they can never expect to find a satisfying job. The elderly queue for eighteen months for urgent treatments they may not live to receive, and are expected to be blinded by the sugar-coated distraction of a few hundred dollars before the election. A struggling self-employed who earns $50 under the table because they can't afford to manage GST may be jailed for ten times longer than a violent rapist of young girls. The legal system has become a giant vampire with its own rules while its field operatives, the police, rule like bullies in their assigned territories knowing they can break the law and get away with it. Everywhere in Australia, environment goes under the bulldozer and the toxic chemicals so that multinationals can have an untaxed feast on our stolen resources. Fossil fuel and uranium profits that mostly go offshore continue to suppress all alternate technologies, while we pop endless pills in the cities to bandaid our suffering from pollution-induced respiratory illness, and die young of rare cancers. We buy our food, stale, lifeless and covered in poison, from the other side of the planet while we tear up our own food crops to plant wine for Europe and America. Our shops are full of produce made by slave labour in China, while "made in Australia" has become a rare collector's item. Our land, utilities, services and even our airports and government buildings are being sold to foreign "interests" who have no interest in the well-being of Australians. One shipful of illegal immigrants is turned away curiously close to the election and suddenly John Howard is a hero. How naive and amnesiac are we? Wake up fellow Australians! |
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SEPTEMBER 2001 Published in "The Echo" 25.9.01 Australians do not want to go to war or support war. We have learned from the Vietnam War and the Gulf War that it is destructive and unwise to follow America into its unjustifiable wars. We do not want to support or cause the death of tens of thousands of innocent men, women and children in Middle Eastern countries. We do not believe that hatred, vengeance, violence and killing can solve the problem of hatred, vengeance, violence and killing. We do not believe that using war against innocent people will prevent terrorism, in fact, it will greatly increase the hostility towards America and the Western world, including Australia, and lead to an increase in terrorism against us. We can already see this rise in hostility caused by America's current war talk. The trade, economic, military and political policies of America, the multinationals and the armaments dealers are what cause terrorism because these policies cause a great deal of poverty, suffering, inequality, injustice and environmental and cultural destruction in the world. People resort to terrorism because media and governments will not listen. It is time for media and governments to listen. It is time to realize that the attacks on the World Trade Centre, Pentagon and White House indicate that the terrorism is an economic and political protest, not a religious one. There have been no attacks on churches, cathedrals or synagogues in the USA. It is not Western religious icons that are being attacked; it is Western political, military and economic icons that are being attacked. Religious differences are whipped up and used as a convenient excuse by political, military and economic interests to divert attention from the true causes of hostility. Western leaders who get their countries into economic difficulty have often used war as a way to get themselves out of difficulty and divert attention from their bad management. This outmoded and destructive style of solving problems must end. War is not a solution to any of the problems facing humanity now. Australians claim the right to be heard and to have our voices represented ACCURATELY in the media. We claim the right to protest about such appalling policies as those which cause terrorism and endorse war. We insist on protection and safety for our courageous protestors who risk themselves on the street to take our message to the world. They are our only voice because the media is corrupt and does not speak what most of us feel. We do not want harm to come to any Australian citizen who protests against Australia's decision to go into war on behalf of America. We want our protestors to be allowed to march peacefully at CHOGM and all other meetings at which destructive policies are discussed and endorsed by world powers. Our peaceful protestors at the World Trade S11 meeting in Melbourne were beaten, injured, jailed and negatively mis-represented by the media. We do not want to see a repeat of this treatment of protestors at the CHOGM meeting in Brisbane in October. We express our utter disapproval of the Australian government's plans to harm these people using police and the army and giving them the power to harrass, arrest, beat and shoot protestors. Australia is the last safe, civilized democracy in the world, and we want the world to know that we wish to remain that way. We wish to give the world a message of peace and intelligent, diplomatic progress on human affairs, and to implore all governments and peoples of the world to join us in finding sane and beneficial solutions to terrorism and all the problems facing the world today. |
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Submitted to "The Echo", Byron Bay, Sept 2001 My long-time friend walked across a paddock to check his bee boxes. A plane zoomed overhead and dropped a load of pesticide on him. My friend was drenched. He has been continuously sick for the eleven years since, unable to learn, often unable to speak or remember. My mother moved to the country to escape the asthma, catarrh, headaches and sinusitis caused by city air pollution. But crop spraying made her sick, and within her four years in the country half of her many friends died of cancer and many of the district‚s children were dying of rare cancers. Mum moved back to the city. Another rural friend described the tearing up of hundreds of kilometres of food crops, orchards and pastures around her and their replacement by a sea of vineyards, constantly sprayed with poison. We destroy the food we grew for ourselves in order to grow drugs for Europe and the USA, but their standards for low-chemical products get tougher all the time. How long will they keep buying our poisoned wine so we can afford to import poisoned food to replace that we once grew for ourselves? Meanwhile into that same wine growing district, came a Hong Kong businessman who owned a chain of very successful organically-grown food stores in Asia. He bought one million dollars worth of stock from the few organic farms among the few remaining food growers and asked when and where he could buy more. A survey of schoolchildren in the city I grew up in revealed the alarming fact that only a few of thousands had seen a tadpole, and none had experienced my frequent childhood pleasure of keeping them and watching them attain froghood. A colleague once began to study the effects of pesticide on frogs and was threatened by the maker of the chemical with the death of his wife and children if he did not stop his research. All of these situations are in the lives of Australian people I know directly. I read and hear about many more, and it spurs me to grow even more vegies in my totally chemical-free garden, but I feel very small on my little island of life in a sea of poison. STOP POISONING US. STOP POISONING THE WORLD. WE DON‚T HAVE MUCH TIME LEFT TO GET IT RIGHT! |