ASEN

Media Release 9th June 2009

Climate change protestors have halted production in Australia’s largest aluminium smelter by attaching themselves to a weigh bridge that is a pinch-point of the operation.

The protestors are angry that heavily polluting industries, like aluminium smelting, will receive 90% of their pollution permits free from the Federal Government under the controversial Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, allowing them to carry on largely unaffected by pollution constraints, and leaving the public to pick up the cost of reducing greenhouse emissions.

Aluminium smelting is an extremely energy intensive industry, and the Tomago plant has a constant demand of around 900MW of power, which is supplied from greenhouse polluting coal-fired power stations.

The Hunter’s two aluminium smelters, at Tomago and Kurri Kurri, use 15% of NSW’s electricity, yet are charged just one sixth of the cost per mega watt paid by ordinary energy consumers. The annual electricity subsidy to the aluminium industry has been estimated to be at least $210 million.

“The Tomago Aluminium smelter alone is excepted to receive over $250 million in free permits in the first year of the CPRS. It is half owned by mining and aluminium giant Rio Tinto, which last year posted a profit of $15.8 billion,” said Steve Phillips, spokesperson for protest organisers Rising Tide Newcastle.

“The Government is pursuing a backwards climate policy that rewards big polluting companies like Rio Tinto at the expense of the rest of the community and the world.

“Aluminium smelting in Australia is two-and-a-half times more greenhouse polluting than the world average, because our energy comes almost exclusively from coal burning.

“At this crucial hour in world history, we should be forcing plants like this to use renewable energy – not paying them to use coal power. The Aluminium industry needs to clean up, or clean out.

“The Federal Government needs to shift focus from compensation to restructuring. We call on the Federal Government to reverse the perverse subsidies given to coal-powered aluminium smelters and make assistance under any emissions trading scheme conditional on an urgent switch to renewable energy for all smelters.”

Check out photos and footage at: http://risingtide.org.au/node/901

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By Asbjørn Wahl, Norwegian Union of Municipal and General Employees

Most problems in society are mainly social and political, even if at first glance they seem purely technical or scientific. This is a hard-earned lesson for the labour and trade union movement.  For example, workplace technology can be developed to serve different interests: the shareholders, the customers, the workers… In the end it is the actual balance of power which decides the solution and who it will benefit.

The threat of climate change is no exception. The solution of this problem requires, among other things, a huge amount of new technology. But the problem isn’t just about technology, it is a genuinely social and political issue. It is decisive, therefore, that the trade union movement develops its own climate change policies. We have to move from a reactive to a proactive position. In the end, it is a question of what kind of society we want to develop.

Facing up to the issues
So far, much of the trade union movement has hesitated when confronted with the problem of climate change, even though this situation has moved on significantly in recent years. There has been a tendency to deny the seriousness of the problem, and there has been some opposition against taking action as a result of a (fully understandable) fear of job losses.

Our first challenge is therefore to face reality. We have to realise the overwhelming scientific proof that climate change is here, that human activities are crucial factors, and that this can be catastrophic. We must realise that the main reason for the problem is the burning of fossil fuel. This means the success factor of any measure is whether or not it contributes to reducing the burning of fossil fuel. The way we live and work will change radically over the coming years either as a result of action, or of inaction. Not to act, or to delay action, is not an option, but will only make consequences worse.

Failed markets need political control
The Stern Report, which reported to the UK government, concluded that “climate change represents the biggest market failure in history”. The on-going financial crisis represents another huge market failure in history. We cannot rely on those same failed market mechanisms to solve these crises.

Both climate change policies and the financial crisis will need increased democratic control of the economy. That is exactly what we, in the trade union movement, also need for many other reasons. This means that the climate crisis not only represents a threat, but also new possibilities for the trade union movement. The on-going crises, together with neo-liberalism’s current crisis of legitimacy, have actually opened an array of opportunities waiting to be exploited.

Trade unions thus have to prioritise climate change policies, but we have to embed these policies in a broader political context. We therefore also have to overcome the contradictions between specific workers’ immediate, sectoral interests and broader interests of workers as a whole. In other words, we are not only transport workers who face a change in work pattern; we are human beings confronting a potentially catastrophic event.

Redistribution of wealth
One thing is quite clear: there will be far-reaching changes. The question is therefore, how do we meet these challenges? Currently, workers and trade unions are on the defensive. We are under pressure. There is a tendency to individualise responsibility for greenhouse-gas emissions. All of us have to pay for the emissions we cause, it is said, even though those emissions in most cases are effects of the way society is organised and market forces are pushing.

Of course emissions have to be reduced, even radically. This cannot, however, be left to each individual’s responsibility. Neither can it be done by implementing economic restrictions which in practise exempt the rich and wealthy from any change. Why should ordinary people support the necessary climate change policies under such conditions? People will never accept that rich people can continue to pay their way, that corporate interests are protected, while the costs are put on workers, consumers and taxpayers. What is needed, therefore, are collective political solutions in which policies against climate change are combined with a radical social redistribution of wealth. Anything short of that will prevent any solution to the climate crisis.

From defensive to offensive
Environmental organisations tell us we have to make sacrifices to save the climate and our planet. This is both incorrect, and strategically and tactically wrong. Climate change policies are not only a question of sacrifices, but of creating a better society for all. Roger Toussaint, president of Transport Workers’ Union Local 100 in New York, got it right when he, at a climate change conference, stated that: “Going green is not just about job creation, it is about an improved life for working people.”

Serious climate change policies will give us an opportunity for progressive social change. Change will presuppose a more democratically managed economy. it will create millions of green jobs – particularly in public transport and in the production of renewable energy. It will reduce market competition and thereby also reduce pressure at work. It will make it necessary to shorten working hours to reduce the overexploitation of resources and allow a more just distribution of jobs across the globe. It will, if we do our job properly, hopefully reduce consumerism as a way of compensating other unmet needs in our societies, characterised by alienation and powerlessness. In short, social change is a precondition and a solution at the same time to stopping climate change.

Furthermore, reduced greenhouse emissions will also reduce pollution in workplaces and communities. An enormous – and free – transfer of technology to developing countries will be necessary, both to reduce their increase in emissions and to lift two billion people out of poverty. Most importantly, climate change policies will secure the survival of human beings and the planet.

Alliances and social mobilisation
Global summits haven’t achieved social equality, jobs for all, decent working conditions, eradication of poverty, gender equality. It seems unlikely they will solve the problem of climate change either. Instead, we need a social and political mobilisation for alternative solutions built on solidarity, equality and peoples’ needs.

The trade union movement will need to build strategic alliances with the environmental movement, and others. To do that, we have to overcome a couple of important weaknesses. Firstly, we have to ensure the environmental movements understand the role of social power (the class conflict). Secondly, we ourselves need to increase the understanding of environmental problems and the climate crisis in our trade unions. This can only happen if the two movements start to co-operate, exchange views and experiences and develop a friendly and constructive environment for discussion.

An excellent example is the Blue-Green Alliance between the United Steel Workers and the environmental movement Sierra Club in the USA, which “is focused on restoring an additional element to the relationship between public policy and electoral politics … that of movement building … without strong, well-organised social movements mobilising along a society’s basic fault lines, meaningful change is unlikely.”

Our long-term perspective must be to build the social alliances necessary to change society, not the climate. It is ambitious, but necessary and possible – and we will sit in the driver’s seat.

In summary
•    Trade unions have to face up to the reality of climate change now
•    We need to be proactive, not reactive, to deal with the consequences
•    Climate change is part of a broader political context. We should look at the structure of society to find solutions.
•    We have to work with others, especially environmental organisations.
•    Climate change offers many possibilities: new green jobs, a greater role for public transport, less market competition… We must act now to seize these changes and make this a positive step for workers.

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Twenty years ago, my mother had a letter published in the Sydney Morning Herald. I found the page yesterday: yellowed, tattered, and almost as old as me. The Editorial criticised the Hawke Labor Government’s statement on environmental policy for failing to set targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But, it said, “Australian Governments will not be walking away from the greenhouse issue. The electorate will not let them.”

Twenty years later – almost my entire lifetime – this Labor Government has finally set targets, but targets that scarcely aim to reduce Australia’s greenhouse pollution to the day of that Editorial. Kevin Rudd and Penny Wong have walked away from a safe climate future. The question is whether we will let them.

What we hear and learn about climate change is truly alarming – that soon there will be no summer ice in the Arctic; that already, people have been displaced from their lands; and that our greenhouse gas emissions, incredibly, are still rising. But these predictions of doom and gloom tell us that everything we do from now matters – and possibly, more so than any other time in recent history.

Even conservatives something else is necessary. Dr. James Hansen, the top climate scientist at NASA said recently, “It seems to me that people should be doing whatever is necessary to block construction of dirty coal-fired power plants.”

Even Al Gore said, “I believe we have reached the stage where it is time for civil disobedience to prevent the construction of new coal plants.”

These are bold statements, and they are spot on.

Climate change direct action – such as stopping, blockading, disrupting, occupying, or preventing the mining, burning and exporting of coal – challenges the legitimacy of the coal industry. It challenges the license of the industry to operate in ways that are killing the planet and people for profit. Direct action puts a spotlight on coal: it says ‘enough!’ It allows us space to begin to break our dependency from this fossilised industry. Direct action hastens our efforts for a new, sustainable, decentralised economy. It drives the creation of thousands of safe, long-term, unionised green-collar jobs. Importantly, when we take direct action together, we create greater political power for ourselves.

Last December, the Federal Government’s White Paper handed huge compensation payouts and free permits to major polluting infrastructure like coal-fired power stations – polluting industries that already receive tens of billions of dollars of public money every year. They set a measly emissions reductions target of 5% on 2000 levels – or a 13% increase on 1990 levels, the benchmark of the rest of the world.

We cannot let them get away with it. We can make what is “politically possible” to be not what Professor Garnaut and Penny Wong judges it to be, but the political situation we ourselves create. For we deserve more than a public subsidisation of dangerous climate change. We need to create a movement that can force this government to commit to making 2010 the last year Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions rise, and begin to decline – and do much more.

When this government goes to the United Nations climate change meeting in Copenhagen next year, they must go knowing the stakes are high – for the planet and for politics. They must go to Copenhagen knowing there will be political consequences when they fail to act with the urgency required.

And we must raise that pressure. We must raise the stakes. We must create unprecedented, unpredictable political consequences. We must build a movement that turns the tide of history and pushes government, industry, and the globe toward a safe and just climate future. We must build a movement that says ‘another world is possible’ – and we will be part of creating it.

Everything we do from now matters. Please, talk to the your friends, people in your classes and communities; ask yourself what you can commit to building this movement across the next few years. Let’s ask ourselves: If not us, who? If not here, where? If not now, when?

by holly

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Anti-Nuclear Struggle in Comiso, Italy

In the early 1980s there was a key struggle against a U.S military base in Comiso, Sicily that was to house 112 nuclear missiles. The agreement
between the Italian and the U.S government was made in secret in 1979, but in spring 1981, the news began to leak out.

Immediately, there was anger over this obvious intrusion into the lives of the people in the area.

Large numbers of anarchists, students, workers and the unemployed organised into self-managed leagues. These leagues adopted a principle of
‘permanent conflict’ regarding the construction of the base, meaning that they would remain in opposition with it until the project was defeated, without thought of compromising.

High school students in Vittoria carried out strikes, using the time to discuss plans for action. The effects of the base became clearer as local peasants were evicted from their land to make room for missile test ranges. American and NATO officers reserved use of various hotels and other services and the Mafia (profiting from the concurrent expansion of prostitution and drugs) used intimidation and terror to frighten those opposed to the base.

The opposition culminated in a number of explosive situations and a huge demonstration to the outskirts of the base, where the cops made several violent attacks and pursued demonstrators for hours. The missile base eventually went in to operation in the mid-1980s, but was closed down in 1992.

See the Cosimo Dossier: www.omnipresence.mahost.org/comiso.htm

The occupations of Seabrook - 1976 & 1977

This began when, in 1974, some veteran peaceniks-turned-organic-farmers in New England successfully blocked construction of a proposed nuclear power plant in Montague, Massachusetts. In 1976, inspired by the success of a year-long plant occupation in Germany, they joined with other New Englanders to create the Clamshell Alliance. Clamshell’s immediate goal was to stop construction of a proposed nuclear power plant in Seabrook, New Hampshire.

Following a 24-hour occupation at the site of two proposed nuclear power plants in Seabrook, New Hampshire, 1414 people were arrested. Such civil
disobedience, organised by the New England-based Clamshell Alliance, became a model for anti-nuclear direct actions across the country.

Similar coalitions began springing up across America: the Palmetto alliance in South Carolina, Oystershell in Maryland, Sunflower in Kansas, and most famous of all, the Abalone Alliance in California, reacting originally to a completely insane plan to build a nuclear power plant at Diablo Canyon, almost directly on top of a major geographic fault line.

Those plants already approved eventually went online, including Seabrook Unit I, but Seabrook Unit II was never built.

Importantly though, the actions did succeed in delegitimising the idea of nuclear power. When the Three Mile Island plant melted down in 1979, it
hugely weakened the industry. While plans for Seabrook and Diablo Canyon weren’t cancelled, just about every other then-pending plan to build a
nuclear reactor was, and no new ones were proposed in the US for a quarter century. See www.marcuse.org/harold/pages/seabrook.htm

’90s Anti-Roads Protests in the UK - the M11 Link Road

The anti-roads movement in the 1990s in Britain, incorporating critiques of gentrification, car culture and the criminal justice bill, brought together people from varying backgrounds to defeat 400 out of 500 proposed roads projects. It included the defence of wild and urban areas, the merging of party and protest and large-scale occupations and blockades.

An important component of this struggle was the opposition to plans to build the M11 link road with east London. For a number of years, a small
number of locals had produced newsletters, held meetings, attempted to lobby MPs and engaged in a series of ultimately ineffectives methods to stop the road’s construction.

However a collective campaign began in earnest in September 1993 when the developers’ bulldozers first appeared. Most of the people who were sitting in front of bulldozers, occupying sites and trees and locking themselves on to JCBs with bicycle D-locks in September and October comprised experienced activists who had moved to the area a few weeks previously.

The main priority at this stage was less ‘trees’ and ‘green areas’ but housing. The proposed link road would go through about 350 houses. The Department of Transport bought all these houses a long time ago and had been throwing people out of them for years.

Once people were evicted, firms were brought in to make the houses uninhabitable: toilets were blocked and smashed, floorboards removed,
stair cases demolished, doors and windows breeze-blocked etc. to deter squatters. From the beginning of the campaign, then, the defense and restoration of these houses as dwelling places was important. The empty houses in the area were treated not only as a general living resource to be defended but also as tools and weapons.

The houses could be used not only as ‘permanent’ homes but also as places to crash for people coming up occasionally to join in the struggle and as
bases for information and communication, meetings and coordination.

Although most local residents didn’t want the road, they were not yet prepared to get directly involved in action against it. There seemed to be a feeling that, since the decision to build the road had gone ahead, and since the bulldozers had already arrived, there was nothing they could do about it. Things began to change when the developers fenced off George Green, Wanstead, to begin work in that area.

After a successful mass action, those involved quickly saw the need to act on their power and go further in reclaiming the land. So they pushed the fence down.

Once the first bit went down, more people joined in. People acted fast and in unison, and eventually very little of the fence was left standing. The police intervened very late and by then most of the necessary work had been done. The ‘site’ had been transformed into de facto common land! Earth removal and flower planting by locals went of all over the weekend.

On Monday, security men were told by their bosses to get everyone off the ‘site’. But this simply wasn’t practical. By dismantling the fence the boundaries of the site had been destroyed. For a time, it couldn’t operate as a site any more.

Although the specific campaign was ultimately unsuccessful and the road was built, it was a crucial factor in increasing the road’s overall cost. Together with other campaigns in the UK at that time, the movement played a major role in the large-scale cutbacks in the road building programs that followed in subsequent years.

San Salvador Atenco Airport Stoppage

“We will not give up our land, even if it means giving up our lives.”

On October 21, 2001, church bells rang throughout towns in Mexico to announce terrible news: a large part of lands in Atenco and nearby had passed into government hands. This was through an ‘eminent domain decree’ that had, as its goal, the construction of a new International Airport in Mexico.

The $2.3 billion airport, which government leaders had been planning for more than two decades, would be the largest single public works project of
Vicente Fox’s presidency. Plans included building the enormous infrastructure for the airport on 5400 hectares straddling three towns: Atenco, Texcoco and Chimalhuacán. Atenco was the most affected in terms of the percent of land expropriated (70-percent). Some of its inhabitants would lose almost all of their crops as well as many of their houses.

Locals were aware that the seizure of 5400 hectares would be only the first phase of a larger number of land-takings and the spreading of urban development and infrastructure to connect the new International Airport with the industrial corridors. This would be part of the larger “Plan Puebla Panamá,” strongly pushed by President Vicente Fox. The inhabitants saw themselves being sucked up by a ‘hurricane of development’ and later ‘expelled like garbage on the side of the highway’, surrounded by ‘cyclone fences’. In Atenco, the project would take eighty percent of its terrain and almost the entire town of Ixapan.

They saw that their communities would be shattered, the inevitable increase in alcohol and drug addiction, and that they would be forced to live in apartments, rising up in Mexico’s massive metropolises. “We don’t want it, we would drown there” they said

Huge demonstrations began, often held daily. There were important marches on November 14, 2001. These caused an international stir due to the beatings that dozens of men, women and children received from the police as they entered Mexico City. In spite of that, more than a thousand farmers arrived at the Zócalo (Mexico City’s huge public square), with machetes in hand, where thousands of members of civil organisations that supported them awaited. Those who had remained in the towns affected by the airport went out, indignantly, to block the highway in protest of the police aggressions and to ask for the liberation of those arrested, who were freed some hours later.

After months of struggle, a new wave of action began. The affected peoples demonstrated that they remained united. Thousands of neighbours angrily blockaded roads and highways. They burned vehicles, they took over soft-drink trucks (the contents were used as part of a ‘Popular Kitchen’ that fed all the invitees), they rioted with whatever they could find or make (including some improvised Molotov cocktails). In the offices of the state attorney general, they took various police officers and workers hostage with the goal of trading them for compañeros who had been arrested. The movement was clearly getting stronger and more powerful.

A few weeks later President Vicente Fox canceled the plans. Info taken from http://www.narconews.com/Issue38/article1395.html

Minnehaha Free State

Minnehaha Free State, in Minnesota, USA was a 15 month anti-road occupation and encampment of sacred indigenous lands between two waterfalls, the St. Anthony (what the Dakota called the Minirara (curling water) and Owahmenah (falling water) and Minnehaha beginning on August 10,
1998.

On December 20, 1998, 800 cops in “Operation Coldsnap” sought to dislodge the protesters by force in the largest police action in Minnesota history. They arrested many protesters and demolished their homes in the encampment. Accompanying the police were members of state and city
government, Governor Anne Carlson, and a press team described by protestor
Jim Anderson as “the police’s handpicked lap dogs.”

The site was reoccupied until November 1999. www.culturechange.org/issue15/i-55.html

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This letter was written in response to an e-mail arguing that we should not criticize the emergence of ‘green capitalism’ & that doing so was giving far too much weight too ‘politics and ideology’. Rather we should focus our activism on encouraging ‘swift global co-operation’ to solve the climate crisis.

It has been argued that climate change will be solved not by ‘politics’ but instead by ‘swift global co-operation’. It’s implied that this means prioritising big international climate summits like Poznan recently and Copenhagen next year and seeing them as decision-making forums of the utmost importance. Rather than struggling against them, we have to influence them.

To me this logic means ignoring huge class divisions: somehow attempting to foster ‘co-operation’ between us and the rich, privileged climate delegates who’ll be staying in Copenhagen’s exclusive hotels next December. In terms of the Australian representatives, it means trying to influence a bunch of people whose idea of ‘emergency state intervention’ is almost certainly a lot closer to the NT Intervention than to legislation that will drastically reduce emissions. It also ignores our own history of struggle: since when has the state granted us favors because we asked nicely.

Rather than relying on the state or on elite delegates it’s in co-operation between ‘us’-amongst social movements and oppressed people acting & self-organising from below- that hope lies.

When I’ve talked with some of the many wonderful environmental justice activists around the country it has previously always been very clear which side we were on. Against corporations who destroyed forests & set up poisonous mines on Aboriginal land. Creatively resisting environmental criminals at economic summits & organising strongly in solidarity against the police repression that often followed. Arguing passionately against Kevin Rudd & Labor as well, and their grand plans for non-existent ‘clean’ coal and for carbon trading mechanisms that will hurt the poor.

For a world that wasn’t only a continuation of this fucking rotten system, but one organised in a decentralised way & without hierarchies and leaders. This wasn’t just about creating new, directly democratic ways of living for a small number of activists - but was a practice essential to helping make a world that could be ecologically sustainable.

Is this all forgotten & is it just ‘politics and ideology’ now? I hope not.

When people write about green capitalism it isn’t something that’s completely abstract and removed from our lives. I saw a small example of it when I got my morning news from the Australian today: they have a shiny new ad putting forward the delights of ‘green business’: http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/business/industrysectors/greenbusiness/

My personal favourite is the bit from the notorious polluters at the Australian Coal Association - apparently they’re ‘working to reduce CO2 emissions’. Good on them!

Green capitalism can already be seen much more sharply in the Global South. It works, for instance, through ‘Clean Development Mechanism’ projects, imposed as a requirement of the Kyoto Protocol. These have devastated local communities and have been met with resistance. A waste landfill site in the Clare Estate township in South Africa is a classic example. Extolled by the World Bank as ‘environmentally progressive’; due to the extraction of some methane (one of the most potent greenhouse gases), the site produces toxins that have caused leukemia, tumours and cancer.

Capital is part of the earth we live in, part of the air we breathe: of course a movement for climate justice should critique it.
- Tim.

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What does sovereignty mean to you?

Burangidigol, it means freedom, it means ancestors, it means sovereignty in our own language. We come from a society of freedom. That’s what our society’s based on; not just free for all and do what you like, but freedom.

So in being a sovereign and standing as a sovereign and walking as a sovereign and breathing as a sovereign I am living my culture. It’s not an appendage, I am it – that’s how important it is to me. The word sovereignty, being an English word, that’s a fantastic one, Burangidigol is sovereignty as well in our language and it’s our birth right, it’s not something that we should just reclaim, it’s about who we are. It means walking who we are, walking our culture, not culture as a physical act, like making a basket, but this is our culture too, quite frankly.

What actions do you take that are informed by your sovereignty?

For a start, I don’t acknowledge the jurisdiction of the Australian government over my life, because it has none. That’s the basis and the foundation of my walk, and my fight is to not just actively reject their jurisdiction but to put it right, that’s justice to me.

So that’s the root of our movement, it’s not just protecting our natural rights, that’s an international law; we’re sovereigns. It’s about accepting our law and walking as we are meant to be walking in this day and age, and as we’ve always walked. It’s not new. It’s something that’s new to a lot of people, yes, because we’ve been enslaved for so long. There’s people in the world who’ve been enslaved for much longer, it’s only been 200 years for us but it’s about just freeing ourselves from the bondage of this society.

We’re not eligible to be bound, that’s the whole point. The whole foundation of our standing up is that the government, they’re foreign powers, they do not have any legal jurisdiction over us at all, so our walk is about educating and rejecting that.

Would you take actions of civil disobedience in the course of your sovereignty?

I wouldn’t call it civil disobedience, I call it just our birth right. I don’t call it war or terror. We’re under duress here in our own country living the way that we do. What they do are acts of terror, they are the terrorists, they are the ones enacting war upon us.

So, it’s a long walk, of course, and our fight is an endless fight, probably until I close my eyes on life, but I hope, when I’m an old girl, I’m gunna have a peaceful existence one day, so I gotta get all this straightened out now as a young person. It’s my right as an older person, to be able to sit down comfortably in my lands somewhere, not be invaded by any foreign forces, and to teach my grandchildren, great grandchildren, whoever’s about, about who they are, and to never forget that, and teach them about how to use the environment, and be one with the environment, that’s what I’m meant to be fuckin’ doing. I’m meant to be doing that now as well, that’s what I’m meant to be doing every day of my life. I got six children, they’re my responsibility, to teach about this stuff, about culture, about how to live.

We live in a culture today, it’s a funny thing to call this lifestyle, but it is a culture, this culture’s about slavery. It’s go get a job, okay, but what’s a job? A job is walking for someone else’s dream. I don’t want their jobs, I don’t want to be enslaved or bound to anyone else’s dream but my own, or people who have like-minded dreams.

I just don’t agree with what they want me to do, and there’s so many people, no matter where your ancestors have come from, in this day and age we have the same problem, and that’s all there is to it. They want us to voluntarily give up our freedom, so we can help someone else, and who is this someone else? Someone who’s been ripping our lives apart, and I won’t contribute to that, sorry, I never will.

Sovereignty’s about governance – it’s not about an action, it’s not about a protest. It’s about governance in our lives, which will build into governance of clans, which will build into governance of nations, which is I guess that catchphrase of self-determination and self-sufficiency as well. It’s about being self-sufficient in a legal sense of the word, to be able to hold our own court legally. If we don’t know our natural rights, if we don’t know our own legal jurisdiction within our realm, and our legal jurisdiction in their realm, and all the other realms that affect us, well then we’re shot ducks, were just bound to be slaves.

Every single human being on the face of the earth has sovereignty. Every single person, not just us. It’s a natural right, that’s an international legal term, natural rights, which means that we don’t have to bow down to a monarch or a government. That’s how it is for everybody.

You have the right to be a sovereign if you choose, and everybody has that right and choice. The term is called a freeman, and their rights are, like I said, the same as ours. They always fight against, or deflect any governing body or foreign power over them, it’s just about learning how to do that.

The Australian government is a corporation. A corporation is not a governing power, it’s like Ronald McDonald saying, “Here’s a licence, drive with it.” All these people [freemen] know the truth under common law, no governing power can do those things to us, so they don’t use licenses, they get pulled up, but if they know all of their shit, they’re free. You gotta know the right things to say, the right questions to ask the police when they come, but that’s how it works.

How would you like to see other people engage in and respect sovereignty?

Well, definitely learn about their own type of sovereignty that they’re entitled to. Us having jurisdiction means that freemen can come into our jurisdiction by invitation and sit inside of our realm, so they’re protected that way. The sovereignty movement is an endless fight. I just hope by the time I’m an old person that I’m not at the same point that we’re at today. If I sat in their jurisdiction I can guarantee that I would be going to the grave fighting tooth and nail, every minute, for any given thing, that’s what they do to us. They’ll make a fight there, there, there, there and there, and we go around fighting them all and we’re fucked by the end of the day. They make lots of spot fires for us, but what I see with sovereignty, going on the route that we are, all those spot fires can be fought with one spear. That’s what I’m seeing as a practical measure as well because everything is to do with sovereignty. Every single fight is to do with sovereignty.

People learn about their rights and then come and learn about our jurisdiction. I don’t see any sense in people who come from this jurisdiction knowing nothing, cause in anything they do, they’ll get fucked by the system, and we don’t want that to happen to people. Sovereignty is about taking total responsibility for your life. We can’t carry everybody on our head. Sovereignty is about self-determination and self-sufficiency. We’re not there yet, but that’s what were moving towards. It’s about living our birthright, our own law.

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The Prescribed Area People’s Alliance is a group of Aboriginal people from communities affected by the NT Intervention. More than 130 people have joined Alliance over two meetings in Mparntwe - Alice Springs on September 29 and November 7.

Today, Friday November 7, the Prescribed Area People’s Alliance held its second meeting. We have issued the following statement:

We are outraged that today Lex Wotton, an Indigenous man from Palm Island, was sentenced for 6 years for protesting the murder of another Indigenous man by a white policeman. That policeman has since been promoted and given $100,000 compensation. Police brutality and harassment of Indigenous people continues throughout Australia, including here in Central Australia in our town camps and communities. It has gotten worse since the Intervention with new powers and military style raids.

The NTER* must be immediately repealed. The $1 billion that has been spent on rolling out this legislation has been wasted, and could have been spent supporting our communities, the services and programs that we have in our communities, that are owned and controlled by us. No one wants it.

We are tired of people who aren’t living this Intervention saying it is good for our people. They don’t have to line up for store cards, have police come through their house or fight to keep their homes or blocks of land.

Income management is not good for us. It’s too hard to access our money. Kids are crying all round for money for drink, for school, but nothing in our pocket. Kids are suffering under the Intervention. Income Management has to be voluntary. People can manage their own money.

The Intervention is racist. If this was about alcohol and children, why is it just Aboriginal people that have this legislation, and not everyone else? Problems exist everywhere. We are not all alcoholics and child abusers, we are strong First Nations people and we should not be treated like this.

The Intervention has demonised Aboriginal men. The government always says that all the women are for the Intervention and men are against it. But the majority of people in the Prescribed Area People’s Alliance are women and strong men are standing up behind them in support.

The Racial Discrimination Act must be immediately reinstated. It must never be suspended again to push through another government policy. Every time it has been suspended, it has been so the government can do something to hurt Aboriginal people. The Federal Government must also sign and ratify the Declaration for the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

These assimilation policies destroy our culture and our lives. It is the Stolen Generation all over again. The government just said sorry to us, but at the same time they are doing this Intervention. They will have to say sorry again.

The government is refusing to build us any housing unless we sign over control of our land for 40 years or more. We say NO LEASES. We will not sign. Why couldn’t they help us out with money for our housing and services? It is our right for these things. Since they took the 5-year leases with the Intervention, they have done nothing. Why do they need 40, 80 years more? The government having this control is no good. Our lives depend on our land. It is connected to our songlines, our culture and our dreaming.

We are angry they are threatening to close down outstations. People choose to live out on their land on outstations. It is their home, their country. The government must provide funding for outstations, not take it away so people have to move into town. Many people don’t want to live in town, they want to live on their land. In town, there is already a lot of over-crowding and problems. We had to fight hard for outstations, but now we are going to have to fight hard to keep them.

We are angry the NT government is trying to stop teaching of language in schools. We need to fight for our culture and our language. Schools must be Aboriginal way - we need bilingual schools, with two way learning. Our kids need to learn in our own languages. Culture must be kept strong.

Us mob from outstations, town-camps and communities are all subjected to this racist legislation. So we, the prescribed area people are going to stick on our decision to keep fighting. We are not going to give up until the government stops this Intervention, listens to us and starts working with us properly.

We call on other communities to take action, in their communities. We call for rallies here in Alice Springs and around the country to mark Human Rights Day on December 13, 60 years since the UN human rights charter was signed. We call for everyone who supports Aboriginal rights to converge on Canberra for the opening of Parliament in 2009.

For more information contact: Barbara Shaw 0401291166 or Valerie Martin 0429891861

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the night before we locked ourselves onto a coal loader i lay with a sleeping bag over my head, angry and tired to the point of muteness. sick of meetings, of planning and car troubles and people, scared and almost over it. we sleep all together on the floor and I try not to think too much in case I change my mind.

early early in the morning we pile in cars, with large metal tubes and small chains around our ready wrists. we drive to kooragang coal port as dawn threatens pale at the edges of the sky. at the entry to the port a streetlight reveals a car with police prop-legged around it, their feet in it’s open doors. i’m so scared our plans are about to stretch too thin and break. we get confused and drive past the site three times, u-turning in front of the police. i want to not be here now, i want to wake up when its over.

finally we pull up beside the fence and tumble out of the car. we go over the fence one by one. scrabbling with no foothold. an almost laugh. a hand scraped on barbed wire. we pass the heavy bits of pipe through the fence and walk quick across the bitumen together. no one comes to grab us, no one drags us down from the fence like i kept seeing in my head. we climb yellow metal steps, onto the machine that loads coal into ships, coal for burning in places distant. press with a flat hand all the big red emergency stop buttons, the conveyor belt winds slowly still and the sirens start. we keep frantically locking ourselves to bits of conveyor belt, changing our minds, changing place, and repeating. everyone else is calm now but i’m not. finally we are settled, feet dangling, knees brushing conveyor-belt rubber. we are locked with bits of pipe and now its easy, and i’m not scared anymore.

the machine is almost beautiful. draped with yellow lights in the almost fog and the sea sitting blackly close. the sun rises over the harbour and the cold air doesn’t sting. lib and me are wearing bike helmets. libby’s helmet is back to front. we are the hottest people ever. probably.

finally they find us. it’s a little awkard. some of them are condescending, tell us all the lies they said they’d tell. “this machine has been turned off for months. you’re not stopping anything.”

“we know it was on when we came,” i say. “whatevs,” i add. sort of undermybreath, sort of byaccident. lib laughs.

Dwayne comes and chats with us. he’s quiet and friendly and curious, it’s his first time with protesters. he tells us to be careful, follow the ritual and we’ll be okay.

the police are grumpy and not impressed. we smile politely, thank them, and refuse to do anything they ask. we wont lock off, thank you. we understand your concern, thankyou. good morning. etc. etc. they search libby haphazardly. out of her overall pockets come fifteen dirty tissues. meanwhile we stuff our faces quietly with chocolate. they lock off our friends. then they take apart the conveyor belt we are attached to. we apologise to the worker. he says its fine, smiling, he has nothing better to do.

we are no longer attached to anything, but the policeman is confused, and asks us to unlock ourselves. we point out we aren’t actually attached to anything. they make us walk down the steps. we stay locked together, yelling at oli that we love him, in case the police are being mean. finally they ask us to please unlock ourselves from the pipe. ok. then we take our helmets off. they tell us to put them back on.

they forget to search me, and put me in the paddywagon with a bag full of chocolate and an epi-pen. they recognise my novocastrian school jumper and chat with me about uni. i am lucky, processed by the nice cop, an ex youth worker. he makes sure we are ok, and never leaves us on our own. lib and sally dance in the back of the paddy wagon while they process me. they ask tony to put his number in front of his face so he does. the police man calls him a dickhead.

finally they are done and we get to ride home in an APEC bus. just the five of us, giggling up the back. it looks like my old school bus plus bars. it probably is. they take us back to camp, like school children, excited and back from a school excursion. a day well spent, and finally over.

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When one thousand people took action against the coal industry’s role in dangerous climate change, they perhaps inadvertently elucidated an interesting debate about the realms of private and public property. In the ensuing weeks, whilst we were all recovering from ten long days of intense and anxious activism, debates raged online between activists and hecklers about the validity of such a demonstration. When I decided to attend Climate Camp, I had come to the conclusion that in order to solve the climate crisis it would take ordinary people doing extraordinary things to make the politicians do anything. Indeed, if you take a straw poll of many Australians most of them will tell you that politicians are usually reactionary; that is, they respond to crises, disturbances and blips that disrupt their pragmatic politics that allow them to straddle interest groups for decades whilst making little progress on the really difficult questions.

It was such that the Climate Camp project captured my imagination. It was a perfect juxtaposition, a group of committed members of the community potentially breaking the law and putting themselves in the firing line to protect something that is ours: the climate and our environment. In a rational world, police would have been instructed by the state to lock down the railway tracks so that the trains could not deliver another damaging load of coal - how dare they, the coal companies, show such disrespect for our property. Yet it couldn’t have been further from the truth. In reality, police were given the usual large powers that successive anti-riot laws have allowed them to aggregate. However, even to some police the whole exercise seemed irrational. When our affinity group of three students made it onto the tracks, most of the police were clearly frustrated that they were spending their entire Sunday in their huge riot suits as lackeys for corporations who continue to bleed the state of policing and economic resources to defend the indefensible. My arresting officer even admitted to me that he was uncomfortable doing this job. It had smashed the idealism that he had once had about being a police officer and serving the community, when in fact his labour was an accessory to the debasing of community property.

Who made the value judgement that private property eclipses social property? Economics students might argue it is a simple case of market failure, a case of not assigning property ‘rights’ to the air, but my contention is that even after we do this, won’t it be the same companies, the same rent seekers, the same interest groups causing the same political failures that predated this market failure? The only solution to this market failure is to fix the political failure that caused it. People power can beat climate change, but we have to be ready to non-violently break the law if that is what it takes to restore order in the biosphere.

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Fences are the contours of dominance, power, control, oppression. Whether they are keeping people in or people out.

Baxter 05
We stood outside the fences and sent balloons up into the air. So that in their isolation the political prisoners could see that there was humanity. That there were people that deeply believed they should be free. We threw tennis balls over the fence with messages of support in English and Farsi. We threw a grappling hook over the perimeter fence. For which people were arrested and threatened with incarceration within prison walls. More fences. The further fences of prison walls.

G20, APEC, FTAA
…raging against fences. I feel hot. I feel suffocated. I feel all the injustice of the world raging through my body. And I feel terrified. The police remind me of the second assault, of the police inquiry into ‘aggravated sexual assault’. They remind me of that disempowerment. And their bodies pressing towards us, masked and faceless in their riot gear remind me of the faceless person fucking me. Feeling powerless. Feeling like they will always win in the end no matter how much you lash your body against them.

I sit now in Cipanas, a small village in West Java. It is past 7pm and I am locked in. But I am here out of choice. Working in a fundamental religious organisation. As a most passionate atheist I thought this would be selling out. But when I think about what is the most direct action I’ve done I think of here.

In jargon my position here would probably be best described as ‘consultant’ and I am accountable to no-one but myself. Which means being accountable to the community I’m working for. The place is a mental health and drug use rehab centre. In a country which views people as ‘setengah orang’ (half a person), this primarily means locking people up. My counselling and community development practice is based in a radical/anarchist perspective founded on ideas of empowerment, self-determination, resisting the pathologisations of people, and seeing well-being as a function of true freedom.

I have sat with people holding hands through the bars of the isolation cells. I have woken up every morning and spoken and laughed with people I love through the barbed wire fence which marks off the small yard connected to their dorms. And I regret not bringing my bolt cutters. But after a couple of months here, we have forged a relationship, a willingness, an understanding of ‘recovery’. And by hand, piece by piece, the fence comes down and the isolation cells become a store room for dusty cans of paint. This is only one drop in the ocean. But it is the first fence I have torn down. And it’s staying down. And we’ve planted vegie gardens where it used to stand. And inside I feel the deep secret warmth of solidarity with all those raging against fences with Molotov cocktails.

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