Global Climate Change Action

PICKET FRIDAY 8.30am - NO TO NUCLEAR: SOLIDARITY WITH NT INDIGENOUS COMMUNITIES

Please come along to this very important picket as the election approaches, the intervention intensifies and very serious preparations for a nuclear industry in Australia are begining. We need to let both Howard and Rudd know that Indigenous justice and a nuclear-free Australia are serious election issues and we demand that genuine committments are made to each. Great speakers as listed below. Leaflet attached - please distribute widely.

PICKET OF AUSTRALIAN NUCLEAR ASSOCIATION CONFERENCE
FRIDAY OCTOBER 19th 8.30AM
280 PITT ST SYDNEY

NO TO NUCLEAR: HOWARD MUST GO!!!

SOLIDARITY WITH NT INDIGENOUS COMMUNITIES

LAND RIGHTS NOT MILITARY LAND GRAB

CLEAN COUNTRY & STRONG CULTURE, NOT URANIUM MINING

Speakers include:
Darren Bloomfield - Aboriginal Tent Embassy
Kerry Nettle - Australian Greens Senator
Jessica Morrison - International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons
Michaela Stubbs - Nuclear-Free Campaigner of Friends of the Earth

The Howard Government’s ‘intervention’ into Northern Territory Aboriginal communities is not about child protection or ending violence against women and children. It’s about undermining land rights, disrupting Indigenous work and income, and weakening opposition to uranium mines and nuclear waste dumps in the NT.

“Quarantined” Welfare – the Tools of Dispossession
Aboriginal people that work through the Commonwealth Development Employment Program (CDEP) manage their own wages and money. Abolishing CDEP will push people onto welfare and the welfare income management system that allows for quarantining and tight control of how people’s money is spent. Many people running businesses on CDEP in remote outstations are already being forced to move into larger regional towns. The extraordinary measures give the Federal Government power to seize lands and property without compensation. The owners of those lands and properties have no right of appeal. Lands will be leased for five years, but the government has plans to extend these measures for 99 years.

Managers
The Federal Government has appointed non-indigenous managers to the ‘prescribed’ communities. These managers have the power to decide who lives in a community and who must leave; they can observe any meeting of an organisation working at the community, they can change any local programme. Many Aboriginal communities consider these measures, often being administered by under-prepared military personnel, as an invasion rather than an intervention.

The Nuclear Connection
In 2005 Mal Brough passed legislation supposedly about child protection, but with the words ‘child’ and ‘children’ conspicuously absent from the legislation, it will actually serve to open the Territory up for mining and uranium exploration. Two weeks ago the Federal Science Minister Julie Bishop approved the nomination of Muckaty Station on Ngapa land as an additional site to be assessed for the federal radioactive waste dump. In 2005 the government passed the Commonwealth Radioactive Waste Management Act overriding Territory law and racial discrimination legislation and making legal challenge by any affected group to a site nomination or selection impossible.

The nomination process for the proposed sites was deeply flawed, with three sites chosen for their status as Commonwealth Department of Defence sites and, with the case of Muckaty, the promise of $12 million of dollars as education incentives and as a managed trust in return for the land being handed over for at least 300 years.

Many people are concerned that groundwater and local wildlife could become contaminated by the long-term storage of waste on their country. Muckaty Land Trust Region is also known to experience regular seismic activity.

It is still illegal by Australian law for Australia to accept international high-level nuclear waste, but signing on to the (US President) Bush-initiated Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP) will inevitably put pressure on the Australian government to consider overturning these laws to accept international nuclear waste. The Liberal party national council passed a motion in June encouraging expansion of Australia’s nuclear industry - including potentially developing a high level dump.

This is why we’re picketing The Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO) and the Australian Nuclear Association. These
institutions control the nuclear industry in Australia, an industry which relies on dispossession and violence against Indigenous people.

Come and join the picket of the Australian Nuclear Association. Be a part of the movement toward a nuclear free future. Get involved in the campaign against the Howard government’s authoritarian invasion.

Upcoming events:
. Charles Perkins Memorial Address, concerning the Northern Territory Intervention: Tuesday
October 23rd at the University of Sydney Great Hall, 6pm.
. Sydney Nuclear Free Coalition Meeting: Thursday Oct 25, 6pm, Lvl 3 UTS Tower

Please contact Liv for more information - 0401 955 405