A group of activists from the Galilee Blockade group took over the foyer of the Adani HQ at Eagle Street in Brisbane yesterday saying they wouldn’t leave until they were arrested.
After three and a half hours blocking the building’s lift access and engaging staff, 12 people in total were arrested and removed by police, the youngest a 47-year-old father of four and the oldest a 74-year-old grandmother of four.
The group refused to leave the building and were arrested for ‘breaching the peace’.
The disruptive action marks the beginning of Dob In Adani campaign, a project for activists to obtain hidden information about Adani and their contractors.
Galilee Blockade spokesperson Ben Pennings was one of the people arrested, Pennings said this was just the beginning. ‘Hundreds of Queenslanders got arrested to save Fraser Island and the Daintree rainforest,’ he said. ‘Thousands will get arrested to protect our climate, the Great Barrier Reef and the Great Artesian Basin.’
Pennings says Adani hide details of their insurer and major contractors because a majority of Queenslanders are opposed to their disastrous thermal coal mine. ‘Large companies working with Adani risk reputational damage but also costly protests.
‘We will use information we are given to regularly blockade the operations of corporations in bed with Adani.’
The Galilee Blockade is encouraging people to Dob In Adani at www.galileeblockade.net.
I am so proud of those Protectors in the Adani foyer. Caring, brave people of Brisbane.
It’s way past time that Australia’s national security should cease being narrowly defined in military terms and urgently expanded to include the global climate crisis. Adani style environmental vandalism and the proposed Mercato mega expansion in Byron, are energy dense projects which spew massive amounts of CO2 (concrete, aluminium and steel require lots of energy to manufacture so each building component should have a CO2 rating). Unless we all, and that includes politicians, commit ourselves to the desperate fight against global warming and the extinction of plants and animals we face speciescide
Good letter Gareth,
The central issue is climate change.
There is a more to do than to stop Adani, to focus on one mine risks winning a battle but losing a war.
Sadly there is no discussion of class in this campaign. It is the people contributing least to climate change that bear the burden, for example poor and the working class bordering the Bay of Bengal in Mumbai, people on the disappearing Islands of Kiribati lacking resources to move to higher ground.
The failure of Labor led Council of Unions to adopt a policy on climate change for workers to transition out of fossil fuel jobs is on great concern. Even at 15% membership unions are a powerful force in bringing about change.
Some unions have adopted good policies, like the National Tertiary Education Union. Other union leaders like Bob Carnegie who is the immediate past Secretary of the Qld Branch of the Maritime Union of Australia has come out against thermal coal mines.
More needs to be done at the rank and file level. But what organisation will take it up?
Ian Curr
30 June 2019
Workers BushTelegraph
Brisbane
I am aware that I sound like a broken record.
However, one way or another, Adani needs
to be stopped. Australians are being held to
ransom by an agreement between the Qld
Premier & the Federal Government. This
is a tiring time for over half of this country’s
people, local Australian Scientists, World
Scientific studies & Climate Emergency
warnings. Well, we ‘reap as one has sown’
& that’s the naked truth of the foolishness
of a power’s gluttony.
When will those who signed off on Adani approval learn that putting PEOPLE BEFORE PROFIT will create many millions more jobs in pursuit and development of everything environmental .. electricity, car, produce … you name it, it will all require jobs.
Coal mining and it’s supporters putting PROFIT BEFORE PEOPLE are on a losing train of endeavor. Raping the Earth, and leaving it scarred forever is not the way to move forward to National Prosperity. National Prosperity benefits us all, for all time. Not just until coal mining is extinct. And it’s a downhill deadend, dying industry already. .. on the road to nowhere in the foreseeable future.
Time for a REALLY HUGE EFFORT from all Environmentalists to run educational campaigns and programs explaining and showing the unlearned, less understanding population just how lucrative, exciting, creative and healthier, for people and planet, a world without coat will be !
..
#StartAdani…….
Solar and wind are cheaper cleaner and provide more jobs.
#buildrenewables
Great infrastructure and export project. Nice to see the Galillee Basin finally opening up. Quality coal exported to the world.
Go back to your bridge troll
Galilee basin is high quality carbon storage topped with World Heritage quality rainforest. Thanks to the brave protesters for helping save the Galilee and build Climate Resistance.
Leave it in the ground.
Rasa, I’d much prefer a greater quality of life for
people here & in every other country along with
‘people before profit’. It’s unadulterated gluttony
that’s government supported [ie; the nit-witted
grab-bag senators & Cos’ leaders] that have
put every last one of us at risk as well as
everything that complements earth itself. Hitler,
if he could, would applaud loud & long to hear
such ‘aussie logic’. Coal & gas sniffing is right
on the money.
Thinking about your comment still, Rasa. The
visual – your ‘nice to see’ comment has a
different spin to mine [no pun intended]. What
I reckon you see – [in my eyes] – is not “The
Galillee Basin opening up” but a weekly price
cut can of sardines being ripped open &
chucked on a slice of bread. 2 views on what
this land means to one as opposed to another.
Thank you to the protesters. This mine can not go ahead. We need action on climate change, not coal mines.