Chibo Mertineit, Lillian Rock
I just returned from the ‘Festival of Resistance’, which happened outside of the weapon expo at the Brisbane Exhibition and Convention Centre. It fulfilled its aim to make a noise about taxpayers’ money being used to support this event as well as investing enormously into the military industrial complex in this country.
The expo was kept pretty quiet and only got into the mainstream media through police brutality and some gutsy actions by protesters. When I hear that a company like Rheinmetal is inviting teachers to their premises, aiming to have an influence through STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) on the curriculum, I feel more than frightened.
What are we letting our government get away with? Did they just embezzle $1.2 billion taxdollars to avoid the public seeing how the robodebt scheme impacted and destroyed lives? We know that the coal/oil/gas industries etc have lobbyists in parliament and are donating to political parties and in return getting millions, sorry, billions of dollars in contracts. We know that our government is working against renewables and they plan to build a $600 million gas plant in NSW and to expand mining in Narrabri. We know that they are cutting forests down to sell as woodchips or to burn to produce electricity in sugarcane mills right here in the Northern Rivers. Trees are carbon sequesterers!
While military spending is on the rise all over the world, it seems like no one takes the climate emergency for real. As Michael Franti sings: ‘We can bomb the world to pieces but we can’t bomb it into peace’. We are really running out of time to change our behaviour to make sure that we are saving our living conditions on this planet and we honestly need more people to engage in our politics, especially while we can do so much from our computer at home – like research information (imagine that thirty years ago!), write to politicians, connect and share it. Or better still, come along, join in. I’ve met so many beautiful people. Check out disruptlandforces.org or find them on Facebook.
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
