It’s been an inspiring week for activists on the north coast. Bob Brown was in Lennox Head to provide an update on the critical situation in Tasmania’s Tarkine rainforest. Environment Minister, Tanya Plibersek is about to determine whether a massive new toxic tailings dam proposed by a Chinese mining company should be allowed to destroy the planet’s last remaining unprotected wilderness area. The Bob Brown Foundation is supporting forest protectors, covering legal costs and instigating legal action with the EDO to save this irreplaceable and spectacular wilderness.
Offshore detention survivor and refugee advocate, Behrouz Boochani, was at Byron Community Centre to talk about Australia’s cruel and inhumane offshore prisons on Nauru and Christmas Island and the poor bastards stuck in Port Moresby since the closure of the Manus Island gulag.
Mr Boochani’s visit was sponsored by the Byron Writers Festival and I urge everyone to read his shameful account of those fatal shores in his award-winning book, No Friend but the Mountains. Depriving people of their language, their identity, treating them in a brutal, uncaring, dehumanising manner, without decent food and medical attention and leaving them in limbo without hope, for years on end – we are doing that.
Our ‘processing centres’ fail to provide a clear pathway for refugees to anywhere but the terror from which they fled. There is no need for the cruelty and brutality, yet it is inflicted in our name by successive governments, putting us up there amongst the worst tyrants who run gulags.
Our new federal Labor government has decided to continue this evil regime, spending billions on new contracts with the US militia thugs now running these prison camps. Surely this money could be better spent?
The federal government created this hideous system and only they can dismantle it. Minister for Immigration, Andrew Giles, and Attorney-General, Mark Dreyfus, should both be concerned about future litigation from tortured refugees. They have the power to end this brutal system and we all have a voice and the power to influence their decision.
If you’re not doing enough, get active – write letters to lawmakers, sign petitions, add your voice to the debate. Doing nothing is not really an option when the future of so many lives is at stake. Supporting the status quo through passive indifference is a death sentence for humanity.
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. 
