Attending a ‘White Deaths in Custody’ demonstration at Sydney Town Hall, demonstrators were informed by Green NSW MP Sue Higginson, that the shooting deaths of two mentally traumatised and disturbed young people, by NSW police, revealed a total lack of will and professional understanding by NSW state politicians of the required need for mental health advocacy/support/remedy. Indeed, it would appear that such required funding has been allocated to the NSW Police and informs their law-and-order strategies, divorced from trauma understanding.
We cannot ignore this tragedy as we witness the growing trauma being experienced by flood victims, homeless people, First Nations people, women, children, and activists as climate-change realities demand that the legal systems and political representatives face the current structural horrors that are escalating. We face the added horrors of a threatened planet and the hubris of developers and their oppressiveprofit technologies, that target the vulnerable.
Reading the recent letter in The Echo by Wallum activist, Amanda Midlam, ‘Men in Black’ brought to my mind visions of a paramilitary exercise enacted by the new security personnel employed by Clarence Property at Wallum. Residents had already been menaced and heckled by security and felt ‘unsafe’. Byron Shire Council was repeatedly informed of this illegality. A raid June 26 by ‘new’ security personnel, dressed totally in black, wearing balaclavas over their faces and ID tags obscured, removed the Aboriginal flag, the ‘welcome tent’, and fenced off a turning circle. Did Byron Council ratify this work? Or was this an intimidatory tactic to traumatise the community and legal protectors?
I would describe disaster capitalism as a system where cronies take all, with arrogance and contempt and delight in the strategies of provoking trauma to all.
The fat lady is singing. Act now!
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. 
