By Katrina Dean
[This is the edited text of a speech given to the February 26 Hobart rally against ocean dumping of Jarosite wastes by Pasminco Metals-EZ.]
On hot days, I often think about going for a swim. I go down to the beach, but I don't put my hand in the water because for fear of heavy metals. All around are signs reading: "Danger; don't swim here!"
Well, why can't I swim here? I live here, don't I? I work and study and I'm active in the community, I pay taxes. Yet I have no say about what happens socially and environmentally. I never voted for policies which allow companies to leak acids or heavy metals into the river, or dump toxic waste in the Tasman Sea.
The decision to extend this licence was taken by the federal cabinet, a handful of people. Here stand the people of Hobart, pushing the toxic fish around our plates.
Pasminco-EZ is a subsidiary of CRA, a huge Australian-owned multinational. CRA, among many other concerns, owns strip mines and other disasters in Bougainville, where much of the land has become uninhabitable. Pasminco owns another industrial plant in Newcastle, which currently releases dangerous amounts of lead into the surrounding suburbs.
This company has threatened to sack workers if it is forced to stick to environmental guidelines. So they get let off the hook by the government, and guess what: they turn around and sack people anyway. Pasminco-EZ has laid off 750 people over the last eight years.
They've been asked again and again to clean up their act. They've been let off again and again and again. For what gain? Fewer jobs, not more.
EZ are bad employers and bad for the economy. Their ambition is to increase productivity, reduce the labour force, make a big mess and probably slip offshore when things get a little sticky.
Clean technology and non-toxic processes do exist. It would require a small percentage of EZ profits to change some equipment and re-employ the people they've sacked to clean up their act. Labor and Liberal governments have let this issue drag on for years.
At the UNCED conference in 1992 Ros Kelly, the Australian environment minister, bragged about clean, green Australia. In 1995 the international press will say Australia is the only place in the world which still allows toxic waste to be dumped in the ocean. The rhetoric of the Labor government is proven empty once again.
They claimed in 1983 it was they who stopped the Franklin Dam. It was the people who waged a long and brave campaign who stopped the dam. Now this government's going to go ahead and pollute the Tasman Sea and indirectly the Derwent River.
At Tas Uni yesterday I talked to a young woman about this rally. She asked, "What's this rally going to do? How's it going to stop EZ dumping?"
The only thing that will make this government take notice is community pressure. This campaign will have to be loud and broad and big. Unless the people at this rally pick up this campaign and run with it, it's over. The mainstream media will bury it in EZ style — out of sight, out of mind.
Last night I was reading a book about the Franklin dam campaign. The writer, someone active in the campaign, talked about it as winning time — time to get serious about environmental politics, time to get organised for the next fight. That time has come again. People with anger and enthusiasm need to step forward.
This campaign needs mass involvement. People across the political spectrum need to unite around this issue. Every tactic needs to be employed — lobbying, petitioning, parliamentary action, cultural action and most of all street action, people action like today. Only a broad coalition can mobilise this sort of force.
I'd like to quote the book I mentioned before about the lesson of the Franklin Dam campaign:
"We have seen the powers of government misused and subverted; we have seen the law and lawkeepers turned to the uses of political expedience. But we have seen other things too. Above all, we have seen the proof that the control of events, the ability to change the whole direction of our society, is not beyond the influence of the least of us. And if we remember this truth, and hold fast to it, then the Franklin and all the other rivers and forests and mountains [and oceans] need never be lost."