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| Image from abc.net.au |
How come so many people still don’t get it?
There is an outrage because a big Indian mining group wants to dig up a massive area of Queensland, Australia.
It’s coal – an outdated, dirty fossil fuel of limited supply that pollutes our air.
The plant will be huge. They’ll be building it on agricultural land. The local town’s population of 500 will be overwhelmed. They will be bringing in workers from India. There will be a runway to fly workers in and out, which will mean lots of airline emissions. And then, most of the coal will be exported for India’s power market.
As far as being an insult to the Australian people and several generations of their children, they might as well have dropped a nuclear bomb full of dog shit and Justin Bieber CDs on Sydney.
The Australian government has asked the company to consider using Australians for their workforce instead if importing from overseas. Well, if you’re going to dig a hole in the country big enough to bury a list of Julia Gillard’s broken promises, you might as well keep local people in work for a few years. Destroying Australia should be done by hard working Aussies!
I’m sure of course, that if the government asks a big multinational mining conglomerate to take a haircut on their profits for the good of the Australian people, they will be more than happy to oblige.
Outraged, Occupy Australia have suggested writing and calling the government to complain. I have personally taken on the task of printing T-shirts for the campaign. Some slogans I have come up with so far include: “Filling the Air with Noxious Fumes is Tony Abbott’s Job” and “Shut your Coal Hole”.
Of course these kind of gestures are the best anyone can come up with against the power of large corporations. They’re futile, but anything would be. If big business wants to do something, they will do it. If something has the potential to make a vast sum of money, then it doesn’t matter one iota what consequences it has – one way or another – it’s going to happen.
When there’s money to be made, there will always be someone who doesn’t care about the environment, agricultural land, local people, local jobs or citizens’ opinions.
