Waking Bula - Open letter to the residents of Bulahdelah 28.3.11

This situation is so dire, so awful, so incomprehensible that no-one in any government will do anything, that I hope at least some media outlets will print it. We can only hope that some of the residents finally wake up to the atrocity on their doorstep and the looming disaster, that will come whether there is a catastrophic landslip or not, whether hundreds of people contract cancer and silicosis or not - just the highway being there will, inevitably, kill the mountain and kill the town stone dead ...mb

Open letter to the residents of Bulahdelah

Enjoy your (to-be) 6-lane highway through the mid-slopes of your World Heritage valued sacred mountain.

Enjoy having the fumes and pollution from 20,000 cars and trucks fall on you every day. 

Enjoy breathing in the highly dangerous carcinogenic and silicosis-causing dust from the explosions.

Experts in the field have warned there is a very real risk of catastrophic landslips in the inherently unstable mountain that could be triggered any time either by the blasting, heavy rainfall*, earthquake*, the removal of so much vegetation or just from the vibrations of heavy traffic.

Enjoy living under that cloud every day - you deserve it - 800 INNOCENT SCHOOL CHILDREN DO NOT.

Maureen Brannan 905 Wilson Road CLOYNA Q 4605 ph: 0427710523 

 

(I have deliberately used the word 'innocent' for the school children, to make the point that the residents are as guilty as the RTA by fully complying with Option E rather than joining the knowledgeable and caring people in their town who have been fighting this great evil for over 10 years, as are all the relevant government ministers who could have stopped this nightmare at any time. The government has absolutely NO RIGHT to put the lives of all those innocent children in such peril! It is an indictable offence!) 

Letter to PM re Economically-unviable Aboriginal communities

Dear Ms Gillard,

You should stop all welfare payments to Aborigines in economically unviable remote communities - they don't deserve it.   They don’t deserve to be treated as second-class citizens (at best).  They don’t deserve a continuation of  over ‘200 years of unadulterated humiliation’, as Oodgeroo put it.

Pay them a ‘cultural maintenance payment’ equivalent to a working wage, and in addition, arrange to send them WHATEVER THEY WANT to set themselves up to become (predominately) self-reliant and fully self-determining again, as they were for the past 60,000 years (apart from the past 223 years of occupation and complete subjugation by the invaders of their lands.)

Your Indigenous Affairs Minister’s job is simply to facilitate that, so that they can re-build their lives and cultures on their own (being the onoy people who can), which are worth infinitely more than all the money in the world.

Open letter to Julia Gillard

Open letter to Julia Gillard:

What with allowing mining in the Tarkine, passing the pulp mill and other notable jobs Mr Burke has had on his plate lately, what time has your environment minister had to assess complex matters of Aboriginal cultural heritage?  He's so busy that in 18 months he hasn't found the time to process the Worimi's claim to protect their sacred mountain estate, during which time many of the significant sites on the mountain needing protection have been unnecessarily destroyed.  In fact, why isn't Aboriginal heritage the job of the Indigenous Affairs department, that being the only department in a position to make a decision on such matters?
Give it to Jenny Macklin, Julia - SHE'S NOT DOING ANYTHING.  Ask her to deal with the sacred Alum Mountain Protection claim, first to stop them blasting it to carcinogenic smithereens.  Then she should look at the by-pass threatening priceless heritage in Tasmania, then all the other ones pending.  Then she can take her time and review all the past decisions made by the wrong department under the 1984 Heritage Act.

And Julia, most people think duck 'hunting' is an absolute obscenity - hundreds of camo-clad, armed-to-the-teeth rednecks laying in ambush at their waterholes is not hunting.  The Australian people want you to ban it, now, before any more native 'sitting ducks' are slaughtered.