22/11/2024
Our world is heading for nearly 3 degrees of heating. Unless we take radical and immediate action, we’re on a ‘highway to hell’, as the head of the UN puts it. And yet our governments are still faffing about, offering little more than lip service or barely disguised denial. As a result, ordinary folks are feeling trapped. Like hostages. But that suits the big polluters just fine. Because inaction on climate is exactly what they’ve spent so much money to achieve. Meanwhile, these corporate rent-seekers suck up more subsidies and super profits as our last chance to avoid climate breakdown is frittered away. No wonder young people are angry.
But when governments appear captive to vested interests, what else can people do but vent their frustration and fury? The ballot box is only available every 3 or 4 years. Which is why the democratic right to protest is both precious and necessary. But acts of peaceful climate protest are being vilified, constrained and even criminalised. We need to resist this dangerously illiberal impulse and insist upon our right to express our disgust, our dismay, and our collective will in the streets.
That’s why I support the People’s Blockade being organised by Rising Tide. Young and old, working class and middle class, ordinary citizens deserve to be heard. Against the political blather and the corporate spin and authoritarian lawfare, we must raise our voices and act together, bearing one another up in solidarity and neighbourly determination. Otherwise, nothing changes. The Big Polluters win. And we continue down this highway to hell. Like hostages.
On November 22-24, thousands of Australians will gather in Newcastle to blockade the world’s largest coal port. They have billions of reasons to be there. And it’s not a privilege, either – it’s their democratic right.
Australian Youth Climate Coalition
Parents for Climate
Australian Religious Response to Climate Change (ARRCC)
Friends of the Earth Australia
Environmental Defenders Office
