Resources for firefighting, not for war!

BY BRUCE MARLOWE

"Major national resources, including use of the military, should be urgently allocated to fighting the current bushfire crisis, instead of wasting hundreds of millions of dollars on sending troops to support the US war against Iraq", Dick Nichols, national co-convener for the Socialist Alliance stated in a January 22 media release.

"Prime Minister John Howard on January 19 described the national capital as under the 'attack of the summer terror of bushfire'."

Nichols criticised Howard's refusal to deploy military personnel to assist fighting the bushfires. "Here we have in the current bushfires a genuine crisis and a genuine threat to the lives and well-being of the Australian community, unlike the completely manufactured, in fact non-existent, threat to the Australian people posed by Iraq.

"Why not redeploy substantial national resources, in particular the military, to assisting in a meaningful way the professional and volunteer firefighting forces, in a period of admitted unprecedented fire threat? Why not spend resources on training and equipping the military to assist in severe national emergencies, instead of using them to confront Third World countries in support of the US oil monopolies and the Bush regime?

"And, in the longer term, why not re-allocate the billions of dollars wasted on military spending to boosting civil programs to prepare for and defend against national disasters such as fires, floods, salination and so on?"

"The Socialist Alliance", Nichols added, "calls on the government and the opposition, on both state and territory and federal levels to commit to a comprehensive national program to tackle the inevitable growing bushfire threat by mobilising social resources in a planned and democratic manner."

From Green Left Weekly, January 29, 2003.

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From GLW issue 523