Victorias three largest community water campaign groups have united to campaign for sustainable alternatives to the state governments new water infrastructure projects.
Ben Courtice
In the room are a chemical engineer from a large mining/energy corporation, a solar energy engineer, a psychiatrist, a veterinarian, an artist and a construction worker. Also present are an ex-Labor Party activist, a Greens candidate in the 2007 election and a socialist student. Where do you find all these people, and more besides, in one room working for the one cause? At a meeting of Melbournes Climate Emergency Network (CEN).
Protests are continuing against the Victorian state governments planned desalination plant at Wonthaggi.
David Spratt co-wrote Climate Code Red: The Case for Emergency Action with Philip Sutton. The book has been recently published and a review can be read in GLW #764. Spratt spoke to Green Left Weekly’s Ben Courtice about the need to move beyond “business as usual” immediately if we’re to avert climate catastrophe.
Climate Code Red: The Case for Emergency action
By David Spratt & Philip Sutton
Scribe Publications, 2008
320 pages, $27.95
By David Spratt & Philip Sutton
Scribe Publications, 2008
320 pages, $27.95
A survey of unionists in the heart of Australia’s coal regions shows strong sentiment for action to stop climate change. The poll, commissioned by the Australian Manufacturing Workers’ Union (AMWU), surveyed 400 AMWU members in the Bowen Basin, Gippsland, Newcastle and the Hunter Valley.
Your Water Your Say (YWYS), the group campaigning against Victorias proposed Wonthaggi desalination plant, is facing bankruptcy due to the state and federal governments decision to pursue costs against the group after it lost a preliminary court case over the project.
Anti-desalination plant campaigners rallied at the Victorian Labor Party conference in Melbourne on May 24. They were protesting against the state ALP governments construction of a large desalination plant at Wonthaggi on the South Gippsland coast.
After decades of “greenies versus jobs” propaganda, it is high time unionists and environmentalists started working together on the looming threat of catastrophic climate change. Sadly, the Australian Council of Trade Unions’ (ACTU) policy on global warming released in March barely strays from what is acceptable to the government and big business.
The seven-member Bass Coast Shire Council, on whose land the Victorian Labor government plans to build a $3.1 billion desalination plant, voted on March 19 to drop its support for the project. In a March 20 media release, council CEO Allan Bawden
Campaign group Your Water Your Say (YWYS) has warned that Victorian state government policy will see the state swimming in water but drowning in water bills by 2014 if the proposed $3.1 billion desalination plant goes ahead at Wonthaggi.
On February 3, 300 angry Goulburn Valley residents, many of them farmers, blockaded the Sugarloaf reservoir just north of Melbourne to protest the construction of a pipeline from the Goulburn River to Melbourne’s water supplies. The Goulburn River feeds into the Murray River system, increasingly drained by irrigation and, for many years now, a record drought.
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