Anti-Adani activists at a rally on Thursday night told representatives of German Siemens AG, the largest manufacturing company in Europe, not to facilitate the Adani coal mine project.
A large crowd carrying placards denouncing Siemens’ involvement in the project gathered outside Luna Park in Sydney where delegates to a rail industry conference were attending a $1500 a head dinner. Under the smoky haze from the unprecedented number of bushfires that have raged throughout NSW in recent weeks, Adani executives were told to listen to the community and rule out working on Adani's dirty coal mine!
Adani wants to install signalling on the 200km railway that it plans to transport its coal to the coast. And Siemens in the only company in Australia who can do this work — the others, under pressure from the people, have ruled it out.
The ruling class and its political servants fear the capacity of the people, combining and organizing their strength in unions and community organisations, to force change on big corporations.
“Scummo” Morrison has identified secondary boycotts by such groups as a major threat and indicated that new laws may be passed to take away even more rights from the Australian people.
On the 1st of November 2019, in an address to the Queensland Resources Council annual lunch, Morrison identified three new threats to the resources sector: disruptive protest, economic sabotage and, “even more worrying”, a “new form of secondary boycotts”:
Environmental groups are targeting businesses and firms who provide goods or services to firms they don't like, especially in the resources sector. … Some of Australia's largest businesses are now refusing to provide banking, insurance and consulting services to an increasing number of firms who just support through contracted services to the mining sector and the coal sector in particular, which is the nation's second-largest export sector…
Let me assure you, this is not something my government intends to allow to go unchecked. Together with the Attorney-General Christian Porter, we are working to identify a series of mechanisms that can successfully outlaw these indulgent and selfish practices that threaten the livelihoods of fellow Australians, especially in our rural and regional areas and especially here in Queensland. Now, we will take our time to get this right. We will do the homework and we're doing that right now. But we must protect our economy from this great threat.
In Morrison’s firing line is that section of the old Trade Practices Act (now the Competition and Consumer Act) which provides exemption from prosecution for secondary boycotts to consumer and environmental groups. He has also identified activist shareholders as part of his “threats” to the economy.
When “Scummo” obscenely fondled a lump of coal that he had brought into the federal parliament (some people at first thought the dead matter was his brain), most people thought he was just a joke.
But the threats he is making against our rights are no joke. They are part of a whole agenda of repression being built up by Morrison to protect the big foreign multinationals and their “Australian economy”.
We must build the broadest coalition of defenders of people’s rights and within that, voice our own agenda for anti-imperialist independence and socialism.
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