Nexus - 0104 - New Times Magazine-pages

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1ews for Peace IOr reace that it has won over the Labor Party - if it wanes in its struggle to keep the environ- ment high on people’s list of priorities, then it will no longer be a vote winner and the Labor Party will just abandon the environment the way it has everything else - it won't show in the public opinion polls and won't rate highly on any party's policy agenda, That's why as a Nuclear Disarmament Senator I'm not so much concerned with building a party as with building a movement. Is the NDP a single issue party? In my first speech in Parliament I showed why we continue to focus on nuclear disarmament. In summary, the existence of nuclear weapons and theirdeployment | goes with them before you can make | Do you think young people are more depends on vast concentrations of power | long-term substantial gains on all those | conservative today? and wealth. You’ve got to have concen- | other issues. Then the focus of people’s trations of wealth to be able to afford | actions who are concerned about justice | Yes, because they're under greater super- them and you’ve got to have concentra- | will move to other areas. vision and constant criticism. The civil tions of power to deploy them and have The Aboriginal issue is a good ex- | rights abuses that are being perpetrated the global strategies to make it work. ample of the interlinking between peace | on young people at the moment are hor- That leads to increasing militarism | and justice issues, because peace and | rendous. You're allowed to imprison and political oppression around the | justice are inseparable. You can’t have | young people for things and in ways in world and if you look at places like Palau, | one without the other. And if those of us | which the adult wouldn’t and couldn't Fiji, Nicaragua, Eritrea, wherever there | concerned about peace don‘tconfrontthe | be. That's holding young people back in are people struggling for sovereignty it’s | major justice issue in this country, then | their activities. against superpower strategic interests. all this stuff about peace and disarma- There are a number of pressures on The economic exploitation of people | ment is just hollow rhetoric. We have to | this generation to make them feel inade- and the environment is to maintain those | take a stand. I reckon you’ve gol to have | quate and powerless, and so only a brave concentrations of wealth, and so poverty | principles and I don’t want to go down | fewcan overcome all of that pressure and in the Third World is generated and | that wet-fingered pragmatic road. If we | do something about it. maintained by the diversion of resources | lose support this year because of our And those who do come along to into this vast global nuclear military | principled stand on Aboriginal sover- | meetings of the peace movement find system. eignty, well so be it. It just means you've | that they're either deathly boring or that In my first speech I used the logjam | got a bit further to go in educating the | they're not terribly peaceful and they analogy; in countries where the loggers | electorate. can’t cope with the sort of rough-and- transport timber by river they regularly I think back to the Vietnam cra; I was | tumble politics that occurs in the peace have logjams. And the way they loosen | a draft resister in those days, I went to | movement and so they stay away. logjams is not by painstakingly taking | prisonin 1972 because I wouldn’t fightin Now I'm a founding member of Pad- one off at a time, but by finding the key | Vietnam, and the whole resistance to the | dlers for Peace, and we're hoping to have log. You release the key log to release the | war started off as a left looney traitorous | upwards of forty kayaks on the water jam. That’s the way I see disarmament, 1 | communist pinko minority. People who | tomorrow (for the arrival of the USS see it as being the key issue - unless you | saw what washappening keptmaking the | Missouri and other nuclear-armed ves- resolve it, you’ll be struggling to save the | statement that it was unjust, that we | sels).Every month we have atraining day Amazon Basin - there's one log; you're | shouldn’t be sending troops there - and | atBlackwattle Bay where people come to struggling to save Nicaragua - there’s | peoplestartedtosectheir sonscomeback | learn safety techniques, play games with another log. You've got to get rid of | in coffins and the truth started to come | power boats to not be afraid of rough nuclear weapons and everything that | out and people changed. water, paddle under [Cont'd Over] NEXUS New Times Four - Autumn 1988