Action Updates

For the second day, the Port of Newcastle has been blocked!

Kim (33) has jumped onto a train saying, “we have to get to the root of the problem, which is the system, we need to organise ourselves differently to create economies that prioritise people’s needs.”

“It’s all connected, the genocide of first peoples, the exploitation of land and the climate crisis.”

“Whether it’s through stopping coal as we hurtle headlong into climate collapse… or showing up in solidarity for Palestine and getting in the way of corporations who are enabling genocide for their own profit… we have to get to the root of the problem. We need to organise ourselves differently to create economies that prioritise people’s needs.”

Australia, Israel, and the USA are a part of the same financial, military, and ideological system of exploitation that maintains power through extraction and military force. Power that serves only the elite at the expense of the needs of the many and the climate that sustains us all.

“The global systems that Australia supports are continuing genocides and dispossession using militarised state-sanctioned violence. I’m here to say that ordinary people without real access to decision-making power can and should intervene directly to stop the flow of resources.”

Joanne, a woman in her sixties from South Australia, joined the resistance after a close friend lost her home in a bush fire. From her vantage point, she communicated the scale of the crisis,

“These coal trains are over one kilometre long. Just imagine them coming every 15 minutes, every day, every week. Climate change is here, and we’re on a railroad to hell.”

Australia’s economic and political system is maintained through the resource flows between roads, ports and rails. It will continue to grow and profit off industries that threaten all life on earth, if we do not get organised and get in the way.

The economic and political structures on this continent were brought here and built on stolen lands. This economic system is complicit in ongoing ecocide and genocide, here and around the world.

We must use sustained, direct action to resist those systems and cultivate another way to care for the land and each other.

#BlockadeAustralia

Two mothers, Rosie and Cat, shut down world’s biggest coal port for second time today! They are preventing all coal trains from entering or exiting by sitting on top of a coal train carriage. This is an explicit act of defiance to Australia’s continuous environmental destruction.

Rosie said: “Only we, ordinary people, can change this trajectory towards the hell on earth that’s happening right now. The structure of power that created it continues to feed the greed of the few at the expense of everything else. We must follow the path to a better world. We must disrupt the system that’s killing everything.”

This action is taking place on unceded Awabakal and Worimi country. Indigenous peoples have cared for and nurtured this land for at least 60,000 years before colonisation and continue to care for country. This continent was shaped by thoughtful techniques that prioritised life and diversity. Acknowledging this is to know that we still have potential for different ways of living in alliance with nature.

Blockade Australia are committed to mobilisations that confront the pressure points of Australia’s extractive system. Sustained action like what we are seeing today is crucial if we are to impact our current trajectory towards complete climate collapse.

Two mothers stand atop a coal carriage in opposition to the current ecocide following the port shut down by Ian earlier this morning. What more could you hope to see on a Tuesday afternoon?

#BlockadeAustralia

On June 23, on Awabakal and Worimi land, Ian Fox (67) hang from the Kooragang Rail Bridge, grinding the Port of Newcastle – the world’s largest coal port – to a halt.

Ian was speaking out: “Australia is a colonised continent. It is a place that has destroyed and continues to destroy cultures and landscapes for profit. Looting and plunder – that is what the Australian system represents.”

We are disrupting the port because it is part of the infrastructure that enables this system of domination and destruction that’s driving all of us towards ecological and societal collapse.

It is up all of us to stand in the way of this system and demand structural change. Our survival depends on non-compliance. Act your politics!

#BlockadeAustralia