Page 155 - Australian Defence Magazine June 2021

JUNE 2021 | WWW.AUSTRALIANDEFENCE.COM.AU
From a protester viewpoint, much had gone right at AIDEX 1991. Significantly, protesters simply camped over the road from the event venue, allowing round- the-clock activities.
This was also the end of the Cold War and there was a narrative in leftish cir- cles that peace would now prevail, there was no need for lavish defence spending, particularly on what were deemed offen- sive capabilities, and that defence com- panies were merchants of death absorb- ing funding better devoted to far more worthy causes.
There is every reason to scrutinise much defence spending in both quantum and quality, especially in this era of lav- ish budgets where the services seem to have near carte blanche to acquire what- ever their hearts desire. But that should be constructive, not just on the basis that they’re evil and we’re not.
So who are those who will be picket- ing Land Forces? Queensland is home to a diverse bunch of left-leaning anti-war
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groups but the organisation which ap- pears to be most active in promoting pro- tests against Land Forces seems to be an umbrella group which calls itself Wage Peace.
This seems to be a peace group for ev- ery conceivable peace-related progressive cause - #FreeAssange, #ClosePineGap, #StopTalismanSaber, #GiveEmTheBoot (that is US forces training in the NT), #DisarmUnis (remove defence compa- nies from universities), #ScraptheF35, #StopTheArmsTrade, #NoMoreUSWars, #WarProfiteers and much more.
Wage Peace has sure got it in for Land Forces (#DisruptLandForces) and for Brisbane-based defence companies, of which there are many. These morally su- perior activists aren’t very sympathetic to the workers.
“We inspected three Brisbane-based companies: Boeing, Rheinmetall and Nioa,” says the Wage Peace website.
“Being onsite gives us ordinary folk concrete information. We encounter real
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people going about their everyday prepa-
ration for ... war crimes.”
In fact their own images of picketing
of Nioa and Rheinmentall show none of the activists any closer than the front gate and there weren’t too many of them either.
Those behind Wage Peace appear to be among the usual suspects. One of the three contact names was the partner of now deceased activist Brian Law whose exploits included breaking into Pine Gap.
Most famously, in 2011 Law broke into Rockhampton airport during Op- eration Talisman Sabre, trundled across the ramp on a tricycle (he had serious health issues) then attacked a Tiger ARH with a garden mattock. He managed to whack a hole in the aircraft’s composite skin, which Defence said cost $162,000 to repair.
This was all very symbolic of turn- ing swords into ploughshares. Law was charged but never made it to trial. He died in April 2013. ■
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