This World Environment Day, June the 5th 2014 an Earth Embassy will be established at the Victorian Parliament House precinct. The Embassy is a reclamation of the sovereign indigenous land and will represent a united front of world indigenous movements against the destruction of the earth and its peoples.
The autonomous space will be a hub for all earth defenders to establish a presence on Aboriginal land and bring their issues to the city streets.
The protest features the First-nations Liberation Movement (FnL). They will bring Black issues to the conversation on World Environment Day, creating a space for indigenous people to join forces in solidarity with others responding to the ecological emergency facing our planet.
West Papuan indigenous activists will construct a traditional hut to bring their demands for environmental justice and human rights in their homeland to Melbourne.
West Papuan Ronny Kareni explained his people’s position. “Imagine a foreign corporation arrived one day with your national government’s blessing and seized your home; destroyed your grocery store, local farms and gardens, your church, your favorite park; polluted your drinking water.”
“West Papuan indigenous people have no recourse to the law to defend their lands from multinational companies. As a collective voice and as defenders of the Earth and indigenous custodians of our land, we demand foreign corporations with their national government to STOP plundering the mother earth.’’
Earth Embassy organiser Izzy Brown explained. “In Australia indigenous people are being double dispossessed, first their land has been stolen, and now its being destroyed. But as the original custodians of the land they continue to be at the forefront of the struggle to defend the planet.”
Robie Thorpe (FnL) ‘’This country is based on premeditated acts of genocide on aboriginal people and our land.’’
“The Earth Embassy moves in solidarity with the recently established Redfern Tent Embassy and the Muckaty traditional owners who are currently in the Federal Court of Australia contesting the Government’s proposed national nuclear waste dump being placed on their land without their consent.
From toll ways to fracking, from old growth forest logging to coal mining, from dredging to drilling, the environment is under attack, and the climate is on the brink of cataclysmic change.
There is now more need than ever to establish a space to challenge state and federal governments committed to funding environmental destruction through subsidies to mulitinational mining companies, the coal and old growth logging industries.
If they attempt to silence us through the recently implemented Summary Offences act that grants the police more move on powers, the Earth Embassy is prepared to challenge their jurisdiction to enact these laws against a sovereign indigenous protest.”
“The Earth Embassy will bring the reality of the environment emergency to the parliament and big business district of Melbourne through traditional, beautiful radical and necessary acts of creative resistance.”