Australia

Australia’s largest weapons expo, Land Forces, was held in the city of Melbourne from September 11 to 13 last week, with several thousands of us showing up to protest and disrupt the event as much as possible.

In recent weeks we have seen a number of significant acts of violence that have directly impacted WRI affiliates. We want to draw attention to two of them – not to compare them (they are radically different in scale, context and level of brutality), but to highlight the way different manifestations of militarism around the world are interconnected, even when they are being experienced in very different contexts nearly 14,000km apart.

NIOA is Australia’s largest privately owned weapons and munitions company, found in 1973 by Robert Nioa, who remains the company’s CEO. NIOA primarily supplies the Australian military and police forces – they are the majority supplier of guns and ammunition to the Australian police.

On 17th June, members of WRI affiliate in Australia - Wage Peace - blockaded the facilities of the NIOA bullet manufacturer in Benalla in solidarity with the call by Senior Elders from the aboriginal Yuendumu community for a police ceasefire.

On 1st April, activists the Make West Papua Safe (MWPS) campaign occupied the lobby of a Thales Australia building, and displayed images of West Papuan activists killed by security forces in the last year.

The Australian government has been accused of “freedom of information abuse at its worst” and unnecessarily dragging out an already lengthy legal battle over a $1.3bn arms deal. The government has spent nearly two years trying to stop the release of a report by the auditor general, that criticised the purchase of 1,100 Hawkeis combat vehicles built by Thales.

In Australia, the coalition government has been accused of succumbing to pressure from the French arms company Thales, and spending nearly twice as much as was necessary on a new fleet of combat vehicles.

On 11th July students at the University of Melbourne took direct action to protest the universities collaboration with Lockheed Martin, the world's biggest arms company. The University has recently partnered with Lockheed on the STELaR laboratory.

In January this year, Australia’s Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, announced that Australia was aiming to become one of the world’s top ten ‘defence export’ countries over the next decade, moving up from its current position of 20th for the period of 2012-2016.

The Australian War Memorial (AWM) is one of our pre-eminent national institutions. It rightly holds a special place in commemorations of our war dead, not only as the nation pauses on Anzac Day, but right throughout the year. In the memorial’s own words, “Its mission is to assist Australians to remember, interpret and understand the Australian experience of war and its enduring impact on Australian society”.

Ferrovial is a Spanish multinational company, with a broad range of interests - they are involved in the construction of the Gugenheim Museum in Bilbao, the construction of the M3 motorway in Ireland, and manage toll roads across Europe. Ferrovial owns 90% of the company Broadspectrum, which runs Australia's offshore immigration detention centres in Papua New Guinea.

Nick Buxton

For anyone concerned with militarism, news of the terrorist attacks in Brussels brought a familiar sense of dread. We ache as we hear the stories of more innocent lives lost, and we feel foreboding from the knowledge that the bombings will predictably fuel new cycles of violence and horror in targeted communities at home or abroad. It creates the binary world that neocons and terrorists seek: an era of permanent war in which all our attention and resources are absorbed – and the real crises of poverty, inequality, unemployment, social alienation and climate crisis ignored.