Haere Atu APEC (AC/DC) Solidarity-Melbourne

This was read today and is dedicated to the memory of Syd Jackson, Moe mai e te rangatira. Takoto e haere ki te wa kainga tuturu.

Occupied Australia is the land of genocide and apartheid for its Indigenous peoples.

The invasion of Aboriginal lands was illegal under international law at the time of the arrival of the First Fleet. This invasion involved the perpetration of war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide and theft of Aboriginal homelands.

The current contempt and lack of a treaty, respect, rights and third world conditions that
Indigenous peoples face in Australia, the current joint police & military invasion of the NT is an International Shame.

As a Maori settler allay of Aboriginal Sovereignty, I refuse to be a silent beneficiary of aboriginal genocide any longer.

Like New Zealand Canada, and the USA, Australia is a colonial settler state, based on invasion, dispossession and colonisation. Its past 25 years of free market fundamentalism must be understood in the context of an ongoing colonial occupation of Aboriginal lands and resources on which the Australian nation-state is based

Globalisation is the second wave of colonisation and capitalist expansion and is been pushed by translational companies and corporates supported and regulated by international mafia rackets like the G20, WTO, World Bank, IMF, APEC. For indigenous peoples struggling for liberation this means there are two waves of colonisation to fight. The first wave of colonisation
has left the indigenous amongst the most disenfranchised, disempowered and
dispossessed groups on the planet. This is well documented. The object of deliberate genocide, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of indigenous people have died during our time in the struggle to retain the right to live on
and care for their territories to which they not only depend for survival but also have ancient, deeply-held spiritual and genealogical connections.

“Island of Hope.” (Report from
the World Council Churches)

The report found the following, that the major impacts of globalization in the Pacific were, number one, rapid increase in extreme poverty; and number two, destabilization of governments.
After decades of failed economic development and stagnant private investment, we see now the rapid rise of extreme poverty in the Pacific. 40% of the peoples of Vanuatu live in poverty. 48% in Samoa. Over 50% in Kiribati. “The Island of Hope” documented that the primary cause of poverty in the Pacific relates to globalization, and that this rise in poverty is interlinked with the adoption by national governments of liberal policies promoting investment and competition, and this has operated to the detriment of social services, including health, education, housing, and social welfare.

With regards to the impact on the political stability of Pacific Basin nations, the report found that within the last fifteen years, the Pacific region has attracted increasing international attention and is now on the world map of political and economic trouble spots.
When we look at the destabilization and the constitutional crisis in Fiji, where we have now had three coup d'etats, in the Solomon Islands, we see that the governments of the Pacific are falling apart because of the onslaught of transnational corporations globalisation, and neo colonial influence and bullying by Australia, New Zealand and the United States.

How does this happen? It happens because there’s a globalized structure, such as what has been imposed on the Pacific region by the two dominantly white powers in the region, and that is
New Zealand and Australia. These results come from what is known as the Pacific Plan for Trade Liberalization, but there are also other global initiatives moving in the Pacific that have had a negative and detrimental impact. Here, I
refer to the APEC plan of 2004, which is called the APEC Integrated Oceans Management Plan. This proposal was developed by the APEC nations for the
purpose of bringing states together in the Pacific so that they could have a collective and integrated approach to marine resource management, and so that they could all share equally in the benefit of this plan.

The problem is that no indigenous nation of the Pacific is allowed to be a member of APEC. Samoa, Kiribati, Tonga, Fiji, Vanuatu, French-occupied Polynesia, they are not members of the
APEC. The members of APEC in the Pacific are the two dominant powers, Australia and New Zealand, and the other member nations that participate now in the rape of the ocean marine resources of the Pacific are Canada, China, Indonesia, Japan, the United States of America. Why are we not surprised to see that leading the APEC initiatives, the governments of the United States, Australia,
Canada, and New Zealand are the same four governments that for 21 years have prevented the passage of the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in the United Nations?

Indigenous rights as perceived by ourselves are
especially critical to our Pacific Island peoples and nations as we approach the 21st century, called by some The Pacific Century. Political, nuclear, military, economic and environmental violations of our Pacific peoples'
indigenous rights by superpowers as well as by our own governments and transnational corporations are mounting. The world needs to be reminded of these
past wrongs a century ago and their relationship to World War II and its aftermath, the Cold War, nuclearism and continuing militarism in the Pacific.

The New World Order of economic globalization is not only based in the dominant nations of Western Europe and north America, but also in a growing number of Asian countries. This neocolonialism is directed at our 300 million surviving indigenous peoples with plundering of our natural resources to sustain the hegemony of corporate transnationalism. In the Pacific, pitted against this mammoth of insatiable capitalistic greed and materialism are we, the indigenous peoples who are determined to survive by invoking our own traditions of spirituality, cultural identities and unity with our sacred environments

People's Charter for a Nuclear Free andIndependent
Pacific (NFIP). The charter declared:

"We, the people of the Pacific have been victimized too long by foreign powers. The
Western imperialistic and colonial powers invaded our defenceless region, they took over our lands and subjugated our people to their whims. This form of alien colonial, political and military domination unfortunately persists as an
evil cancer in some of our native territories such as Tahiti-Polynesia, New Caledonia, Australia, and New Zealand. Our environment continues to be
despoiled by foreign powers developing nuclear weapons for a strategy of warfare that has no winners, no liberators and imperils the survival of all humankind.

We
... will assert ourselves and wrest control over the destiny of our nations and our environment from foreign powers, including transnational corporations. We note in particular the recent racist roots of the world's nuclear powers and we
call for an immediate end to the oppression,exploitation and subordination of
the indigenous people of the Pacific."