Protests disrupt Westpac’s 200th birthday dinner
Guests attending Westpac’s black tie 200th birthday gala dinner on April 8 were greeted by hundreds of protesters outside the event at Carriageworks in Redfern, who angrily denounced Westpac for not distancing itself from Adani’s proposed Carmichael coalmine in Queensland's Galilee basin.
Shaun Murray climbed some scaffolding and chained himself to the building, interrupting the dinner for 90 minutes.
As police worked to remove him, Murray shouted denunciations of Westpac for refusing to rule out funding the mine, forcing Westpac chief Brian Hartzer to refute the allegations. “The Westpac group has not been approached to fund Adani,” Hartzer said, according to The Australian.
More pictures by Green Left Weekly here.
Trawling to be banned in Tasmanian waters
Legislation was introduced into Tasmanian Parliament on April 6 to permanently ban trawling in the state’s waters. The amendment to the Living Marine Resource Management Act 1995 will ban trawlers of any size, including supertrawlers, and will also ban practices such as double trawl netting in Tasmanian waters.
However, conservationists have pointed out that most of the offshore fishing grounds where factory freezer trawlers operate are outside Tasmanian waters. Supertrawlers mostly operate on the edge of the shelf, where the small pelagic fish are most abundant.
This area is located in Commonwealth-managed waters, and the Small Pelagic Fishery is a Commonwealth-managed fishery. Only action by the federal government can effectively ban supertrawlers from Australian waters.
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