Global Climate Change Action

by Dr. Alison Broinowski
(Published with permision from the Author for not-for-profit public awareness purposes)

"In late June and early July, just as the Howard Government was dispatching the army to Aboriginal communities to deal with sexual abuse, the U.S. military was involved for two weeks in northern Australia in the biggest ever joint exercise, Talisman Sabre.

Most Australians saw no connection.

Military training areas, uranium mines, sites for future nuclear waste dumps and now Aboriginal land seized by the Commonwealth are dots across the Australian map.

Several of them are connected by the Adelaide-Darwin railway. Having been many times promised, the $1.3 billion link from Alice Springs to Darwin was surprisingly found viable in 1999. By January, 2004, the train was running. The only tenderer, according to research at University of Technology Sydney, was the FreightLink consortium led by Halliburton (then headed by US vice-president Dick Cheney), with state, territory and federal contributions.

FreightLink owns the railway and can operate it for 50 years. It has contracted UK firm Serco, to staff and service the train.

Serco, which manages British nuclear power plants, gained a reputation in 2000 for sacking workers without AWAs at Australian naval bases in Jervis Bay.