Water Tanks Not War Tanks 

On Wednesday the 28th August at 2pm, peace activists rolled a large water
tank into the Australian Tax Office at 350 Collins St and proceeded to form a
human chain and bucket water into the tax office to fill the tank.  The
activists then publicly indicated their intention to refuse to pay part of
their 1990 income tax to the government and to redirect the money to assist
in the development of water projects in the Horn of Africa.  This activity
was part of a creative nonviolent action designed to highlight opposition to
Australia's massive and disproportionate spending on the military, and to
highlight the hidden human rights environmental and development costs of
military expenditure.  The focus on water was designed to draw attention to
the fact that in a world that spends over $2 billion a day on the arms race,
about half of the third world's population does not have even the most basic
need of clean water.

The activists were engaging in a form of nonviolent, noncooperation called
war tax resistance, which is the conscientious refusal to pay part or all of
one's taxes because they are used to finance Australia's involvement in the
nuclear arms race, conventional wars, and 'low-intensity warfare' through
military 'aid' as exemplified by Australia's role in Bougainville.  The
reason for this is simple - whatever else we do to oppose militarism and the
arms race, we support it in a very basic way through paying for it with our
taxes.

In Australia approximately 10% of the annual budget is spent on the military.
Each year the Australian government spend between $9 and $10 billion on the
arms race.  This spending links us with both the nuclear arms race and
increasing militarism through the presence of foreign bases on Australian
soil, uranium mining, visits by foreign nuclear-armed and nuclear-powered
warships and was used to finance Australia's complicity in the Gulf War.  At
present Australia is engaged in a regional arms race, spending between 2 and
4 times as much as Indonesia on militarism, and accounting for 95% of
military expenditure in Oceania.  This allocation of funding becomes even
clearer when one considers that the government comparatively spends only a
fraction of this on the environment and virtually nothing on researching ways
of resolving conflict nonviolently.

This action is part of a growing international campaign which is now very
prominent in many countries.  At present there are tens of thousands of
people active in war tax resistance campaigns in Belgium, Canada, West
Germany, France, Italy, New Zealand, Spain, Switzerland, USA, and UK.  In the
context of this global movement, each year activists in Melbourne stage a
creative nonviolent action at the tax office designed to draw attention to
the campaign and to the real costs of military expenditure.  In 1987 the tax
office was presented with 104 trees to highlight the environmental costs of
military expenditure and in 1986 was presented with 94 shovels to highlight
the third world development costs of military expenditure.  The actual taxes
were than redirected to grass-roots non-government and development groups
working in Africa.

In 1989 and 1990, activists chose to highlight the social justice costs of
military expenditure and in particular the Koori struggle for land rights,
self-determination and social justice.  In order to do this, activists
arrived at the tax office with a trailer load of Koori land.  Activists then
shovelled earth from the trailer which they wheelbarrowed into the tax office
foyer.  They dumped the earth on the floor and shaped it into a large map of
Australia.  Other activists passed yellow buckets full of earth, each
complete with a Koori flag, along a human chain into the foyer to be dumped. 
Finally a Koori flag was paced squarely in the middle of the Australian
continent by Robert Thorpe from the Koori Information Centre, symbolically
reclaiming Australia on behalf of the Koori community.  Our taxes were then
paid to Robert Thorpe and Darleen Mansell of the Koori Information Centre as
rent for use of Koori land.

This year the action focussed particularly on the crisis situation unfolding
in the Horn of Africa region.  In Ethiopia during the past two years rain and
crop failure and civil war has severely affected ten million people.  Farmers
have been forced to eat their seed stocks, and animal and human diseases are
rampant, resulting in thousands of preventable deaths.  This year the action
began at the Bourke St Mall, outside the general post office, where activists
gathered at 1pm before rolling the water tank down Elizabeth St to the wonder
of drivers and pedestrians.  The action followed thorough liaison with police
who cooperated by coordinating traffic lights and providing officers to
direct traffic around us.  Upon arriving at the office, activists spent time
bucketing the water from the back of a truck to the foyer of the tax office
where it was used to fill the tank.  This year four tax resisters Carrie
Giles, Wendy Orams, Robert Burrowes and Brendan Condon handed an amount of
$798.09 in the form of a cheque to Kiros Abera, an Australian representative
of the Relief Society of Tigray (REST) to assist in a program designed to
train Tigrayan workers in Northern Ethiopia in the siting and construction of
shallow wells for the provision of cleaner, safer water supplies.

One aspect of the action this year of particular interest was the way in
which the mainstream media virtually totally ignored the protest.  This is in
contrast to previous years in which the tax office actions have receiver
wide-spread coverage, particularly in the electronic media.  In 1989-90 the
focus was on Koori issues which have been traditionally disregarded and
marginalized by the mainstream media, yet there was far more interest in
these actions than the water tank protest.  We have attempted to analyse the
poor media response and several factors may have contributed to this.  In the
past the campaign in Melbourne has centred around one individual, Robert
Burrowes, and one theory suggests that while one individual on a 'personal
crusade' is a novel and tolerable thing, larger numbers of people are more
difficult to marginalize and are more threatening.  Another suggested reason
is that in the light of the Gulf War the peace movement is experiencing a
conservative backlash from vested interest groups who control the media and
who perceive the peace movement as a threat to their interests.  Particularly
as a strong undercurrent of opposition is building to things like the
Australian International Defence Exhibition (AIDEX) to be held in Canberra
later this year.  Other reasons include general 'war-weariness' amongst the
media and inadequacies in the way we approached and informed the media this
year.

Valuable lessons were highlighted for activists regarding the danger inherent
in relying to heavily on the mainstream media, which in many respects is a
system of information flow designed primarily to advertise, sell and to
reinforce the existing unjust economic order, and to reinforce the associated
attitudes and values that support and maintain that order.  It also
highlights the glaring need for social change activists to continue to
develop alternative information flows and forms of media designed to compete
with, undermine and supplant mainstream media.
Brendan Condon