ARE WE AT THE TIPPING POINT FOR CLIMATE ACTION?

Are we at the tipping point for action on the climate emergency?

Are we at the tipping point for climate action? In 2016, when we started our campaign calling on the Australian parliament to declare a climate emergency, we had no idea how far and how fast the idea would spread. Within a year we had the support of 20,000 individuals and 55 groups. Scientists, journalists and politicians from across the political spectrum had spoken out. In 2017, Darebin Council became the first council in the world to declare a climate emergency. They wrote a Climate Emergency Plan and in 2018 held a Climate Emergency Conference. The Climate Mobilization in the United States and the Extinction Rebellion campaign in the United Kingdom have been putting pressure on local municipalities to follow in Darebin's footsteps and they are making fast progress. Recently, London became the third city in the UK to declare a Climate Emergency, after Bristol and Manchester, with Totnes and Stroud following soon after. The London emergency transition program will include retrofitting buildings, creating a national electricity system that runs without creating greenhouse gas emissions, and electrifying the transportation system. There are now 21 councils and cities that have declared a climate emergency and eight of these declarations were in the last  two weeks! In the United States, The Climate Mobilization succeeded in having emergency climate action and a World War two-scale mobilisation written into the platform of the Democratic Party. Newly elected Democrats including  Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (in the picture) are pushing hard for a Green New Deal. Please donate In mid 2018, we launched a booklet, 'Don't mention the emergency?' and we have now distributed over 1000 copies to politicians, scientists, journalists and community campaigners. It explains how to talk about the climate science and the need for emergency action in ways that move people to take action.   Campaigns all around the world are using the online version and we are starting to hear more use of emergency language from leaders and commentators. The picture below shows school students delivering a copy to local Labor candidate Kate Thwaites. We need your help to print more booklets in time to distribute them to politicians and opinion leaders before the federal election in 2019. Please donate here to help the emergency message reach more of those who need to hear it. We need $3000 to print another 700 copies. Listen to the author of the booklet, Jane Morton, explain our need for your help here. School Strike for Climate One person can make a difference. In August 2018, 15 year old Greta Thunberg (pictured below) began a school strike calling on the Swedish Parliament for emergency climate action. She says, "I have Asperger's syndrome, and to me, almost everything is black or white. I think in many ways that we autistic are the normal ones and the rest of the people are pretty strange. They keep saying that climate change is an existential threat and the most important issue of all. And yet they just carry on like before. If the emissions have to stop then we must stop the emissions. To me, that is black or white. There are no grey areas when it comes to survival. Either we go on as a civilization or we don’t. We have to change." Within months school students in many countries around the world were following Greta's example. In Australia, tens of thousands of school students took to the streets on 30 November, defying Prime Minister Scott Morrison's call for"more learning in schools and less activism". What an amazing and uplifting sight it was to see students out in force. Students fully understand how serious the problem is and that time is running out to preserve a safe climate. The students' strike, and its widespread media coverage, has been a great morale boost for climate activists. It has put the climate emergency front and centre of the coming Australian federal election. The Extinction Rebellion is spreading While school students are striking, their parents and grandparents are signing up to risk arrest as part of the Extinction Rebellion (XR). This movement recognises the climate emergency as an existential threat to humans as well as vulnerable ecosystems. Even if all nations honour their Paris emissions reduction commitments, we are still on track for three to five degrees Celsius of warming by the end of the century, and at those temperatures, most people on earth would die. That's why we need to "rebel for life". On 31 October, Greta Thunberg and journalist, George Monbiot were in London with thousands of campaigners calling on the UK parliament to declare a climate emergency. When the government failed to act by the deadline, the Extinction Rebellion began a series of escalating acts of disruptive civil disobedience, commencing with a protest that closed down much of the centre of London for several hours on 17 November. They have also staged sit-ins at the BBC and government offices and glued their hands to office windows to put pressure on the government to act. They have the support of hundreds of eminent people including a former archbishop. There are over 35 countries working on launching their own rebellions in mid-April 2019. If you would like updates from the international campaign, sign up here. If you are interested in being part of the Australian rebellion, sign up here. New data base We hope you like our new format newsletter and are happy to continue receiving occasional updates from the Australian campaign to declare a climate emergency. If you received this after unsubscribing, our very sincere apologies. We have recently consolidated a number of Excel spreadsheets into this Action Network data base. From now on we will be able to keep better track of those who subscribe and unsubscribe.

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HOMOPHOBIA IN PRESTON, MELBOURNE IN 2018

HOMOPHOBIA IN PRESTON, MELBOURNE IN 2018 Document dated 25 December 2018

When we bought our house in Preston, in Melbourne, Victoria, the type of house was called a villa unit in 2000, and we moved in in January and February 2001 from Sydney and Newcastle.

We are unit 2 of two units and unit 1 is the front one, nearest the street along the driveway which is common property.

It didn’t take us long to discover that unit 1 was public housing, in other words it belonged to the Victorian Department of Housing. It was not administered by them and was managed by an organisation called “North East Housing. It was controlled under a scheme called “Transitional Housing” and was supposed to mean that tenants were placed there until more suitable accommodation could be found for them, supposedly for about 1 year from placement.

We soon discovered that this did not mean what it said and some tenants were there much longer, which was both good and bad.

For the purpose of this document, the current tenants fall under the word “bad”, not only bad, but shocking!

We estimate that the current tenant is the 13^th since we moved in on 27 January 2001, and to date have been in unit 1 for 2 years and two months.

In that time she has been appallingly rude to us using the worst of language and threatening us in several ways, to the extent that we have spoken to the police because Haven, Home Safe have not responded to our requests that this family be moved out as soon as possible.

We suspected that her problem may be homophobia and we felt she was linking that to paedophilia because she has 3 little boys, one now aged about 3 and the other two seem to be about 7 years old.

It all came to a head on the afternoon of 15 December 2018 as the following details will explain:

We have complained about the driveway being cluttered with the children’s toys – bicycles, scooters, large netball balls and other paraphernalia. We have not complained about the children playing with them, our complaint is that when the children are not playing with them, they are left lying in the driveway and being an obstruction to those of us who use the driveway every day.

On this day at 1.30pm two friends came to pick us up to go shopping. One of these friends is a man in his late 80s and he uses a walker aid and walks with difficulty. He is also legally blind as he has Macular Degeneration, and therefore has to be helped with his walking wherever he goes. The driveway was cluttered as usual and the other friend, who is not incapacitated kicked one of the items out of the way to help the person with the walker make his way through along the driveway to unit 2, our unit.

We got ready to go shopping and were walking down the driveway to the street when the tenant came to one of the windows of unit 1 and screeched at one of our friends, “GO FUCK YOURSELVES YOU POOFTERS!”.

There was other abuse as well, such as “Haven laughs at you, they think you are a joke” (judging by the responses we have had from Housing, this seems to be true!!!), but we have reached the stage where this behaviour can not be tolerated any longer.

If the tenant is not removed in the very near future, we will be considering an intervention order on advice from the police. We will also be considering retaining a lawyer to bring a damages claim against both the Housing Minister and HHS for the stress, inconvenience and cost caused by the tenants despite repeated requests for their removal, over a lengthy period of time.