Responsibility, Reparations and Repair

This week we bring you recordings from two public events on Collins Street Melbourne that are calling for justice and reparations for those directly impacted by industrial disasters.  On 15 September a delegation of First Nations people representing communities experiencing the ongoing consequences of the Mariana tailings dam collapse at BHP's Samarco mine in Brazil visited BHP's global headquarters seeking justice.  Eight years have passed since the disaster that saw 60 million tonnes of highly toxic mining waste obliterate the Doce River for 700 kilometers and the communities living alongside it suffer still today.  On 27 October Friends of the Earth's Nuclear Free Collective and the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons visited the British Consulate and the offices of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade calling for an apology to First Nations impacted by the British atomic tests 70 years ago, a clean-up of the Emu Field and Maralinga test sites and to sign on to the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.