SAW protests at the Careers Fair
On Tuesday the university had its Careers Fair, with a whole host of big corporations descending onto campus to recruit students. Not simply content just to open its doors to a whole range of killer uranium and coal mining companies and the military, the university this year decided to step it up a notch, and lay out the welcome mat for possibly one of the most nasty companies on the planet, BAE Systems – world’s largest arms dealer, profiteer to the tune of billions of dollars from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, supplier of weaponry to dicatorships in Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, Yemen, Saudi Arabia and Jordan, and funder of UOW’s program to help develop components for the next generation of killing technology.
So, of course, SAW rocked up to protest! We picketed the fair, handed out 150 leaflets, held up placards denouncing UOW and BAE, gave speeches, chatted to students, and took interviews for Wave FM, ABC Illawarra, i98FM, Prime TV and - somewhat bizarrely - UOW TV. It had originally been our plan to go into the fair and protest at BAE’s stall, but due to the great lengths we’d gone to to attract media and publicise BAE’s prescence, security turned up in large numbers to prevent any “disruption.” (Of course, designing missile systems for more efficient bombing, selling torture equipment, manufacturing anti-personnel bombs, taking over UOW’s labs to develop better weaponry - none of this is disruptive in any way.) Quite a few students were irate that nobody was allowed to get into the hall, but many others stood around to listen, took leaflets and chatted with us.
It’s becoming increasingly difficult for the university to perform military research and host war-profiteering companies like BAE without attracting constant protests and a great deal of negative publicity. The over-the-top way in which the university is starting to react to us (sending security to follow us for hours on end after we held up a banner on the first day of semester, for instance) is just one sign of this. Soon enough we’re going to have to move on from small protests to bigger actions that link everything wrong with the uni (massive cuts to Arts and music courses, no money to buy renewable energy, millions for war research) and that are going to have the power to really challenge the administration and win lasting gains for students and staff!
