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PagesPublic FigureArtistVan Nishing
Just completed this mural in solidarity with the Djab Wurrung people and the campaign to stop the Victorian Government cutting down more sacred trees in order to construct a highway.
Was good to make use of the dark grey colour already on the wall in the Victorian suburb of Kensington and turn it into a road.
Congratulations to the people of Chile and yesterday's referendum victory!
Here's a few images from 2019 when the people of Chile had woken to it's newly found... radicalism on a mass scale against the conservative neoliberal establishment of more than four decades. There's no better time to post these after the very recent #AprueboConvencionConstitucional landslide victory for a new constitution in favour of the working class and oppressed. Make no mistake, the mass street protests of last year cleared the way for yesterday's result.
The mural here still exists (hopefully) in Brock Way, Kensington if you'd like to visit it in solidarity and since there's less lockdown restrictions.
Below is a summary on the subject from Socialist Alternative - Red Flag:
"Congratulations to the people of Chile, who have voted by an overwhelming majority to abolish the constitution inherited from the US-backed Pinochet military dictatorship. With 99.5% of votes counted, 79% voted for a new constitution.
After record voter turnout delivered the "rebirth", tens of thousands of Chileans flooded the streets in jubilant celebrations full of singing and fireworks.
Chile's old constitution explicitly enshrined the so-called free market economics that had been enforced via military dictatorship. Even after the country moved from dictatorship to capitalist democracy, Chileans have seen inequality and the cost of living skyrocket, while their public health care and education systems are in ruin. The constitution's official neoliberalism made a mockery of these social problems.
This victory belongs the Chileans who hit the streets last year, defying brutal police repression to protest austerity measures introduced by the government of billionaire President Sebastián Piñera's. Sparked by young students, the movement rapidly swelled into one of hundreds and thousands of activists fighting the Chilean state.
Their demands have included a new, citizen-written constitution, higher wages and pensions, better health care and education, and a rejection of the neoliberal policies that led to nearly a quarter of total income going to the top 1% of Chileans.
Sunday’s referendum asked voters who should draft the new constitution: a body of newly elected delegates, or a convention in which half of the delegates would be existing members of congress. 80% of voters supported a newly elected body, without automatic inclusion of congress members. The Chilean working class do not trust the political establishment to determine their country's new constitutional basis.
A new constitution won't solve the problems of Chilean capitalism, but this vote is a great historical repudiation of the entire legacy of Chile's Pinochet period, and its legacy that has lived on through Chile's "democratic" period. It's a victory for the working class, and hopefully the first of many, more radical victories to come. And it couldn't have been done without the movement of mass, militant street protests that defied so much police repression, and that hopefully will continue, deepen, and radicalise."