Protesting the 'Land Forces' Arms Expo at the Perth Convention and Exhibition Centre Oct 6 - 8, 2026

To stage such an event is a crime against humanity and a crime against the planet itself. It is inexcusable on any level. 

Boorloo experiences ongoing colonialism and its toxic legacies. Boorloo is being used as a staging post for future violence around the world. Unacceptable! 

Peace is the only way. 

Below is a poem written against this event (it refers to the original planting of memorial oak trees in 'Kings Park' — Kaarta Koomba — after the First World War) and here's a short, rough video I made last week when down in the city from within the 'Bishop's Garden' opposite the Convention Centre.

Reclaim

            against the ‘Land Forces’ arms expo at the Perth Convention Centre 2026

 

Cameras will penetrate the faces

of those who lift their hands

to make peace signs, to object,

 

on this ‘reclaimed’ wetland,

the Perth Convention Centre

making its claim to the world’s

 

war-work. That it would break

humane conventions, would shatter

bodies across the globe,

 

fits with the agency

granted to weapons, those

euphemisms of culture and nature.

 

Under the reflections of mining towers,

fossil fuel empires, the cycle

of making and dissolution

 

will be in the purview

of arms dealers

and their companies.

 

Wreathed by traffic,

the arms expo sales junket

will animate glass,

 

concrete and steel.

The homeless have been

‘moved on’, and told

 

they’ll be ‘catered for’,

special powers legislated

to protect the oh so polite

 

death-zone artistes manqués

going peacefully about

their business, while heat-

 

stressed trees planted

for the war dead

on Kaarta Koomba

 

try to photosynthesise

bewilderment

as long dead oak trees once did

 

when a gunshot marked the first

memorial plantings

over a hundred years ago.

 

And now, expeditionary forces

promoting deft warcraft

highlight the sheen of weapons

 

before they explode,

before they deliver their verdict

on the life-industry of flesh and blood,

 

before they reclaim the world

for the inanimate, feigning

an organic sensibility.

 

 

            John Kinsella

Against War and War Propaganda in its Myriad Forms

Euphoric Hero Dysphoria

 

Each hero latched onto

in order to manufacture

more heroes, to pick up

more arms supplied by

‘allies’ whose industries

of arms and related items

(‘supplies ‘) make a killing

justified by the economic

trickle-down effect so bills

can be paid and consumer

items purchased as if good

conscience had anything

to do with that euphoric

hero dysphoria a president

or high command would urge

on would embody as bodies

on streets in trenches by churches

and where trees or even fields

of wheat grew as the seasons

still managed to function

until recently, until metaphors

once again fell into line,

rushed to serve death.

 

            John Kinsella

 

In Opposition to the State Arms Manufacturing Conference

So, the Western Australian state government wants to join the arms race with gusto. See here.  This grotesque participation in the manufacturing and distribution of death is normalised and familiarised with little opposition. Some people are peacefully protesting at the venue today, but the mainstream media seem to have no problem with this deathcult war-profiteering event. In fact, the local newspaper writes it up under 'manufacturing'!

Graphology Spectre 24: against the arms industry

The deadline for making firebreaks is upon us —

demarcations to prevent death finding its way in.

The deadline for making firebreaks is upon us —

and as we finish the job arms manufacturers play with fire.

The deadline for making firebreaks is upon us —

and Defence West gambols with notions of Westernising death.

The deadline for making firebreaks is upon us —

firebreaks that won’t stop the attack they call ‘defence’.

The deadline for making firebreaks is upon us —

so the State and its profiteer-cronies can send fire outwards.

The deadline for making firebreaks is upon us —

while in the casino-resort the gamblers in death deploy semantics.

The deadline for making firebreaks is upon us

while the ‘arms conference’ fine-tunes and sanitises death.

            John Kinsella

Against Australia's Arms Industry

I write this as an expression of absolute disgust at and resistance to the Australian government's push towards becoming a 'top ten' arms manufacturer (see). That is the politics of murder. And, furthermore, I write against Australian universities accepting research money directly or indirectly from those connected with arms industries anywhere (see).

Graphology Subtracter 3: global/local

Australia dreams (in its substitutions) of its small arms manufacturers

becoming big arms manufacturers — an artisanship of the many,

the splendour of giving tools of power to ‘allies’.

A bunch of Australian universities are already paving the way

for knowledge endowment — ethics committees and components

for nuclear weapons as close as investment in intellectual freedom.

Yesterday we saw a quenda cross our path — or we crossed its path —

in the broadest daylight. What wasn’t out of kilter in its world?

Such investment intermediaries of life — the expansion of ‘opportunities’,

the denials, the codes of conduct guiding professional outcomes.

            John Kinsella

Against Australia's Arms Trade Ambitions

           

          by John

So, the fascist regime wants to position itself to become a major arms exporter, to feed the horror and distress of military conflict around the world. Its concern about export to oppressive countries is a furphy, a way of positioning itself as righteous in exporting to the apparently ‘better’ countries, countries more efficient at screening their human rights abuses.

Australia hungers for power, and the constant papers and addresses to position itself as an influential ‘middle power’ are part of the same mentality that denies human-induced climate change, sees the remaining native vegetation and wildlife as something to delete or at best fetishise, something that stands in the way of ‘development’.

It’s tragic being inside this most nineteenth-century political and psychological immaturity — a game of states and borders, of power deals made by elites with vested interests in their outcomes. Australia is not decolonising; it’s recolonising and extending its ambitions into becoming a coloniser in overt and subtle ways. Arms exports are the most brutal form of colonisation.

This goes hand in hand with the abuse of refugees, of ‘turning back the boats’, of refusing to scrutinise the ‘fuck off we’re full’ or ‘if you don’t like it, leave’ mentality that rules in much of rural Australia, and in the suburbs as well.

One of the most appalling notions underlying so much of this pocket battleship aggression, this dreadnought hangover of the years leading to the First World War, is that of ‘any job being better than no job’. We hear this being peddled by politicians of the right over and over again. So, to manufacture arms that are used to kill is a just way of making a living?

There aren’t even semantics worth undoing here to show the blatant hypocrisy of such unreasoning ‘pragmatism’. The mining industry hugely benefits from arms trade, and all the ‘philanthropy’ of rapacious miners buying off academic institutions, and infiltrating the thinking and processing mechanisms of universities, doesn’t change the fact that in the end they provide the raw materials of bullets, guns, missiles, atomic warheads. The degrees of separation seem to protect their consciences, but in the end, the corpses are at their doors, and the doors of government.

Christopher Pyne’s desire to position Australia as a 5 percenter in terms of defence industry and sales is an overt fascist desire — the nation state develops and fosters industries that entrench a militaristic identity in which we are all expected to acquiesce or to be excluded.

There are no real rights in Australia, just illusions of rights. They are taken from us daily, and we do nothing. Australia already participates in the international arms trade; don’t think it doesn’t. And this should be stopped immediately.

But things are about to get a whole lot more bloody in the new patriotism stakes that are being foisted on us. If this core of colonialism is not addressed, Australia will consolidate its position as a New Colonial Power. For that’s what it is, and why people can’t see the wood for the trees given most of its forest and bush is being chopped down with nothing but dust in sight, chopped down and burnt or logged and/or turned to woodchips; it’s an astonishing feat of denial. But then again, note the sticker you see around here that supports the hunting and fishing party: a gun with a tick, and a tree with a cross through it. Get it, people?