Greens candidate for Mackellar, Craige McWhirter was delighted to see a front page story about the USS Kitty Hawk's visit to Australia in the Manly Daily and other news outlets on Friday.
"I was disappointed however" Craige said "that no mention was made in the media of exactly why this US fleet was gracing us with it's presence. The US didn't send millions of dollars of men and machinery here on a sight seeing tour of Sydney, nor did they send them here for us to gawk at or to create traffic chaos".
"Under a 20-year agreement that the obsequious Howard government signed in 2004, which allows the US to test its new weaponry, to use our military bases, our airfields and our naval ports, the USS Kitty Hawk and the rest of the US fleet have been expending their ordinance in live fire exercises in our World Heritage listed Great Barrier Reef at Shoalwater."
The Greens are concerned that those munitions include weapons enhanced with uranium. Such weapons have been linked to cancer in our returned servicemen (Iraq - Gulf War Syndrome) and with obscenely high rates of birth defects in both Kosovo and Iraq.
In 2005 Craige bore witness to the military exercises of the USS Kitty Hawk from a yacht at Shoalwater. Nearby David Bradbury was launching his documentary "Blowin in the Wind" which exposed the first birth defect on Australian soil that was attributed to the US use of uranium enhanced weapons at Shoalwater.
"If these weapons are now being used on Australian soil, we are not only going to be left with land that we can never clean up but we are also going to pass on a legacy to our children that can never be healed."
"Far from being something to celebrate, the arrival of this fleet is a mark of our subservient role in the alliance with the US. John Howard has made us the doormat upon which the US test their weapons."