34 years ago today, former Finance Minister Peter Walsh was spitting the dummy again.
The former Minister for Finance, Peter Walsh, attacked Australia’s major conservation groups yesterday saying he hoped Australia’s largest company, BHP, would use common law to bankrupt Greenpeace for interfering with seismic testing.
Senator Walsh said the major environmental groups were trying to subvert economic development — an objective they had pursued with some success.
Launching a book which emphasised market solutions to environmental problems, Senator Walsh said extreme elements of the conservation movement were more concerned with “destroying” industrial capitalism than protecting the environment.
“One wonders how long a country which is unquestionably some distance down the Argentinian road will continue to allow organisations like the Australian Conservation Foundation to subvert economic growth, and particularly the growth in the traded goods sector, to the extent that they do,” he said.
A long-time critic of the conservation movement, Senator Walsh fired a broad side at Greenpeace over its recent campaign to stop BHP’s oil exploration in Bass Strait. The organisation argued that the seismic tests would disturb whales which breed in the area.
He accused Greenpeace of hypocrisy in trying to stop oil exploration using petrol-powered rubber dinghies and a diesel-powered mother-ship.
“I hope that BHP sues Greenpeace under the common law and collects damages large enough to bankrupt the organisation.”
The book, Markets, Resources and the Environment, was produced by the Tasman Institute which Senator Walsh acknowledged many in the Labor Party considered “only marginally less obnoxious” than the League of Rights, or the Queensland National Party.
Lamberton, H. 1991. Walsh attacks greenies. Canberra Times, 10 April, p.3.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 355ppm. As of 2025 it is 427ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that Walsh from Western Australia (that’s not insignificant) absolutely loathed “greenies,” as per his comments in March 1990 on the eve of the federal election victory that was handed by to Labor by small g-green voters.
Walsh, as a columnist in the Financial Review, would bang on this drum repeatedly.
What I think we can learn from this is that the Australian Labor Party has always had a faction that has absolutely loathed greenies and resented having to compete for small g green votes because they are wedded to one particular vision of prosperity (pave the planet, redistribute the crumbs from the developers’ pockets and call it social justice). They also don’t like having to engage in debate with people who don’t have precisely the same world view as them because they are brittle af.
What happened next
Walsh kept on being a prick and was a leading light in the Lavoisier Group of climate denialist pricks.
What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Please do comment on this post, unless you are a denialist, obvs.
Also on this day:
April 9, 1990 – Australian business launches “we’re green!” campaign
April 9, 1991 – Peter Walsh goes nuts, urges BHP to sue Greenpeace – All Our Yesterdays
April 9, 2008 – US school student vs dodgy (lying) text books