On this day, November 8 1989, greenies respond to a Labor Minister who declared environmentalism to be a “middle class “fad.”
SYDNEY: Australian Conservation Foundation executive director Phillip Toyne hit back yesterday at the Minister for Primary Industries and Energy, John Kerin, who last week described the green movement as a middle class “fad”.
1989 Anon, 1989. ACF says Kerin’s lash at greenies was ‘fatuous’. Canberra Times, 9 November, p.7.
http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/120858727
[The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 351ppm. At time of writing it was 416ppm- but for what it is now,well, see here for the latest.]
The context was this –
Australians had begun to really get their heads around environmental degradation, the Greenhouse Effect (see Dan Cass’s brilliant essay on this site). In May 1989 Tasmanian Greens had done very very well at the elections there. Labor saw the Liberals trying to outflank them on climate (true story). Business was beginning to organise its pushback. The speech by Kerin can be seen as the beginning of the general reaction…
Why this matters.
There’s always a pushback. In Australia’s case, it’s gone on “successfully” for three decades. But then, the country was always a quarry with a state attached…
What happened next?
The pushback.