Thirty five years ago, on this day, June 22nd, 1990, the governing Labor Party of Australia is – gasp – siding with the rich and against the future.
Conservation groups have accused economic ministers within the Hawke Government of hijacking the environment debate and pre-empting discussion of a paper on sustainable development due to go to Cabinet next Tuesday.
The executive director of the Australian Conservation Foundation, Phillip Toyne, said yesterday that the ACF was “extremely concerned” to express disquiet with the fact that the Minister for Employment, Education and Training, John Dawkins, and other economic ministers were trying to dominate the sustainability debate.
1990 Lamberton, H. 1990. Environment debate ‘hijacked’. Canberra Times, 23 June, p.5.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 354.5ppm. As of 2025 it is 430ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that the ALP had clung to power at the March 1990 election thanks to green-concerned voters holding their noses and voting for Labor candidates. Some Labor figures (Peter Walsh, for instance) hated this, and hated the greens (the Greens didn’t exist yet). Meanwhile, the business pushback against all things environmental (except greenwash, obvs) had begun in earnest in March 1990….
What I think we can learn from this is that the ALP has never been able to cope with green issues. On some level they know this, I assume.
What happened next. The Ecologically Sustainable Development policy process got underway, and came up with some decent workable ideas, which were then watered down/ignored and then memory-holed – see here for the spectacular implosion of the whole process- … And the emissions kept climbing.
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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.
References
Also on this day:
June 22, 1976 – Times reports “World’s temperature likely to rise” – All Our Yesterdays