Twenty years ago today, governments make their usual big empty promises…
On 7 April, two days after the Bald Hills decision, Neil Mitchell of 3AW put the Prime Minister on the spot in relation to a housing project west of Melbourne at Melton, saying ‘there’s a $400 million development out there at risk’ because of the elusive and endangered grassland-dwelling Golden Sun Moth. The Prime Minister was unaware of the moth. Still he promised ‘I will investigate that’. Other stories queried whether the endangered red-tailed black cockatoo would ‘sink a $650 million pulpmill’ in SA, and whether the little known flatback turtle would continue to raise an issue for Chevron’s $11 billion Gorgon gas project off the northwest coast of Western Australia.
(Prest, 2007: 253)
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 382ppm. As of 2026 it is 428ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The broader context was that the Liberal Party had gone to the 1990 election with a more ambitious emissions reduction target than Labor, but this had not won them for the election. Small-g greens had come out for Labor, and the Liberals decided they had been “stabbed in the back” and that all of this was all climate change stuff was a socialist hokum. John Howard, who had become prime minister 10 years before the events described here, had done everything in his power to protect the fossil fuel industry and to quash the growth in renewables and to prevent international action.
The specific context was that Howard was beginning to look old, beginning to lose his grip. Kyoto had, in fact, finally been ratified by enough nations to come into force, and negotiations for a success and protocol were underway.
Also, the Australian Conservation Foundation had teamed up with various banks, for example, including Westpac, and released a study with the laughable title “early action on climate change” that was a couple of days before this. And Howard’s environment minister was maybe not quite as sharp as either of them thought and had managed to create opportunities for people to poke fun. This latest one was the apparent John Howard beginning to not quite be on top of things. We now know that late 2006 was the year that the dam broke and that Howard stopped being invincible and started to look very, very beatable for the 2007 election.
What I think we can learn from this is that there are usually cracks in the dam. Sometimes these cracks just stay there. Other times, with hindsight, you can see that floods about to begin.
What happened next: Howard not only lost the 2007 election, but he also lost his own seat.
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 7, 1995 – First “COP” meeting ends with industrialised nations making promises…
April 7, 2010 – Ziggie tries to sprinkle Stardust – 50 nuclear reactors by 2050 – All Our Yesterdays