Event report/analysis: “It comes down to what your definition of ‘movement’ is”

The tl;dr – 

It comes down to what your definition of “movement” is.  

If you believe, as Adam Bandt and his colleagues seem to, that a movement is a bunch of people from a Big Organisation, jetting in from their HQ and standing on a stage, offering “hope,” authenticity and validation to ranks of people who are sat mutely in rows, wanting their (begging) bowls filled up, then Friday was another success in a long line of successes.

If you believe, as I and a few (many?) other people do, that a movement is made up of individuals, small groups, large groups, pulling mostly in the same direction, as frenemies, helping each other out, learning from each other, sharing ideas and resources, then Friday night was another catastrophic shit-show/missed opportunity in a world that can’t afford any more missed opportunities.

That’s it. That’s the post.

Read on at your peril. 

First let”s say the good stuff (because one of the standard response-but-not-replies is that I “never say anything positive” (1)

• The event, at the Jam Factory on North Terrace, had a fair number (150? 175?) of people present (certainly slightly more than at Thursday’s rally).
• Most of those people (but not all) seemed to enjoy themselves, and get what they wanted (or at least expected?)
• They heard from some voices that are too rarely platformed (i.e. First Nations people)
• Er…
• That’s it

Not much, is it? And absolutely not enough. It wasn’t enough forty years ago and it most definitely is not enough now.

Here’s what happened, from my perspective. On Thursday, there’d been a rally. It was held under time and place constraints. Here, on Friday, the organisers had more space and time to show what they could do.

There were people at the door to check that everyone had RSVPed, that their name was On The List.  This felt a little bit “off”, and I almost decided to test the idea that I wouldn’t be able to get in without giving a name and email. But then they found me on one of their sheets of paper (we will come back to this).

The event was billed to start at 5pm but it was quarter past when we were called to order (we will come back to this). People were mostly sat on the chairs, talking to people they knew. There were empty seats, but also people standing at the back and the side. Perhaps 150 people?

The event started with a lovely coming-onto-the-stage led by Uncle Jack and his fellow panellists, and a welcome to country. After that, I gotta write, it was mostly downhill.

Kirsty Bevan of the Conservation Council of South Australia got things under way. The transcript could be submitted to the “I” column of UK satirical publication Private Eye. She also said that us gathering there in the evening was an “action”? Really?  Are we emptying the term “action” so far as to include these sorts of meetings?  A rally outside an AGM would, in some people’s minds, be a borderline example of an ‘action’, but a meeting counts as an action now? If the rest of the event had been good, I wouldn’t be “nit-picking” (2), but it wasn’t.

The standard line appears to be that the Santos business model is causing climate change. This is indisputable, but the question is then, how do we stop it? (3) 

Next up, Adam Bandt, formerly a Greens MP. – “together we are going to build a movement.” Again, it comes down to what you think a movement is. In my view there was basically no “movement-building” going on.

Bandt also flipped through the stump speech memes he had deployed at the rally.  “Governments don’t go to war over the sun and wind…”)  “There’s more of us than there are of them.”  And then, cringe, “Remember the Franklin Dam campaign.”  Well, about half the audience were 60 or more, and CAN remember it (it culminated in a 1983 High Court decision saying that the Hawke Federal government DID in fact have the power to over-rule the Tasmanian government on the question of a hydro-electric dam).  But maybe the example of a ‘victory’ you are pointing to is … (checks notes) … FORTY-THREE YEARS AGO then maybe – just maybe – you’re doing something wrong?

Bandt then held out the promise of the audience being able to “take a couple of actions” and that he would tell people what they were (we will come back to this).

Then, the bombshell.

Bandt quickly and casually announced that the event – which had been advertised as a Q&A would not, in fact, have q and a,  because there wasn’t enough time

This was astonishing, and absolutely – in my opinion – deadly for the credibility of ACF and CCSA as campaigning organisations.

They had advertised it as such. They had the venue for two hours. They started fifteen minutes late for no apparent reason. Nothing was stopping them holding the advertised Q&A.

This was a brazen bait-and-switch

Either they never intended to do a Q&A, or they did but some OTHER reason stopped them and they were too scared/embarrassed to say what that was. So they came out with the “lack of time” excuse instead and relied on everyone being too polite to make a big deal of this.

Why am I making a big deal of this?

Because “we” are supposed to be better than the lying conniving exploitative extractive assholes who are trashing the planet

“We” are supposed to be honest, competent etc

Either they never intended to do it, or “something came up.” I am not sure which is worse. It simply cannot have been a lack of time. That is a brazen lie and it is shameful that Bandt had such a low opinion of the audience that he thought it would fly. The only thing more shameful is that the audience went along with this. So much for their self-respect.

Then followed the speeches from the First Nations representatives, which almost redeemed the whole sorry show. Almost, but not quite.

For me, the key call was from Kara Kinchella.  “We have to do better than we’re doing.”

Quite.

But on the evidence of this awful event, which was pure ego-fodder, we are NOT doing better, and we seem not to know or care.

Bandt then did a “conversation” style thing with the three speakers, making sure to interject favoured campaign factoids (Santos has had sales of $47bn over the last ten years, and paid zero company tax.”

At just after six pm (with the venue available for another hour!) Krsty Bevan drew the formal event to a close.  Almost. There was still time for Bandt to claim that there were “a few hundred of us here tonight” (nope).  And that we should all sign a petition and saying “I look forward to seeing you at the next rally.”

It was (to me) fascinating that the impending (mid-May) Australian Energy Providers annual conference was NOT mentioned. Could it be that ACF and the CCSA are afraid of bad publicity because of those “bomb-throwers” of Extinction Rebellion? 

The final, inevitable, invocation was to stay, listen to some music and buy a beer “talk to each other” – having done precisely nothing to design the meeting around making it easier for people who came not knowing anyone to talk to strangers.

Some people did stick around, but I was not the only one heading for the door. And at the tram stop I met someone who’d been at the same event and we compared notes, agreeing that it had been intensely top-down, designed it seemed to us mostly about gratifying the egos of the comperes (this is distinct from the panellists) and harvesting contact data for future use. 

I will write again about all this, but I have a couple of (well, four) closing thoughts to share.

First, there was a kind of ‘love-bombing’ going on (so much so that it gave me flashbacks to a late 1980s ‘Festival of Light’ meeting I went to(4). Repeated effusive (fulsome, in the original sense) thanks for attending, but without any attempt to say thank you in a meaningful way (i.e. by enabling people to form or strengthen the kind of weak ties (as per Granovetter) that make a movement.

Second – some of those people present – especially ones who are already plugged into networks –  DID have a good time, did have a kind of bonding/re-charging of their batteries.  But so what? that’s not enough, and certainly not enough compared to what could have been done. It all has a vibe of the animals singing Beasts of England to soothe themselves after the latest evidence of their defeat at the hands of the pigs and the dogs. (That’s an Animal Farm reference)

Third – if people who attended are turned into ego-fodder, if they leave without new connections, new ideas, then whatever hopium the organisers have ‘inserted’ into them fades and they have to come back for more, or they just to give up. 

Fourth – there is an irony in all this. We (the good people) are opposed to Evil Organisations who disregard the skills and lived experiences of local people, who see those people only as in the way or simply usable as resources. But when the same dynamic – top down, extractive, is used by nominally different campaigning organisations, we are so colonised, so desperate to believe in a Brighter Future, that we don’t even see the dynamic.

So what happened and why does it keep happening?

So why did I write this?

 For the shiggles. Because a couple of people said they were curious. Because I am not writing enough.

What response do I expect?

For the most part, absolute silence.

For the next part, indifference, derision and ad hominems.

For the next smallest part, willful incomprehension and counter-“attacks” that set up various strawmen and knock them down.

So, WHY did I write this?

I don’t know. Habit? Despair?

Other posts on the same theme

• Dire Mountain
• Dear New Climate Activist
• Change Howitzer
• We’ve got to stop meeting like this
• Defragging the movement
• Cher, incentive structures and our inevitable doom
• There’s a hole in my movement, dear Liza

Footnotes 

1. There is a limit to how much ‘defensive writing’ you can do, in order to try to maintain a conversation with people who are – in my experience – absolutely determined NOT to have a conversation about these issues (namely the ongoing failures of ‘big’ green organisations).  The more you try to anticipate their responses (again, not replies) and neutralise them, the more time and energy you waste, the more reader(s?)-bandwidth you take up, the more you allow low-rent people to live rent-free in your head. And for what?  So, foregrounding the ‘good’ stuff (which ain’t that good) is my only conscious attempt to frame this in ways ‘acceptable’ to the ‘right’ people. They’re not reading, and if they’re reading they’re not taking it in, and if they’re taking it in then they’ve not been doing anything, and will continue not to. What was that about ‘rent-free”? Sigh.
2. Words matter. And they reveal how we conceptualise the world, and our actions. Gathering for a meeting as “action” my very fat arse.
3. Also, if you’re doing housekeeping, perhaps actually ask someone from the venue where the toilets are?
4. Don’t ask.