Category: Australia

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Activism Australia Coal Gender

2013, Jan 7: Paper (briefly) wraps rock. But coal wins in the end… #auspol

On this day in 2013 an activist called Jonathan Moylan sent out a fake press release, purporting  to be from a major Australian bank, saying it was withdrawing funding for the Whitehaven Coal mine at Maules Creek. The share price briefly plummeted.

Why this matters – this issue became part of the culture wars over coal and climate in Australia, in the lead up to the 2013 federal election that saw the ALP swept from office after only 6 years. The Coalition has been in charge ever since, regularly toppling its own leaders while exacerbating the climate crisis through a … well, it’s an ugly ugly story.

As for Moylan, well he escaped a jail term.  [These sorts of non-violent direct actions are now even more illegal than they were. We can expect to see a lot more of them between now and the breakdown(s).]
And the mine? Well, what do you think?

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Australia Climate Justice

January 5, 2006 – strategic hand-wringing about “Our Drowning Neighbours”

On this day in 2006 Anthony Albanese MP (now leader of the Opposition and perhaps Australia’s next Prime Minister) and Federal Labor MP Bob Sercombe  launched  Our Drowning Neighbours, Labor’s Policy Discussion Paper on Climate Change in the Pacific.

This was part of the ALP’s use of climate as an  ‘wedge’ issue to differentiate itself from the (seemingly-endless) government of John Howard (we will be coming back to him more than once in the course of this project).   That use of climate as a wedge would accelerate markedly when, at the end of 2006, Kevin Rudd took over as opposition leader.

Why this matters. By the early 1980s, once the science and consequences of what was then called the “carbon dioxide problem” was basically settled, the sea level rise issue has been understood. And islands and low-lying states knew they had an existential (and not in the wanky Sartre sense) problem. And there have been endless declarations about this. And Australia, as the big beast in the South Pacific, and as the very big polluter (both domestically and via its coal – and more lately gas exports) is always going to be in the frame.

What happened next – The Labor Party formed a government in 2007, in the “first climate change election.”  Refugee issues were on the agenda for Rudd and then Gillard, but not in the way that Albanese and Seccombe might have thought..  Australia is now fortress Australia, and you wouldn’t bet on a different set of policies any time soon. Meanwhile, the small island states know that they will simply not be there in another fifty years.

For an overview on the issue, you could do worse than this 2009 paper from The Australia Institute “A fair-weather friend? Australia’s relationship with a climate-changed Pacific.”See also this coruscating piece from 2010 by Kellie Tranter. And an event report from October 2016 on Voices from the Climate Front Line.   See also 350 Pacific and SEED.

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Activism Australia UNFCCC United States of America

1992, Jan 3: Greenpeace vs POTUS on Climate Change

On this day, 30 years ago, to coincide with the visit of President George HW Bush to Australia, Greenpeace Australia took out newspaper adverts of the Statue of Liberty with smoke billowing from her torch, calling on the United States to drastically reduce its carbon emissions. 

The context for this was that negotiations for the climate treaty to be signed in Rio later that year were well underway. And all the signs were that the US would play a spoiling role. 

This matters, because that’s exactly what Uncle Sam did. The French said rightly, that targets and timetables for emissions reductions by wealthy countries should be included in the text of the treaty. The Americans replied, “if you put those in, we’re not coming.” The French blinked, reasoning that timetables and targets could be inserted later. They were at Kyoto, vastly inadequate, but there. And then the Americans didn’t ratify and withdrew from the process.

We are still living with the consequences of this. And our children, other people’s children, other people’s children will all also live with those. Not to mention all the other species we “share” this planet with. 

It’s always worth remembering that these agreements that we live with now were the result of previous proposals, compromises and in this case -as in many others – naked veto power.