Thirty five years ago, on this day, October 5th, 1989, Australian Federal Environment Minister Graham Richardson warns Prime Minister Bob Hawke that he will have to save Kakadu (i.e. ban mining) to win the election, because green-minded voters will accept nothing less. (See Paul Kelly’s The End of Certainty for details)
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 353ppm. As of 2024 it is 422ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that Australia had been digging up and exporting minerals for good 25 years in large quantities. And the whole concept of Aboriginal land rights and sacred sites was nothing important back then. Not to the white people anyway. But by the mid-late 80s, that was changing. And the idea for an expansion of the uranium mine at Kakadu that would damage the National Park was a vote loser in the marginal inner city constituencies where Labor hoped it would be able to cling on to power at the next federal election. This had to happen early in 1990 and therefore Graeme Richardson, who was Prime Minister Bob Hawke’s very effective environment minister, was telling Hawke that he was going to have to save Kakadu even though this was going to seriously piss off the mining lobby. The mining lobby feared that it was the beginning of serious restrictions on their ability to plunder, sorry to “develop”, Australia’s resources for their own benefit. And Hawke took that on board; he delayed the decision and took the credit for that.
What we learn is that these seemingly tangential issues are important to understand if you want to understand how climate policy works
What happened next Labor did in fact squeak home in the March 1990 election, and then had a quid pro quo debt to keep the Ecologically Sustainable Development process.
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:
October 5, 1988 – Vice Presidential Debate and ‘the Greenhouse Effect’
October 5, 1992 – Ignoreland hits the airwaves. #Neoliberalism
October 5, 2006 – Greenpeace sues Blair Government over shonky energy “consultation”