Thirty four years ago, on this day, September 24, 1989, German activist and member of parliament Petra Kelly opined on Australian government policy
WHEN BOB HAWKE cried at a press conference in 1984, his face was plastered all over German newspapers.
That was about the last time matters of any relevance to Australian domestic politics rated even a centimetre of German news space.
That is, until Bob Brown and his team of green independents made it on to the Tasmanian Government benches in May.
According to the founder of the West German Green Party, Petra Kelly, the greens’ success in Tasmania was widely reported – even in the smallest German village.
“I think Bob Brown is probably the most well-known Australian in Europe,” Ms Kelly said from her hotel in Adelaide last week.
“He’s much more widely known than Mr Hawke.”
In Australia for an “ecopolitics” conference at the University of Adelaide, Petra Kelly has attracted media attention for describing Bob Hawke’s moves to capture the environment vote as just “green cosmetic surgery”.
Mealey, E. 1989. Petra sees green over Aussie Politics. Sun Herald, 24 September.
(Petra – the diminutive name – wouldn’t be used for Bob or Andrew. But tbf, has been used for “Boris”)
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 353ppm. As of 2023 it is 423ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that Petra Kelly was a big star from the German environmental movement and antinuclear movement. Adelaide was a good place to do this stuff and I totally missed it. I was not plugged into those networks and it pisses me off but it is what it is. At that time, btw, everyone in Australia was running around talking about the “greenhouse effect.”
What I think we can learn from this is that the mass media will use diminutive names, first names for women, in a way that they would not for men
That there were linkages between German and Australian movements and learning; see Christopher Rootes’ article about this which appeared in Environmental Politics.
What happened next is that Petra Kelly died in 1992 – it was probably murder-suicide or possibly an agreed pact we can never know. And Hawke made grand promises about climate action that, well, never got kept. And here we are.
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.