Antinuclear

“………..My foundation, the Bob Brown Foundation, is preparing for a public showdown with the coalmining industry and its political backers. In the run-up to the federal election, our focus will be Adani – as the global mining giant looks set to be pushing ahead with its colossal Carmichael coalmine in central Queensland.

The decision-making process on the Adani mine is no less murky or corruptible than that for the Murray-Darling. Adani needs approval for water management and its bogus plan to protect the rare and beautiful black-throated finch……..

On Wednesday, Queensland grazier Bruce Currie, alarmed by Adani’s potential impact on water, delivered a petition with more than 27,000 signatures to the Queensland government to ban the mine. Meanwhile, Labor’s deputy leader Chris Bowen backed the mine, saying: “Adani was to have been the largest coalmine in Australia but it is now far from that.” He has not figured that Adani still plans to take all the coal out of Carmichael and export it, only slower.

Millions of Australians are deeply concerned about global warming but have limited means for demonstrating that concern. We plan to unite Australians who feel our country is in self-inflicted and unnecessary jeopardy – especially vulnerable to global heating, while at the same time jostling Indonesia into second place as the world’s biggest exporter of coal.

Australia’s environmental vulnerability has been on show as the disaster overtaking the nation’s biggest river system has played out in public during the past few months. ……

There seemed to be no good time or place to make a stand for the Murray-Darling. Head in sand, the nation let it go and hoped everything would turn out all right.

We must not so easily wait for salvation from Adani. There will be no divine intervention. The onus is on us. And worse is yet to come.

Yet the parliamentary majority, voted in by the majority of Australians, favours more coalmining, gas fracking across the country and new deep-sea oil drilling, including in the Great Australian Bight.

With the support of the Business Council of Australia, then treasurer Scott Morrison thought it reasonable to hold up a lump of coal in parliament and claim its burning was good for us. “Don’t be afraid, don’t be scared, it won’t hurt you,” he said, taunting the opposition. “It’s coal.” With that he handed it to a gleeful Barnaby Joyce.

Now the prime minister and Australia’s most powerful environment arbiter, Morrison knows – as we all do – that burning fossil fuels is both loading the atmosphere with greenhouse gases and serially lowering its content of breathable oxygen, for want of which those Murray cod are dead.

Here we are in an age of popular greed-driven stupidity. Money rules. The value of life, let alone happiness, on Earth does not count in the marketplace of the richest per capita country in the world.

This must change and only we, the people, can change it. That challenges us with personal discomfort.

Faced with the immense wealth and power of the mining industry, it may seem an impossible task. But I have seen, firsthand, how grassroots campaigning can shift public and political opinion in Australia. In May 1982 the “Whispering Bulldozer”, Liberal premier Robin Gray, swept to power in Tasmania. By July, bulldozers were rolling into the Franklin River valley to build the Gordon-below-Franklin dam. Saving the wild river seemed a hopeless cause. But in December 1982 the Wilderness Society’s peaceful blockade began in the riverside forests. Some 6000 people went to the region, 1300 were arrested and 500 jailed, including me. In March 1983, Labor’s feisty new leader Bob Hawke was elected prime minister on a platform that included the slogan “I will stop the dam”. The rest is history. People power and strong leadership saved the Franklin, which has since become an icon for Tasmania’s job-rich tourism and hospitality industries.

In 2017, the High Court accepted that peaceful protest is a legitimate part of Australia’s representative democracy. It is encouraging to know the Adani convoy will be a legitimate part of the nation’s public discourse. Whatever problems we encounter, they will not come near the problems caused by us doing nothing. The Adani coalmine is a harbinger of global catastrophe. This convoy of concerned Australians will be taking on Adani out of respect for our children and the future of all life on Earth.

The convoy is a simple option for people who can spare some time, money and courage to act on their commonsense convictions in this age of absurdity. We will cop it from the radical powerbrokers who put coal before coral. There will be outrage about us not being at work, driving petrol-burning cars – in fact, our Stop Adani Convoy’s vanguard of electric cars will challenge the government to catch up with comparable countries in facilitating non-petrol vehicles – or simply our being “greenies”, “do-gooders” or a threat to big corporations. To offset this, there will be a special chair available at public meetings along the way for Gautam Adani – but not his understrappers – to personally take us on. Should he fly in, I think we will manage.  This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on Feb 9, 2019 as “A mighty convoy”. https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/opinion/topic/2019/02/09/the-stop-adani-convoy/15496308007421