Australians were generally happy to ride on the sheep’s back. Many of us are not at all happy to be riding in a coal cart. Australia has robust legal institutions and our politics is relatively democratic and accountable, but since the turn of the century fossil-fuel miners have massively increased their influence over both sides of politics, and over state and federal governments.
Former PM Malcolm Turnbull returned to Canberra to listen to the Indonesian President address Parliament, but offered up his thoughts on building more coal fired power stations that's being pushed by some Nationals.
This article is an edited extract of Judith Brett’s Quarterly Essay The Coal Curse: Resources, Climate and Australia’s Future  |
The first Australians to suffer from the politics of the resource curse were Indigenous Australians. During the 1980s and 1990s, as the mining lobby effectively weakened legislation on land rights and native title, it developed the strategies it would later use to stymie effective government action on climate change.
When the Australian Mining Industries Council (AMIC) was formed in 1967, its initial aims were conventional industry matters, such as the rules governing foreign investment or the exchange rate. But mining was starting to face a quite different set of challenges.
The new mining boom was concentrated in Australia’s north, where many Indigenous Australians had continued to live on or close to their country. Some groups were demanding land rights, including the capacity to veto mining. Conservationists were pushing the government on mining’s environmental impact, and there was suspicion of the extent of foreign ownership.
Because mining employed few people, it could rely less on electoral pressure than other economic interest groups. The miners needed to convince the public that mining was crucial to national development and prosperity and so should not be curtailed.
In 1972, AMIC imposed a special levy on its members to fund campaigns focused on mass audiences rather than governments. Contacts in the media were fostered: articles and advertisements placed in newspapers, TV and radio; material prepared for public affairs programs.
In 1973, the new Labor government’s minister for minerals and energy, Rex Connor, commissioned a report on the contribution of mining to Australia’s welfare. The report by economist Tom Fitzgerald questioned the assumption that mining was inherently beneficial to the Australian economy and confirmed the industry’s conviction that it could not take the public’s support for granted.
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| Prime Minister John Howard (left) is shown around the expanded Olympic Dam mine in South Australia by Western Mining's Hugh Morgan in 1999. Morgan had begun his campaigns to influence politicians in the 1970s. Credit: Bryan Charlton |
By the early 1980s, Morgan and Evans were leading figures in what was then called the Australian New Right, a loose network of conservative men – and a few women – in high places, who combined a zeal for free-market economics with opposition to the progressive causes of the 1970s, including land rights and environmentalism.
Through think tanks such as the Institute of Public Affairs and the Centre for Independent Studies, through newsletters and conferences, private dinners and informal gatherings, they developed arguments and strategies to counter what they saw as a dangerous left-wing grip on public opinion.
“Politicians can only accept what is accepted in the public opinion polls, so you have to change public opinion,” Morgan told Paul Sheehan of The Sydney Morning Herald in 1985. By then he had become a vehement opponent of Indigenous land rights.
Gough Whitlam had taken a commitment to land rights to the 1972 election. In government, he appointed Justice Edward Woodward to conduct a royal commission into Aboriginal land rights in the Northern Territory. Woodward’s recommendations were revolutionary. Here are some:
- all Aboriginal reserve lands were to be returned to their Aboriginal inhabitants;
- Aboriginal people could claim vacant Crown land on the basis of traditional ties with the land;
- and - most importantly for the subject of this essay - entry into Aboriginal land for mining and tourism required the consent of the local community.
After the Whitlam government was dismissed at the end of 1975, the incoming Liberal prime minister, Malcolm Fraser, generally supported Woodward’s recommendations, and his government passed the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act in 1976. AMIC wanted the veto abolished and royalties reduced, as did the Northern Territory government, which saw the Act as a brake on development.
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| Then prime minister Malcolm Fraser (top) sits in the bed of the Todd River in the Northern Territory speaking to Indigenous locals in April 1978. Credit: Age archive |
The draft proposed minimum uniform land rights across the states and territories, including protection of sacred sites, a veto over mining, and royalties. A fear campaign began, led by AMIC and the Western Australian Chamber of Mines, with media releases, opinion pieces and press, radio and TV advertising, including full-page advertisements in national newspapers.
The public campaign was designed to make ordinary Australians with no direct involvement in mining feel they had a stake in disputes happening far from where they lived. The centrepiece was the argument that Aborigines should not have special rights. AMIC distributed speakers’ notes with arguments such as: “Land rights should be equal rights, not greater rights”; “Australia is one country and there should be one set of laws for everyone”; “No country can be divided against itself and survive.”
It claimed that the proposed legislation had the power to lock-up a quarter of Australia’s surface, bring mining exploration to a halt and damage the nation’s prosperity. In Western Australia, a TV ad showed a black hand reaching across the state to build a wall: the message was that land rights would lock-up vast areas of territory.
The appeal to equality rejected arguments that Aboriginal people’s distinctive relationship to the land, and their distinctive suffering as a colonised people, entitled them to special rights or treatment. It was a powerful appeal and support for land rights started to fall, among both the public and elected politicians.
The WA premier, Brian Burke, told Hawke that the commitment to uniform land rights could cost Labor up to eight seats in his state at the 1984 federal election. Hawke dropped the veto over mining exploration, and by 1986 the government had effectively abandoned the promise of uniform legislation, leaving the states to do as they wished.
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| Demonstrators in Sydney march on John Howard's office in December 1997. Credit: Paul Jones |
The High Court’s finding that in certain circumstances a form of native title might still exist unleashed an even nastier and more divisive campaign than the one waged against uniform land rights.
Hugh Morgan called on the Coalition to overrule the Mabo decision if they won government by passing legislation to extinguish native title. As this would open the government to unknown claims for compensation for the extinguished rights, conservatives also called for the 1975 Racial Discrimination Act to be overturned so that native title rights could be abolished without compensation. Victorian premier Jeff Kennett played on fears by falsely suggesting that even suburban backyards could be at risk.
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| John Howard speaks to the media after a special meeting with premiers in April 1997 called to discuss a response to the High Court's Wik decision. Credit: Mike Bowers |
After extensive consultations, including with Indigenous groups, the Native Title Act passed at the end of 1993. Native title holders could negotiate over development, but they did not hold any veto powers.
The Mabo judgment was clear that freehold title extinguished native title, but it said nothing about leases. At the end of 1996 another High Court judgment in a case bought by the Wik people of Aurukun found that leases did not necessarily extinguish native title.
In response the new prime minister, John Howard, held up to a television camera a map of Australia showing just how much of the continent might be subject to claims. The National Party’s leader, Tim Fischer, toured the bush calling for “bucket-loads of extinguishment”, as if native title was a fire threat.
Howard rejected extinguishment because of the unknown compensation it would trigger, but the 10-point plan he developed severely curtailed the rights of native title holders and did not include the right to negotiate with mining companies on pastoral leases.
The campaigns against uniform land rights and then native title built an alliance between the National Party and Australia’s miners. Miners could spruik their contribution to Australia’s national prosperity, but they were hard-pressed to give this a human face. The National Party could provide any number: weathered old farmers talking about their pioneering forebears and their deep love of the land; or young couples living in the outback and raising their kids far from city amenities.
These tough men and women wearing Akubras and standing in outback landscapes were invaluable to the miners’ campaign to associate the fight against native title with a shared national heritage, to make it seem relevant to the vast majority of Australians, who would never be affected by a native title claim.
The campaign was also invaluable to the National Party. Beginning life in 1920 as the Australian Country Party to represent farmers and rural communities, its base was shrinking. When Fraser defeated Whitlam at the end of 1975, the National Country Party won 11.04 per cent of the national first preference vote and 22 seats. In 1996, when Howard defeated Keating, it was 8.2 per cent and 18 seats.
The problems facing the National Party were not just a shrinking base but uncertainty about what it stood for. Its Coalition partner was enthusiastically embracing free-market policies, which threatened the many subsidised services country people enjoyed. Yet it could not openly break
with the Liberals and risk its cabinet positions. Fighting against Aboriginal land rights gave it new relevance, and the miners paid for advertisements which reminded the public that the Australians at the heart of the country were the men and women on the land.
After John Howard won the 1996 federal election, policies seen to favour Indigenous Australians were an immediate target, frequently justified with one-line arguments about equality straight from AMIC’s 1980s speakers’ notes against land rights. The miners were defending their economic interests but in doing this they had weakened public sympathy for Aboriginal people and popularised arguments against their distinctive rights. Here was the resource curse in action. Pauline Hanson rode into parliament on such arguments, and they are trotted out regularly by conservatives.
The big miners did subsequently work hard to repair their credentials with Indigenous Australians, developing strategies to boost employment, offering scholarships and cadetships, employing archaeologists and anthropologists to advise on cultural heritage. BHP, Rio Tinto, Glencore and Fortescue all proclaim a commitment to engaging with Indigenous people and outline various targeted programs on their websites. They could be generous once they had won.
The mining industry’s campaign against land rights and native title gave it the capacity to mount public relations and advertising campaigns and the confidence that it could win; and it created a network of influential right-wing warriors primed to defend Australia’s existing distribution of power and resources. When climate change began seriously to threaten fossil-fuel miners at the end of last century, they knew what to do.
Links
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- 'It unnerved us': John Howard admits he mishandled the High Court's Wik decision
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