The Guardian - Katharine Murphy
The biggest environmental campaign seen in Australia since the 80s is causing bumps in the road for both sides of politics
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‘One Labor figure puts the problem for his party this way: It is talismanic; It’s the litmus test.’
Photograph: Julian Drape/AAP
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When it comes to the Adani Carmichael coalmine, the spotlight this week has been trained on Queensland as the state government
battled an internal split on whether to give the project a royalties holiday. There have also been murmurings in Canberra, where Labor MPs are
starting to express public opposition to a project many have been privately wringing their hands about.
But to fathom the next phase in the political battle against the project, we need to train our eyes a bit further south.
Over this past week in Victoria, the Greens have launched a new
fundraising drive to produce placards which will begin appearing shortly
around the electorates of Melbourne, Batman, Wills and Melbourne Ports.
The placards have a simple message, easily consumed from a passing
car or tram. They say: Stop Labor’s Adani Mine. It won’t stop with some
signage. The Greens are planning to door knock the inner urban
electorates where they now slug it out with Labor in hand-to-hand combat
during federal elections.
While a couple of Labor MPs, David Feeney and Peter Khalil, have got out ahead of the new onslaught
by outing themselves as opponents of Adani,
the Greens are telling their supporters the objective is to force the
federal Labor leader, Bill Shorten, to rule out supporting the Adani
coalmine.
“Here’s our strategy,” the pitch for donations reads. “We know that
if Bill Shorten changes Labor’s position and commits to reviewing
commonwealth approval, Adani’s plans will be dead. Labor are already
starting to feel the heat, and it’s working, with some MPs saying they
don’t personally support the plan. But now we need to ramp things up and
force a formal change in Labor policy.”
Right now the Greens are focused on Labor in Victoria. But this
campaign could easily flow on to other states, and to the seats where
the Greens now also face off against Liberals in the inner cities.
If we view the electoral contest through an inner-city lens, Labor is
already under acute political pressure on Adani, and the new Greens
campaign won’t help. But it would also be a mistake to think Labor is
the only major party feeling the heat on Adani. More of that story
shortly.
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| The Greens’ placards have a simple message but it won’t stop there: the
party is planning to door knock inner-urban electorates. Photograph:
Greens |
First we need to take a moment to comprehend the scale of what’s going on.
#StopAdani is the biggest environmental campaign seen in this country since the Franklin campaign in the 1980s.
It is well-organised, rolling out in communities (there have been 320
events nationally over the past few months, and another 60 are in the
calendar). The issue thunders through social media and reverberates
through mainstream press coverage.
The campaign is also very well-funded. One seasoned environmental
campaigner told me this week “there is more money in this campaign than
in any campaign I’ve seen, anywhere” and noted it wasn’t entirely clear
where the money was coming from.
The anti-Adani effort links in to coordinated global efforts by the
environment movement to stop new coalmines. #StopAdani (and the
associated activities) is the environmental movement’s equivalent of a
multinational corporation – with
Queensland the local frontline of a global, anti-coal offensive.
Whatever the intrinsic policy merits of constraining new coal
development to help the world meet its pressing and existential
challenge with climate change (and those merits are blindingly obvious
to anyone who accepts the science – if you accept the science, a steady
transition away from coal isn’t optional) the major parties remain
highly sensitised to the fate of the project.
There’s the enduring Australian bipartisan tradition: the economic
exploitation of resources means local employment and export dollars. And
the Carmichael project sits, literally, at the epicentre of the
political battle, in a region where disaffection has significantly
altered the contours of the political contest.
The Coalition and Labor are eyeing off a group of marginal seats in
Queensland that could easily decide the outcome of the next federal
election. Both are also cognisant of the looming state election
campaign. A recent ReachTel poll of 1,600 Queenslanders has the two
major parties currently deadlocked 50-50 on the two party preferred
measure.
On the politics of this development, Labor is caught uncomfortably
between its blue-collar constituency and its progressive, inner-urban
support base.
Federally, it articulates a formulation which attempts to placate
both camps: Adani should proceed if it meets all relevant approvals
because jobs are good – but not at the expense of the Great Barrier
Reef, and it shouldn’t get a cent of taxpayer support.
The new Greens campaign, apart from the obvious objective of trying
to gain political traction in targeted seats, is about pushing Labor off
their hedged formulation into an overtly anti-coal position – which is
not a decision the party as a collective is yet ready to take.
Triggering that debate is, in fact, a fast train to splitsville.
So that’s the challenging state of affairs in progressive politics. Now we need to consider the Coalition.
The
Turnbull government doesn’t have to straddle the barbed wire fence
quite so inelegantly but Adani is causing it grief as well.
Government MPs in north Queensland, where regional unemployment is
high, are champions of the project. The chief cheerleader of Adani in
Canberra is the resources minister, Matt Canavan, who is also
responsible for the development of northern Australia. Canavan sometimes
does several media interviews a day extolling the benefits of the
project, creating an impression the Coalition is monolithic on Adani.
Canavan is so assiduous in his occupation of the airwaves you can
fail to notice that he, and his party leader Barnaby Joyce, are really
the only government people out there consistently banging the Adani
drum.
In fact if you look and listen closely, apart from
a moment of pure, mind-numbing idiocy
where the treasurer, Scott Morrison, brandished a lump of coal in the
parliament, you’ll notice the Liberal party has dialled the pro-coal
rhetoric down in recent months.
Why would this be? Well, if you ask around, you get the feedback that
evangelising about coal works in some pockets of the country but it
isn’t that politically helpful for Liberal MPs in Sydney and Melbourne
with either mixed constituencies – seats such as the prime minister’s
electorate of Wentworth in Sydney, or Kelly O’Dwyer’s electorate of
Higgins – or even in more blue-ribbon areas, with the sorts of
constituencies that were once characterised patronisingly as “doctor’s
wives”.
The rolling civil society campaign against the Adani mine – which
includes environment groups and GetUp! – means Liberal MPs are getting
regular anti-Adani traffic through their doors and inboxes and social
media accounts.
MPs around the country are being put on the spot by either GetUp! or
local #StopAdani groups who are asking them point-blank whether they
support the mine or not.
Two
Liberal backbenchers have already come out in opposition to the idea
that the project will be given a $1bn concessional loan to fund a rail
line linking the mine to Abbot Point:
Bert Van Manen and
Sarah Henderson.
Apart from what’s playing on out on the ground, there are other bumps in the Coalition road.
There is also strong opposition inside the cabinet to the idea of the
Northern Australia Infrastructure Facility granting the loan, despite
Canavan regularly arguing the case for a positive decision. One senior
government figure is blunt in putting the counter-case. “That is not
happening.”
Even if Canavan somehow prevails in a looming internal government
battle over concessional support for the development, it’s unlikely to
be the end of the story. On that issue, the anti-Adani forces
are preparing for a legal fight.
Single issue, negative, “stop the ..” campaigns are always the easiest campaigns to run – just ask Tony Abbott.
They are simple, and they resonate.
All the polling I’ve seen indicates #StopAdani has been enormously effective in influencing public opinion.
Even if people have not yet crossed over into overt anti-coal
consciousness because of their concern about climate change, Australians
are highly sensitised about the fate of the Great Barrier Reef. Very
few people will want a mine project that they fear will damage the reef.
One Liberal said to me forcefully this week when I asked how Adani
was playing out on home turf: “Christ, I wish it would just go away.”
One Labor figure puts the problem for his party this way: “It is
talismanic. It’s the litmus test. Adani has become shorthand for ‘are
you serious about climate change?’.”
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