The Boats Labor Should be worried about

BY ADAM BANDT
Leader of the Australian Greens

We’ve witnessed a terrible race to the bottom in the last weeks of Parliament, with Labor and Liberal trying to outdo each other to see who can be toughest on refugees, rushing through laws which have rung human rights alarm bells.

It’s back to the days of ‘stop the boats’, where the Liberals run a dishonest fear campaign and Labor collapses in a heap. 

But there are some boats that Labor should be worried about.

Just a few weeks ago, I found myself sitting on a kayak with hundreds of others as part of a 30 hour blockade of the world’s biggest coal port in Newcastle. 

The event, which blocked the coal port for 30 hours, was inspiring and intimidating in equal measure. 

The ships, the port and the piles of coal are huge. There are scores of ships, queued up out to sea, waiting to be filled with the giant piles of coal, created by the trains with hundreds of carriages which shunt down from the Hunter Valley. 

It feels like madness, given we know that there are alternatives to create power which won’t cost us the earth, drive up the cost of everything and threaten the security and wellbeing of everyone on the planet. 

The power we need is people power. That’s what we had that day on the harbour. Hundreds of people from across the country are taking direct action against the mining and burning of coal, the leading cause of the climate crisis. 

From the water, you can see these three giant coal loaders, with cargo ships so big you could play a game of full sized football on their deck. They line up out to sea, come in to be loaded with coal, millions of tonnes of coal, each year. 

The coal, when burned, will cook us all.  This truth, which we have known for decades, in conjunction that the vast majority of the profits are exported too, feels like cutting off our nose to spite our face. 

It’s why, after over 30 hours of blockade, the police moved in arresting over 100 protesters, including a 97 year old local named Reverend Alan Stuart.  

"Whatever happens to me doesn't matter but what happens to the climate is going to affect future generations," he said.

During the blockade of Newcastle Harbour it was impossible not to think about the future generations, and the damage being done by coal and gas. 

Kayaking is something usually done on holidays, something that’s fun and relaxing. But one of the implications of the growing climate crisis is the new ways we worry about the dangers posed by summer. 

After the black summer bushfires of 2019 when the whole country burned, or the floods the following years, summer now comes to us with a sense of foreboding and fear. We know we are due for more fires soon. We know that the climate has changed and threats of dangerous, extreme weather have increased. 

The world’s efforts to tackle the climate crisis are struggling. The recent meeting of the world’s governments, the COP, was held in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates. The President of the COP is also one the heads of one of the world’s biggest oil corporations and is still seeking to dispute the science driving the dangerous increase in extreme weather. 

The decision by the UAE to host this conference was an attempt to greenwash its attempts to cling to its profitable attempts to mine, burn and export fossil fuels. 

But our country is in the same boat. Labor’s pushing to host one of these international climate meetings in order to greenwash the fact that we too are one of the world’s biggest exporters of coal and gas. 

Australia’s got 116 new coal and gas projects in the pipeline. In the last year, the government approved five new coal and gas mines. 

Fortunately, together with people taking action on the water and in the streets, the Greens are taking action in Parliament.

After months of pressure and negotiation the Senate & Albanese Government have agreed to Greens calls for significant environmental reforms to protect nature and the climate from greenwashed habitat destruction and dangerous gas fracking.

The Government has agreed to scrap controversial nature offsets from its proposed Nature Repair Market Bill and to establish new environmental protections from climate-wrecking gas fracking projects. 

The Government has agreed to close the loophole which currently gives gas fracking corporations a licence to drill without any federal environmental water assessment. The agreement is a major blow to climate-bomb projects in places like the Beetaloo Basin and the Kimberley and a win for the climate, the environment and First Nations communities.

In a time of climate crisis, no new coal and gas projects should get approved. You can’t put the fire out while you’re pouring petrol on it. 

Labor had delayed critical changes to our environment laws, but Greens pressure got the job done before huge new climate-wrecking projects could get approved.

As we head towards a summer we hope will be safe, but fear could be devastating, Labor wants to open more coal and gas, but the Greens and the people are there to stop them.