The covert Legislative Council hearings for logging and mining executives on the anti-protester legislation, without other witnesses being told of the arrangement, requires a public explanation, former Tasmanian parliamentarian Bob Brown said today.

“It is unconscionable that MMG, for example, was offered this facility but community groups and individuals were not. Other witnesses were not told that MMG was eavesdropping on their testimony or that by special, secret arrangement, MMG was able to provide a point by point rebuttal of their testimony. In this fraudulent process, it appears that MMG’s covert response misled the members of parliament,” Brown claimed.

“MMG was able to make concocted, misleading and contestable claims about the forest defenders with no due opportunity for rebuttal. For example, MMG indicated to Councillors it had not polluted the Stitt River catchment near Its Rosebery mine even though this is manifestly false.”

“This is a very serious miscarriage of proper parliamentary procedure. Logging and mining corporations should not be given priority treatment over Tasmanian Aboriginal or other social or environmental interests in testimony to our parliament. The President of the Legislative Council must explain how this process went so wrong, take those who arranged it to task, and assure the public that it will not happen again.”

Yesterday, a Bob Brown Foundation protester climbed onto the mooring line of the Antarctic toothfish plunderer Antarctic Discovery and hung a banner on the vessel revealing its true nature as an Antarctic destroyer, not an Antarctic discoverer.

19-year-old Billie Raffety from the Huon Valley suspended herself from the vessel’s mooring line to protest the presence of the vessel in Hobart / nipaluna.

As is too often the case, this peaceful protest was met with aggression and dangerous responses from both TasPorts and the crew of the Australian Longline vessel, Antarctic Discovery.

Without warning or communication, the crew and TasPorts workers dropped the mooring line of the vessel with Billie, fully clothed and in heavy harnesses and with multiple ropes and equipment, into the freezing Hobart winter waters.

No effort was made by either TasPorts or the crew of the Australian Longline vessel to assist Billie who was breathing heavily from the shock of being dunked into the cold harbour.

“Our Police Liaison officer clearly explained to the TasPorts staff that it would be extremely dangerous to drop the mooring line as this would result in the potential entanglement of our volunteer if she was dropped into the water still attached to the line and surrounded by the ropes, rigging and hardware she had used to climb the mooring line,” said Bob Brown Foundation Antarctic campaigner Alistair Allan.

“One of the TasPorts workers was even heard asking, “What if she can’t swim?” This fundamental safety consideration was ignored, along with a whole range of other safety procedures that TasPorts must have around preventing a ‘person overboard’ scenario.”

“TasPorts staff did nothing to respond to this ‘person overboard’ situation. No life ring or floatation device was deployed, and no effort was made to offer any assistance to Billie who was in the cold water of the harbour, potentially entangled in rigging and ropes.”

“Fortunately, our boat was close at hand and managed to safely retrieve Billie from the water. She was extremely cold and shocked at the complete disregard shown for her safety by TasPorts staff and the crew of the Antarctic Discovery.”

Not only does Australian Longline show complete disregard for the health of the Antarctic ecosystem that they plunder, but it also turns out the public’s safety is of no consequence either.”

Bob Brown Foundation has filed an official statement with Tasmanian police regarding the reckless actions of both TasPorts and Australian Longline and has written to the CEOs of both organisations demanding an explanation for their dangerous behaviour.

Tasmania’s Parliament has rammed through harmful anti-protest legislation on behalf of the corporations destroying native forests, Australia’s largest temperate rainforest in takayna / Tarkine and the island’s oceans and rivers with toxic salmon factories.

“Tasmanians have been betrayed by their government who have put profit for Earth’s plunderers before people,” Bob Brown Foundation’s Campaign Manager Jenny Weber said.

“Passing the second reading phase in Tasmania’s Upper House, on a count of heads of those who support this draconian anti-protest law, it will pass in August,” Jenny Weber said.

“MMG’s owners in Beijing will be delighted. Tasmania’s anti-protest legislation, once it passes, is MMG’s Bill targeting Bob Brown Foundation. Parliamentarians were fed lies about our non-violent protests. In over three decades of environmental protests in Tasmania, there has never been an instance where an employee, contractor, protestor or member of the public has been injured due to protestor activity,” Jenny Weber said.

"Cathedral-like ancient rainforests, with many trees 500 and more years old and critical breeding habitat for the Tasmanian Masked Owl, will be flattened and covered in toxic mine-waste sludge if MMG’s proposed tailings dump is not halted in takayna / Tarkine. We are not going to stand back and let these important, stunning, ancient rainforests be destroyed. Our sustained disruption will continue until MMG leaves takayna / Tarkine,” Jenny Weber said.

“The legislators have yet to take sweeping action on climate and environmental protections. The viability of our little planet needs legislators' action immediately. Dangerously reckless governments in Tasmania, Victoria and NSW are passing legislation aimed to crush peaceful protestors. Draconian anti-protest laws will not work, as the window rapidly closes on securing a liveable planet, Earth’s defenders will continue their non-violent protests to hold back the Earth-destroying machines,” Jenny Weber said.

“A handful of elected members of Tasmania’s parliament stood up for the fundamental rights of all citizens to protest. Sadly something is rotten with governance, not environmentalism, in Tasmania,” Jenny Weber said.

This morning, a group of activists climbed onto the mooring line of the Antarctic toothfish plunderer, Antarctic Discovery and hung a banner on the vessel revealing its true nature as an Antarctic destroyer, not an Antarctic discoverer.

19-year-old Billie Raffety from the Huon Valley suspended herself from the vessel’s mooring line to protest the presence of the vessel in the supposed Antarctic gateway city of Hobart. Dock workers and vessel crew untied the line and dropped Billie Raffety into the water where she was picked up by the other activists involved in the protest. 

The vessel, owned by Hobart-based Australian Longline, has just returned from smashing the sub-Antarctic toothfish populations off Australia’s World Heritage-listed Macquarie, Heard and McDonald Islands.

“This vessel, despite efforts to appear sustainable, is targeting a species that is sold as a “luxury” product. Antarctic and Patagonian toothfish is not a sustainable fishery providing food security to the globe. Rather, they are a status meal in five-star hotels and fancy restaurants, decimating a species we know little about,” said Bob Brown Foundation Antarctic Campaigner Alistair Allan.

“The toothfish industry touts their Antarctic and Sub-Antarctic operations as one of the world’s most regulated fisheries, but with most of the Earth’s fisheries in rapid decline or near collapse, we cannot trust that the toothfish is not destined for the same fate. This fish is red listed by NGOs due to its position as an apex predator and overfishing in the 80s and 90s. It is a fish we should not be pillaging.”

“The Antarctic Discovery, or rather, Antarctic Destroyer, is responsible for deep sea devastation and disturbance of the Southern Ocean. Australian Longline vessels can set as many as 60,000 hooks on tens of kilometres of lines. These skewers rake the delicate Southern Ocean ecosystem, catching anything in their path. Using 60,000 hooks in one of the world’s last wild places is obscene,” said Billie Raffety.

“Hobart claims to be an Antarctic custodian but how can this be when we allow such destructive vessels in our port? In a very short amount of time, industrial whaling and sealing took both species to the brink of extinction in the Antarctic. We cannot allow the same to happen to toothfish. The public has a right to know that Hobart is being used as a base for expanding the looting of the Antarctic,” said Alistair Allan.

Gold Coast based takayna defenders have joined with Bob Brown Foundation to protest at an investor forum in Surfer’s Paradise to send a message to investors that Venture Minerals' plans to mine in World Heritage Value rainforest in takayna / Tarkine is bad business. Venture Minerals is scheduled to pitch for investors at the Gold Coast Investment Showcase today.

Protestors have dogged Venture Minerals at investor forums in Noosa, Perth, Sydney and Brisbane over the past nine months. Protests have also disrupted exploration activities on the proposed mine site in Tasmania. Opposition to Venture Minerals projects was the subject of a 4 Corners episode in May.

“We are chasing this company across Australia to make sure that its spin and greenwash are exposed to potential investors, and every time we have turned up and spoke to investors the company’s share price has dropped. Truth has power," said Bob Brown Foundation takayna / Tarkine Campaigner Scott Jordan.

“People around the country have been joining with us in solidarity that the precious ancient World Heritage Value rainforest of takayna / Tarkine must not be destroyed for the short term profits of Venture Minerals."

“Until they abandon this folly, we will continue to take them on in the forests, in the board room and in the investor markets."

“Marinus will wreck the only known natural population of disease-free Tasmanian Devils on Earth,” said former Greens leader Bob Brown in Hobart today.

“It will put up power prices for all Tasmanians. Marinus will transform Robbins Island in north-west Tasmania from the most important stronghold for the critically endangered Tasmanian Devil to another disease-ridden one.”

“Marinus also threatens large swathes of Tasmanian forests and an array of shore birds which migrate from Siberia each year to feed adjacent to Robbins Island, which will be converted into a giant windfarm by Marinus,” Bob Brown said.

“The Albanese Government should stop this project.”

Bob Brown Foundation is calling on Federal Environment Minister to release Australia’s State of Environment Report immediately.

Today, a Federal Court hearing was held for Bob Brown Foundation vs Federal Environment Minister & mining company MMG. Bob Brown Foundation is challenging the flawed decision on 6 January 2022 by the previous Federal Environment Minister to approve MMG’s proposed clearing of takayna / Tarkine rainforests and Masked Owl habitat for its proposed heavy metals tailing dam site.

Bob Brown Foundation is pleased that the hearing date set down for 19th July has been maintained, despite Environment Minister Plibersek indicating her preference for an adjournment to an unspecified date.

“We are seeing unnecessary delays to an urgently needed decision for takayna / Tarkine, where the Tasmanian Masked Owl and many other threatened species rely on the intact rainforests. Meanwhile, MMG is continuing with its works,” Bob Brown Foundation takayna / Tarkine Campaigner Scott Jordan.

“MMG’s machines continue to operate on the site, while the minister has delayed her reconsideration of the flawed approval. Counsel for the government revealed Minister Plibersek is not going to decide on the reconsideration until mid-July at the earliest, a month later than the court was previously told,” Scott Jordan said.

“Minister Plibersek could, and still can, intervene to evict MMG from takayna / Tarkine until this decision has been made. Instead, we are seeing the works pushing on before the validity of the approval is decided,” Scott Jordan said.

“The public does not want to wait another month to learn about the declining state of Australia’s environment. The new Federal Environment Minister has announced a long-awaited damning State of the Environment report will be released, but not for another month.”

“Australia’s environment continues to lose its unique wildlife-rich native forests to logging. Koala, Swift Parrot and Tasmanian Devil habitat is being destroyed, takayna / Tarkine has two new mine proposals and a planned heavy metals tailings dam, while the Great Barrier Reef is bleaching. Let’s not waste another day for the public to see this national environment report card,” Bob Brown Foundation Campaign Manager Jenny Weber said.

In 2019 the much-publicised Nationals Senator Matt Canavan railed against the Stop Adani Convoy as ‘do-gooders and bludgers’ heading to Queensland and ‘telling us all what to do’.

He was too young to remember his idol, Queensland Premier Joh Bjelke-Peterson, heading to Tasmania in 1983 to tell locals they must dam the Franklin River.

After Queensland, the Stop Adani Convoy culminated in a rally outside Parliament House in Canberra. That was the biggest show of public feeling in the 2019 election campaign. Five thousand people called on both Labor and the Coalition to stop the Adani coal mine then about to get under way in Queensland’s Galilee Basin.

However, no major media outlet covered the rally: not a word or a picture. Climate change was off their agenda.

Labor lost the election two weeks later after announcing it would not stop the mine and, as well, would give $5 billion to fossil fuel corporations to accelerate gas extraction across Australia including from the Galilee and Beetaloo (NT) Basins.

Had leader Bill Shorten assured Australians he would stop Adani extracting the coal the Queensland result would have been much the same but Labor would have picked up seats in the southern capitals and won the election.

Post-election, some fashionable commentators claimed that the Bob Brown Foundation’s convoy, not Labor’s pro-coal policy, had cost Labor the treasury benches.

In fact, the convoy saved Greens Senator Larissa Waters’ seat in Queensland which pre-convoy polls had had her losing. After 4,000 people turned out in Brisbane to cheer the Stop Adani Convoy rally there, an electorate freshly-invigorated about climate disasters including the bleaching of Great Barrier Reef corals, voted Larissa back in. Her Senate win was an essential foundation for the Greens well-earned Queensland successes in 2022.

After the 2019 election came the bushfires and floods which speakers in the Stop Adani Convoy had warned about. As the Adani mine was developed over the protests of thousands of citizens, many of whom were arrested or jailed, hundreds of thousands more Australians were going through the hell of the coal-fuelled climate disasters of bushfires and floods. Coal-toting Prime Minister Morrison holidayed in Hawaii and came home with his hubris in shatters. Rockhampton-based Matt Canavan became less visible, even on the ABC. The climate sceptics who for so long had been ubiquitous in climate change discussion thinned out in both commercial and ABC broadcasting.

Coalition MPs like the member for Capricornia, Michelle Landry, who had paid for counter-gatherings to the convoy in 2019, were shuddering in 2022 as the Greens and Teals galvanised new attention on climate change. The latter-day Landry called on her extremist colleague Canavan to “pull your head in, Matt”.

United Nations’ Secretary-General António Guterres warned that it is “moral and economic madness” to invest in new fossil-fuel projects. Every time Greens leader Adam Bandt repeated the same sentiment in the election campaign the Greens gained votes.

Ms Landry got back with a reduced majority while three Greens were elected in Brisbane. She now plaintively affirms that we need action on climate change. She should have listened to the convoyists who were, after all, not breaking news: scientist Eunice Foote first warned about the perils of injecting carbon into Earth’s atmosphere in the 1860s.

Politics is a game for too many scribes in the Canberra Press Gallery who get paid well to report on the entrails of human political interplay and shortcomings. However, the viability of our little planet is not a game. It is deadly serious and requires mature reportage of the fact that Earth’s biosphere is rapidly deteriorating due to human destruction, not least the burning of fossil fuels causing catastrophic global warming. This existential crisis surpasses all others in human history.

Machiavelli warned six hundred years ago that if you want to change the world you should get ready to be crushed by those who already have the power and the money.
That’s the case now with the huge vested interests which profit from burning fossil fuels. Labor and the Coalition have buckled but the Greens, and now the Teal independents, have not. Nevertheless, many petty-politics-captured pontificators in the media are all too ready to take up the cudgels against the agents of change who are outside their own myopic bubble.

This echos the Suffragettes travails more than a century ago. Amongst their highly-organised critics was journalist Flora Shaw who saw women as having ‘a ‘God-given’ position as the helpmeets of men’. The Suffragettes’ frustration was insufferable and some resorted to violence, giving the anti-Suffragists even more ammunition. But the tide of history was unstoppable.

So it is now with the climate emergency. The difference is that this time life on Earth is at stake and the global community’s response is appallingly slow and short of the mark. That is why, in a joint declaration last week, 400 climate scientists, physicists, biologists, engineers and others broke with usual caution to back peaceful protesters courting arrest from London to Sydney. Their frustration is insufferable.

After Anthony Albanese’s sigh-of-relief victory, it is tempting to think that all is okay again. But it isn’t. Witness Labor’s rush to burn more gas, including the new Prime Minister’s full-blooded endorsement of Woodside’s giant Scarborough gas-extraction project off the Western Australian coast. Scarborough’s projected greenhouse gas pollution of Earth’s atmosphere is greater than the Adani coal mine’s.

For those who hope that the urgency of environmentalism is seeping into the old parties, look no further than Labor combining with the Coalition in the Victorian and Tasmanian parliaments, since the federal election, to pass draconian new laws with jail sentences aimed at crushing peaceful protests against coal mining, industrial fish farms or the logging of native forests. Standing in front of a chainsaw about to cut down an ancient tree full of endangered species, or in front of a napalm-dropper setting fire to its felled remnants, is now an equal crime in Tasmania to aggravated burglary or to invading a neighbour’s house brandishing a shotgun.

Because they cannot win the public argument for destroying biodiversity, Labor and the Coalition are going to criminalise environmentalists. They are captured by the resource extraction lobbies and are not about to implement the seismic change required to respond to the scientists’ alarm for life on Earth. The Greens-Teals vote will continue to grow, but they needed to be in government now, everywhere, for the planet to have its best chance.

Even so, while there is life there is hope. Down in Tasmania’s takayna/Tarkine rainforest, more than 80 peaceful protesters have been arrested for getting in the way of giant state-owned Chinese mining company MMG’s machinery preparing a toxic waste dump. The rainforest is a stronghold for Tasmania’s giant masked owl, the largest barn owl on Earth, which is vulnerable to extinction.

MMG has alternatives to its proposed acid wastes dam outside the Tarkine near its Rosebery mine. Yet former Environment Minister, Sussan Ley, gave MMG the go-ahead, even dismissing as unnecessary MMG’s offer to protect the big trees which might have nesting sites for the owls. A week before the election, after the Federal Court intervened to say MMG must protect those trees, Ley notified the Bob Brown Foundation that she was reconsidering her decision.

That reconsideration is now on the desk of the new Minister for the Environment Tanya Plibersek. The world’s-best-practice option for MMG is to pulverise its mine wastes and place them back underground. The nearest mine to MMG is already doing so. But there are no options for the endangered owl, Tasmanian devils or other threatened species in the Tarkine. This may be a small matter in the global environmental crisis but, now that it is Minister Plibersek’s call, hope has returned to the rainforest camp where forest defenders lie awake at night listening to the calls of the masked owls which face being silenced forever.

Bob Brown.

The police raid on unarmed environmental defenders will raise alarm bells for people concerned by the worsening environmental conditions in Australia and around the world, Bob Brown said in Tasmania today.

“Australian governments are importing the American tactic of attacking the environmentalists instead of protecting the environment. I do not know Blockade Australia but I do know that heavy-handed government tactics to stymie peaceful protest against environmental exploitation, which is driving species to extinction and fuelling global heating could just lead to environmentalists going more underground.”

“We have yet to see police directed to raid coal mines, gas frackers or forest loggers in defence of environmental laws in NSW or anywhere else. But the public is told those laws will prevent future harm to Australia’s natural environment. It is a farce. If planning to block a city street becomes a worse crime than putting another million tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere or flattening and burning another thousand hectares of koala or masked owl public forests, something is rotten with governance, not environmentalism,” Brown said. “In Tasmania, we’re still waiting for Chinese State owned miner, MMG, to be prosecuted for its leaking tailings dams in north-western Tasmania, the subject of a recent 4 Corners investigation.”

“Meanwhile, in Tasmania, the Rockliff government is pushing new draconian anti-environmentalist laws through parliament which threaten 4 years in jail for people who stand a second time in front of chainsaws in a public forest laden with endangered species. Actively defending the natural environment is becoming a crime no less than terrorising neighbours with a gun. This is an irresponsible and reckless abuse of legislative power in favour of polluters and environmental wreckers. The Bob Brown Foundation’s motto is ‘Action for Earth’ and it will not be coerced into uselessness by such irresponsible laws. This is the outcome of spineless politicians caving into the profiteering exploiters of nature,” Brown said.

The Bob Brown Foundation has praised Assistant Minister for Charities Andrew Leigh’s commitment to freeing Australian charities from the censorial moves of recent Coalition governments in Canberra.

“This is a democratic move by the new Labor government. The Morrison and Abbott governments were hell-bent on choking charities, but not big business, from speaking out on matters of the environment and social justice. It had a chilling effect and muted charities which had strong community support from challenging government policy,” Bob Brown said today.

“The coercive idea of delisting charities which challenged government or big business was a prime factor in environment groups taking some of their teeth out even as the global plunge into environmental disaster grew. The fact is that Australia and the world have mass extinction and destructive global heating on our hands but the government was saying ‘we will shut you down if you challenge us on these realities’.” Brown said.

“Andrew Leigh is rescuing Australians from the shadow of autocracy by restoring freedom of speech for charities,” he added.

In an interview with The Canberra Times, Dr Leigh also spelt out his drive to put trust back into government and to double "powerful" and "transformative" Australian philanthropy by 2030.