By Pip Hinman
The celebrated "failure" of a media stunt in John Howard's NSW electoral office, organised by Friends of Hinchinbrook a few weeks ago, raises some interesting tactical issues for the environment movement.
A protest against the Federal Court go-ahead for Keith Williams' controversial Hinchinbrook resort, the protesters' actions backfired when the police and the establishment media didn't respond the way the environmentalists had planned.
The police failed to remove them from Howard's office (so there were no shots of protesters being dragged away by the hair), and the media focussed on them eating pizzas and pasting Howard's head over a portrait of the queen rather than the federal government decision to allow this white-shoe brigade developer to breach World Heritage conditions.
The Sydney Morning Herald on February 22 devoted half a page to rubbing the activists' noses in the "failed" stunt, arguing that it didn't work because it wasn't sophisticated enough!
True, the stunt was badly planned and led. Actions primarily aimed at attracting media attention — are tricky events to organise because protesters have no control over what gets reported. And the establishment media are not neutral; they are big businesses with vested political interests, so they will distort things when they can.
Nevertheless, the issue which prompted this action is important, and the fact that young environmentalists are prepared to make their voices heard, equally so.
The Herald's Murray Hogarth went on to argue that the current generation of environment leaders have a lot to learn. They do, but not the sort of lessons Hogarth has in mind.
A large part of the current invisibility of the environment movement, despite the increasing number of environmental problems, is the bad training that the younger generation of environmental leaders have received from their predecessors, who elevated lobbying, the so-called "sophisticated" action, above organising broad mass actions.
This, combined with the lack of mass action by the workers' movement, has made leaders of the environment movement nervous about organising protests which are anything other than small media stunts. The establishment media scorn these rather amateur events, but these spokespeople for the status quo are not encouraging a return to the Franklin Dam blockade-style action or the more recent marches against French nuclear tests in the Pacific, both of which forced governments to heed people's concerns.
The leaders of the environment movement do have a lot to learn, but not from the Labor-trained lobbyists. The movement's leaders should not set their sights so low. The enthusiasm of high school students in the 1995 anti-nuclear protests showed that today's generation is a lot more environmentally aware — and they are prepared to demonstrate their views.
Politicians are more likely to be swayed by masses of people from all walks of life taking to streets than a handful of earnest, if naive, protesters. This is not to say that smaller actions are of no use, but that they are no substitute for the political clout of mass actions.