By Lisa Macdonald
In direct response to the battle over the federal government's woodchip export licences decision, the environment movement will be back on the streets of most of the nation's capitals over the next two weeks.
The plans for a series of rallies, marches, vigils and public meetings between now and the end of this month come in the wake of the success of the timber workers' blockade in Canberra and the prime minister's decision to fast-track the environmental assessment of 509 coupes of native forest which were listed for protection last year by environment minister John Faulkner, but are being targeted by the timber companies for immediate logging and woodchipping.
Environmentalists are particularly angry that many of these areas have already been, or are in the process of being, logged even before the assessments are completed. While the decision by anti-woodchipping campaigners to move their campaign onto a more public footing may have come too late to protect many of the 1300 coupes originally recommended by Faulkner, it is nevertheless a necessary step to win at least a partial victory for the forests.
Rallies are being organised in Sydney, Perth, Adelaide and Newcastle, and public meetings in Brisbane, Melbourne and Perth (see pp. 22-23 for details). The actions are being called by a variety of organisations and groups of activists, ranging from the Greens (WA) to wilderness action groups to the Democratic Socialists.
Some of the actions were initiated at a national meeting of about 50 environmentalists representing all of the movement's peak bodies and a range of regional and grassroots organisations, held in Newcastle February 4-6. These actions are being coordinated through the Wilderness Society branches in each city.
The movement has already lost a lot of time and ground to the timber companies, which have used the mass action tactic very effectively to force the government's hand in their favour.
A change is long overdue, from an approach based on letter writing and discussions with politicians behind closed doors, to one which allows and encourages the 80% of Australians opposed to woodchipping in old growth forests to express that opposition in an organised, forceful and consistent way.
The election-focused, lobbying approach by the movement leadership to date is being revealed as useless. The ALP is rapidly closing ranks. Hot on the heels of Keating's failure to consult the environment lobby during cabinet's decision making regarding the 509 forest coupes (the timber industry was consulted), John Faulkner, the minister who only a year ago was prepared to be "a very strong advocate for green groups", declared that it was no longer feasible to maintain an open door policy to the environment movement.
In these decisions, the federal government is reflecting and moving on the right-wing agenda of the timber industry and the corporate sector generally, which was best expressed in the Australian editorial of February 8: "The federal government is right to reassess its relationship with the environmental movement ... the recession, ministerial changes and a new ACF leadership have altered the political map. The environment portfolio is being run differently, and the environment lobbies, struggling to hold or regain their large memberships of the 1980s, have become more activist and fallen under more fragmented and extreme leaderships. A retreat from a policy of easy access in Canberra would be a sensible step toward making the government less beholden to environmentalists."
The peak bodies' letters to the PM, private meetings at Parliament House and threats to shift green preferences at election time have, it seems, had no useful effect. Worse, they have been pursued in direct counterposition to and at the expense of activating the only real power the movement has: the hundreds of thousands of activists and supporters prepared to mobilise to defend our old growth forests.
Although there is now apparently broad agreement within the movement that the campaign must be taken onto the streets, the process of getting there is proving to be far from smooth. Reports from organising meetings around the country indicate that many leaders in the peak bodies are still resisting the growing pressure from local grassroots activists to open up the campaign to mass participation.
This reluctance seems in part a product of their persistent lack of confidence in large numbers of people's desire and willingness to take more public and more radical action around the woodchipping issue. Half of a crowd of 800 people who turned up to a public meeting organised by the Tasmanian Greens and peak environment bodies in Hobart on February 7, for example, had to sit outside the meeting because the organisers had underestimated the size of the hall needed.
There is also evidence of a bureaucratic approach by the leaderships of the peak bodies who are concerned to maintain the "respectable" image and politics of the movement. In Melbourne, for example, despite the attendance of more than 10,000 people at an anti-woodchipping rally in the city centre on February 5, participants in the national conference in Newcastle decided not to organise or call for any more protest actions in that city.
In other cities, frustrated by the leaders' reluctance to act quickly and publicly, rank and file members of the peak bodies joined forces with other groups of environmental activists to organise speak-outs and rallies in Brisbane, Sydney and Hobart last week.
Even where the movement leaderships are responding to the pressure from the grassroots by planning and resourcing large public rallies, the approach so far has been widely criticised as undemocratic.
In both Brisbane and Newcastle, for example, anti-woodchipping activists who turned up to open meetings to organise the rallies scheduled for later this month were told that the date, place, nature and speakers had already been decided by the Wilderness Society and that the meetings were not to make strategic decisions. In the words of one of the Wilderness Society organisers in Newcastle, referring to the national meeting of 50 people a week earlier, "The environment movement has already made those decisions".
As a result of the federal government's decisions on woodchipping, the environment movement today is larger and more active than it has been for a number of years. It is also more broad and diverse, not limited to the full-time staff and decision makers in the peak bodies, or to those activists who do not have work, family or other commitments and can get to national meetings such as the one in Newcastle.
It is crucial to create real opportunities for all these people to express their support for the movement's aims and to participate in deciding its course. This requires city-based, weekend public meetings, rallies and marches.
The current method of making important decisions among a select few and then declaring them to the activists will not assist the building of a stronger campaign. If persisted in, it risks losing the campaign. That approach will not be tolerated by the thousands of people who are angry about the imminent destruction of our old growth forests, who have opinions about what we can do to save them, and who want to make their own decisions and act on them.