By Marina Cameron
US President Bill Clinton's call while visiting Australia for binding greenhouse gas emission reduction targets highlighted yet again the bankruptcy of the Australian government's environment policies.
Of course, Clinton's public stance on global warming is pure hypocrisy. The government of the most powerful capitalist country on earth is responsible for massive environmental destruction via its trade, "aid", military and domestic economic policies and practices. Nevertheless, that fact that Clinton (unlike former President George Bush) has been forced to make even token statements is a win, albeit minor, for the environment movement.
In Australia the trend is in the opposite direction. The election of the Coalition has resulted in an escalation of anti-environment rhetoric and action by government. The groundwork laid by the Labor Party has been enthusiastically leapt upon by the Liberals, who have, since March, legislated to allow expanded woodchipping and uranium mining, given the go-ahead for ecologically destructive developments on Hinchinbrook Island and the Great Barrier Reef, cut funding to the Environmental Protection Agency and other environment agencies, and voted against greenhouse gas emission targets and nuclear disarmament in international forums.
The Coalition's election has prompted some environment organisations to reassess the strategies they pursued while Labor was in office. This is a welcome discussion, given the paucity of victories for the movement in recent years and its seeming inability to involve large numbers of people in ongoing campaigns, despite persistent polls which put pro-environment sentiment at 70-80% on many issues.
Labor-Liberal-Labor
As Labor's federal rule drew to a close, some in the peak environment organisations were beginning to reappraise the wisdom of relying on lobbying the ALP to save the environment. Since the early 1980s, Labor had made a long list of bad environmental decisions at both a state and federal level.
While scepticism began to develop about Labor's ability to represent environmental interests, however, the peak environment groups' loyalty to the lobbying approach in general led many to express this disillusionment by flipping over into supporting the Liberals, either in the hope that they would be better, or in order to teach Labor a lesson. The result is an even greater evil in Canberra and a crisis within the environment peak bodies which, as they flounder around between the two major parties, watch their support base dwindle and the assault on the environment escalate.
Addressing this problem, the Wilderness Society's NSW campaign coordinator, Felicity Wade, has pointed out (GLW #255) that "there is no room for sentimental loyalties to old allies". She says the environment must be a "bipartisan issue": "We play policies, not parties". But she also admits that this is a pretty hard game to play these days — there are few differences between Labor and Liberal to play off against each other and, in any case, the major parties no longer seem to want to play.
The real question, not yet addressed by the peak organisations, is how to break out of the flip-flopping between the two major parties and develop a strategy which forces them both to respond — not just relative to each other (i.e. giving a crumb or two more than the other in order to win votes at election time), but to all the demands of the majority of the population for environmental protection.
The basis for the lobbying approach lies in illusions in the responsive nature of parliamentary democracy. But as the string of broken promises of every Liberal and Labor government in Australia's history reveals, there is no such democracy. These capitalist parties have consistently disregarded the views of the population on every issue where those views differ from the "needs" of big business. Exceptions to this general rule have almost always been the result of public opposition being organised into large, active, very public campaigns which threaten the party in office's control of government.
The peak environment bodies' refusal to build such campaigns during the 13 years of Labor government (being well funded by the ALP, they had no intention of threatening its hold on power) now leaves them with a tiny, demoralised activist base, a rapidly dwindling funding base, and having to engage in "horse trading" between two increasingly bold horse thieves.
Lobbying capitalists
TWS announced on August 13 that it was scaling down its operations in Canberra in response to both major parties' failure in environmental policy. This shift could have signalled a rejection of the lobbying approach and an end to its "automatic" support for the ALP. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to.
Instead of lobbying politicians, TWS will now lobby big business directly. In the meantime, says Wade, "We look forward to Labor building a more sustainable platform and restoring the confidence of the environment movement that it once enjoyed".
The crux of the new campaign perspective is expressed in the title of TWS's November 18 media release announcing its boycott campaign targeting woodchipping giant Boral: "Conservationists call for corporate responsibility".
The shift in focus is explained in terms of getting closer to where the real decisions are made and as a return to grassroots campaigning. However, while it is true that most major policy decisions are made in corporate boardrooms (rather than parliament), it is naive to assume that large corporations with direct economic interests in environmental irresponsibility will respond to environment organisations' lobbying.
The major parties and their politicians can sometimes be swayed, albeit temporarily, by mass campaigns and the threat of a voter backlash. TWS attempts to equate this with the power of consumers over business — "Boral's arrogance about protection from consumer disgust with woodchipping will be short-lived", it says.
The problem is that "consumer power" is narrower and weaker than a mass campaign of protest activities. Fewer people are consumers of Boral products, for example, than might be persuaded to participate in broader public campaign activities. Furthermore, boycott campaigns, like lobbying in general, are based on individualised action. The gains in terms of movement building — which can be made only when people take collective action and thereby exchange ideas and experiences, and learn, are inspired by and gain confidence from each other — are lost to all but the inner core of activists who organise the boycott.
Boycotts can be a useful tactic to bring public attention to an issue and pressure to bear on the companies involved. But they will not achieve their goals unless teamed up with mass campaigning which clearly demonstrates broader public opinion and facilitates the involvement of the maximum number of people possible in whatever way they can express their support.
It is no accident that the last big wins for the environment movement, such as stopping the damming of the Franklin river in Tasmania in 1983, were the result of years of mass campaigning. In addition to direct action at the dam site, frequent, large, well-publicised rallies calling on the federal government to stop the dam were held in most major Australian cities; campaigns asking voters to write "No dams!" on election ballot papers were run; and schools, universities, trade unions, women's organisations and people from all walks of life were encouraged to take up the issue in every sphere they could.
When, in the mid-'80s, the leaderships of the environment movement turned to lobbying Canberra as their primary activity, it left those campaigning on the ground with fewer resources and less ability to coordinate and strengthen their activity. Many activists turned to simply campaigning "in their own backyard".
The myriad of local campaigns to save this park or that creek, or prevent a particular motorway, are encouraging evidence of the persistently broad pro-environment consciousness in the population. Nevertheless, the majority of such campaigns have been ineffective, both in terms of achieving their goals and in terms of building a stronger nationwide movement which can run successful campaigns on broader environment issues.
National organisations can be representative and effective only if they grow out of and are directed by on-the-ground campaigners. The peak organisations' role then is to link up otherwise isolated local campaigns, and to provide information, resources and an organisational framework for national campaigns. That is, their role is to make grassroots campaigning more effective, not to replace it with a small, centralised "high powered" team of expert lobbyists.
Winning allies
Given the weakness of the environmental movement today, winning any campaign will be dependent on broadening public support and building alliances with other movements and campaigns. This does not mean submerging specific demands for environmental protection into other issues, but rather that the movement must make more effort to reach out to and patiently and persistently work to win the support of as many sectors as possible for those demands.
Environmental destruction will continue but the mass of peoples' willingness to fight against it will not if it is counterposed to their jobs and income.
Jobs and the environment, for example, are too often counterposed, and the environment movement still sees it as outside its charter to convince workers of our common interests. In forest conservation campaigning, the question of alliances with the forestry unions has been equated with alliances with the union leaderships rather than the workers themselves.
The ALP-controlled leaderships, however, are motivated by protecting their own privileged positions — not those of the forests or their members. They therefore whip up hysteria around job losses in the industry and loyally toe the pro-woodchipping line of the Labor Party. If the rank and file memberships of both the unions and the environment movement were to build a campaigning alliance for more plantation forestry (for example), the ALP misleadership of both movements could be sidelined and the companies and government forced to meet the campaign demands.
Likewise, the Boycott Boral campaign would be immeasurably strengthened by an alliance between TWS and Boral's employees, who have the capacity not simply to reduce Boral sales, but to stop production altogether.
Backed up by public rallies, petitions and other broader campaign activities, such a strategy is much more likely to succeed than lobbying either government or big business. This is because it does not engage with capitalism on its terms but uses our power base — the mass of ordinary people who, politically educated and mobilised around their shared interest in environmental sustainability and social justice, are the most powerful force in society.