Controversial Victorian climate change protest laws breach freedoms of political expression and are “stifling democracy”, a prominent barrister and Greens candidate has claimed. Brian Walters SC, who is running for the seat of Melbourne in the Victorian state election on November 27, told Crikey that new penalties relating to “critical electricity infrastructure” specifically target climate change protesters.
“I don’t think there could be any other reason for bringing those laws in. In fact they refer specifically to coal infrastructure,” he said.
Yesterday between 100 and 300 people protested at Hazelwood power station in the Latrobe Valley, Victoria. Signs attached to a perimeter fence announced the new offences and possible jail terms. Over 250 police were present, including officers from the mounted division, search and rescue, water police, the dog squad and the air wing.
One new offence imposes a maximum penalty of a year’s jail or equivalent $14,300 fine for being on premises “without authority”. Another imposes a maximum penalty of two years’ jail or equivalent $28,700 fine for damaging, interfering or “attaching things” to critical electricity infrastructure.
The legislation was introduced by Victorian Minister for Energy and Resources Peter Batchelor late last year after a similar protest at Hazelwood power station, where 22 people were arrested. No protesters were arrested yesterday, so the legislation remains untested. In his second reading of the legislation, Batchelor said: “The offences are not merely for the protection of private interests but for protection of the electricity supply.”
The genesis for the harsher penalties can be traced to a Council of Australian Government decision in December 2008. In a more recent communiqué, energy ministers “reiterated the importance of appropriate penalties to deter protest activities designed to interrupt operations” at power stations and related infrastructure.
But Walters SC told Crikey the offence dealing with being on the premises without authority wasn’t introduced to protect electricity infrastructure at all: “It doesn’t do that because a lot of people will be caught who don’t threaten the electricity infrastructure in any way.
“Under these laws just being on land without authorisation becomes an offence, and it’s an offence carrying a huge jail [term]. You don’t have to be asked to leave and refuse, you don’t have to do any damage to anything. You just have to be there.”
Walters SC says politicians were influenced by a controversial court case in the UK, where six Greenpeace activists who painted a political slogan on a chimney at Kingsnorth power station used climate change as a “lawful excuse”. Dr James Hansen, a scientist from NASA and one of the world’s leading experts on climate change, testified on the activists’ behalf. The jury then cleared the activists of causing criminal damage.
“The case not only was defended, but it was politically damaging to the interests of big coal,” says Walters SC. “This [Victorian] legislation appears to be directed specifically to avoiding that kind of embarrassment, not for protecting any electricity infrastructure.”
Walters SC told Crikey activists charged with the new offence would not be able to call a climate scientist to testify: “Historically, it’s been regarded as a reasonable excuse that you’re making a lawful political protest. And indeed the High Court have recognised the right of political free speech, including by action.”
But under the new offence, he said, “there’s no question of reasonable excuse”: “I think it [the legislation] is designed to shut out the kind of case that we saw in Kingsnorth, and to stack it all in favour of big coal, and to prevent criticism of the inaction in relation to coal-fired power plants.”
Responding to these claims, Peter Batchelor told Crikey: “The Brumby Labor Government supports the fundamental political right of all Victorians to carry out peaceful protests and these penalties do not affect that right. As seen on the weekend at Hazelwood, peaceful protesters have nothing to fear from this legislation. These penalties were introduced to better reflect the serious consequences and dangers that can arise from entry or damage to power stations.”
However, a protester at Hazelwood power station, Simon Jane, said last year the intention wasn’t to destroy property but to send a message: “The plan was to get in the car park and get arrested. No one wanted to do any damage, it was purely nothing more than a statement.”
Lou Sigmund, a Latrobe Valley local and an independent candidate for the Victorian state seat of Morwell, spent the afternoon of the Hazelwood protest standing up for the power station and its workers’ jobs. He says he doesn’t blame the power station for trying to stop protesters entering the compound. “What they don’t want is idiots who jump over the fence and electrocute themselves,” he said.
Yet he also describes the new laws as “draconian”. “I really think that people have a right to protest,” he said.
Switch Off Hazelwood organiser Shaun Murray also spoke out against the new offences. “They’re laws designed to quash political protests,” he said.
Other activists on the day told Crikey the new offences “reduce the options of how you can protest” and are an example of the government “directly trying to repress grassroots political action”.
Asked about the impact of the new offences, Walters said: “We are less likely to hear the concerns of the activist community about the future health of our planet, and we are discouraging people from participating in our democracy, and therefore stifling our democracy.”
But while the new offences were a major deterrent to some activists, they represented a challenge to others. Friends of the Earth spokesperson Cam Walker said that although there were no arrests at the Hazelwood protest, the new legislation might be challenged by a “pledge of resistance” where many activists took part in a “mass occupation”.
The proposed HRL-Dual Gas power station in Morwell might be the impetus for such a demonstration, he said. “I would suggest HRL, if it does get through the EPA process, would be a test case for these new laws.”
In the longer term, disproportionate legislative responses to threats themselves eventually become the issue, thus either supplanting or adding to the original issue. One effect of this instance will be to add to the number of objectors and add to the liklihood that antagonistic action will take place.
I am very familiar with many coal fired power stations and can attest that the risk to persons wandering around on these sites, significant though it is, is nowhere near as great as, for example, the risk of being in the wrong place at the wrong time with large animals, yet nobody suggests equivalent legislation to cover slightly risky workplaces where cattle or horses are present.
Clearly, the real issue is political and not personal risk.
Attempts by PR staff or politicians to say otherwise will eventually, if not immediately, white-ant their credibility until the pendulum swings back. The Vic Government and the power generators will find that their prospects have been damaged by this new penalty.
If only we had time to be patient re greenhouse gas action, but that’s another issue.
We need voices like Brian Walters in State Parliament.
What what what about protesting a gas power station? Yes I know it’s slated to run from “natural gas and syngas made from coal” but until gas prices are much higher than they are now, coal is not an economical option, this is just ticking the “clean coal” box (and if/when it did start to run on coal, it would be far more efficient in terms of consumption and emissions than the existing Hazelwood et al).
In the meantime, gas-fired power is exactly what is needed to keep the electricity infrastructure running smoothly as we integrate higher amounts of intermittent renewables such as wind energy. It is a vital mid-term ingredient in the reduction of emissions. Adding wind power without replacing the big dinosaur coal power stations with more flexible gas will mean the coal power stations become *less* efficient as they are required to have backup capacity ready for whenever the wind drops — this means backup boilers fuelled and fired and may even require turbines spinning without load.
Jonathon,
Read Clauses 79 and 80 of the Electricity Infrastructure Act of Victoria and you will have your definition. The definition includes coal fired generation plant but is not limited to that – it includes all other generating and distribution plant, including transmission lines and switchyards. The specific offenses appear to me to have been written with coal in mind.
Regarding your affirmation that natural gas and syngas are clean coal: That depends on the definition of clean coal. There is not really any such thing. Gas products do burn more efficiently in CCGT power stations, however what is needed to support wind and solar PV is mainly OCGT, which is not much more efficient than lack coal-burners and is certainly not part of any phasing out of fossil fuels in general.
One other strike against all natural gas supplies, however derived, is the large CO2 content of this gas which is usually vented at the processing plant and often overlooked entirely in calculations by (?) experts when they assess the carbon intensity of competing proposals.
If you want 65% efficient CCGT, then the back end of these is similar to the very same boilers that fuel coal fired stations and which limit their ability to follow load.
So, after deleting OCGT and wind and solar PV from rational consideration, I suggest that you take a good look at nuclear. Cost-wise, this stacks up very well against wind + OCGT + CCGT and is even further out in front of Solar PV and Concentrated Solar and Offshore Wind. Nuclear is technologically available, is currently working safely in over 450 plants worldwide, is extremely safe and has no carbon footprint after construction. The pollutants from nuclear are very much easier to manage and are far less volume than those from fossil fuels – especially when the radionuclides are considered. Nuclear manages all of its radioactive detritus; coal cannot, and there is more of it.
Hi John,
I didn’t say anything about the protest legislation. I just questioned why protesters would even want to oppose a new and efficient power station in the La Trobe valley — what can we possibly expect to gain from demanding that the old ones be closed down if new ones with lower emissions aren’t built to replace at least some of the lost generation capacity?
I know coal can’t physically be clean, but there are certainly far more efficient ways to convert it into electricity than using 40-year-old boilers and steam turbines. Gasification of brown coal is probably the most efficient way to use it because it exploits the water content (rather than needing to spend energy drying it) and separates the ash before combustion. Successive governments in this country have allocated enormous funds to various ‘clean coal’ initiatives and gasification is by far the most promising of them, given that it’s the only one that would be economically viable without subsidy. It’s only rational for power station investors to follow the government money, however irrational it was for the government to allocate it in the first place!
I’m not a passionate opponent of nuclear power and I don’t think it’s so expensive or so dangerous that it should be ruled out altogether. That said, I’m distressed by the poor environmental standards of the uranium mining industry in this country and I’m completely unimpressed by nuclear power’s economics in any Western country (even including Sweden and France, though the profound lack of domestic fossil fuels in those countries does seem to have made nuclear look like a reasonable option in the 60s and 70s, before recent cost reductions in renewable power). Japan and China do seem to be doing it relatively cheaply, but not necessarily with a view to maximum public safety. Most countries that have nuclear power today decided to pursue it not for economic reasons but “incidentally” to rattle nuclear sabres. It’s a matter of hubris not . When one of the committed nuclear power countries gets around to it, we might see some interesting development of fourth-generation reactor technology which could draw a line under nuclear waste problems and may put an end to the demand for mined uranium fuel. It might also put an end to everyone’s energy problems, everywhere, forever. I’m not holding my breath for that one.
Australia is not presently burdened with a nuclear power industry nor a significant nuclear waste problem. I think the cost of establishing both here would be very high, both in dollar terms and politically. In this country I would far, far prefer to see decent investment into developing hot-rock geothermal and large-scale solar thermal power. Hot rock is a new and undeveloped idea but the principles are sound; solar thermal power is now well established and languishes only because it competes with coal and gas. A carbon price would work wonders for both I’m sure.
I know that the back end of a combined-cycle power plant is a steam turbine but I do dispute that new and modestly-sized CC plant can’t be built to support variable loads far more efficiently than the legacy 40-year-old coal-fired gigawatt-scale generators. To avoid having those coal-fired turbines vary too much, we have invested in open-cycle gas peakers and pumped storage in the Snowy Mountains, but the output of “base load” generators still has to vary significantly with demand, irrespective of the contribution of intermittent renewable power. Adjusting fuel-consuming generation to match demand variation is just good economics … unless your technology, like large-scale coal-fired or nuclear thermal power, makes it expensive to do so (mind you it’s perfectly normal for steam locomotives and nuclear-powered ships and submarines … it’s the scale which makes it expensive, not the underlying technology).
Existing demand varies throughout the day and most of that variation is met by reducing the output from the huge coal-fired plants overnight, at some cost in wasted fuel and unnecessary emissions just to keep them spinning. It would be less wasteful to do the same with newer (and possibly smaller-scale) combined-cycle “base-load” equipment. Open-cycle gas turbines are used only as low-capital-cost peakers for short bursts (typical load factor 5%) to meet brief spikes in demand over and above the maximum capacity of the (more capital-intensive) coal power stations.
Well-sited wind turbines in Victoria have (individually) over 30% capacity factor and (in aggregate over a wide area) can average out to much steadier production over the course of each day. The right way to think about integrating wind is just to subtract the wind production curve from the existing demand curve. Using open-cycle peakers to compensate for all wind variation is exactly equivalent using them to provide *all* of the gap between the daily trough and peak consumption! It’s uneconomical, it doesn’t happen now, and it isn’t going to happen no matter how much wind power is added to the grid.
There’s no chance of “deleting OCGT and wind and solar PV from rational consideration”. OCGT won’t be abandoned any time soon, because of the low capital cost. Indeed the technology is growing, because it is very efficient in fuel-consumption terms to replace industrial boilers (eg. in pulp mills and oil refineries) with open-cycle generators for combined heat and power. Onshore wind electricity, per kilowatt-hour generated, is the cheapest non-fossil power source available by quite a big margin. Solar PV is definitely *not* cheap or economical today, but it is convenient and has attracted some irrational-seeming subsidies which help (along with some more rational investment schemes) to fund some impressive technological development and economies of scale which are steadily driving down the cost. Solar PV with battery storage is already quite competitive with gensets for off-grid applications; I’ll wager that within the decade PV competes with on-grid fossil-fuel power as well, leapfrogging nuclear for any sunny country that hasn’t already drunk the fission kool-aid for reasons of sabre-rattling.
But enough hypothesising about the details — power investment is needed and is being held up by “sovereign risk” uncertainty. Bring on the carbon price and then follow the money!