In a week of post-election finger pointing, Bob Brown’s anti-Adani convoy has taken a lot of flack for Labor’s titanic loss in Queensland.
The LNP’s Michelle Landry, while noting the main driver was a primary vote swing from Labor to One Nation, thanked Brown personally on Sunday after receiving a massive 11.3% swing in her seat of Capriconia. Both commentators and union sources have alleged the convoy backfired, further alienating locals against the Stop Adani movement rather than convincing anyone of the mine’s alarming potential as a “carbon bomb”.
But how did the convoy play out on the ground and in relation to Labor’s broader messaging? Did the convoy really turn any moderate voters off the anti-Adani cause, and could a protest movement be expected to deliver anything other than protest?
On the road to Clermont
Along with an electric car and a group of protesters, Brown left Hobart just before Easter for a series of east coast rallies peaking at Clermont, the town closest to the proposed mine site on April 28. They then headed back to a star-studded Canberra rally with singer Paul Kelly and author Richard Flannagan.
Despite a one-sided campaign from The Courier-Mail smearing “Bob’s mob of revolting protesters”, there were no reports of anti-Adani protesters engaging aggressively or illegally. The only incident occurred at a Karmoo Dreaming celebration, organised by the Wangan and Jagalingou Family Council in support of the Bob Brown Foundation, where a counter-protester disrupting the event rode his horse into a woman.
Unsurprisingly, Brown himself considers the campaign a success and rejects accusations that enough was not done to communicate alternative employment opportunities.
“When we look at the reception we got in Queensland, there were 5,000 people in the rally in Brisbane, which along with our rally in Canberra were the two biggest turnounts in the whole of the election campaign,” Brown says. “And where you see leadership taken on climate change by the Greens, or Zali Steggall, or [Helen] Haines in Indi, the vote went up. Where there was indecision and internal ructions, like the CFMEU attacking its own party in central Queensland, the vote went away from Labor.”
That apparent lack of engagement — which did not translate to any change in the Greens’ vote in Capricornia — has been the core complaint against the convoy (see Stan Grant sternly questioning Brown on The Drum). Union sources maintain that, whatever support at the rallies themselves, protestors did not do enough to talk with locals.
However Brown maintains his events attracted “farmers, engine drivers and people working in the mining industry”, and that the Greens’ policy for 50,000 clean energy jobs in Queensland was repeated to media throughout the campaign. The problem lay in that “the Murdoch media in Queensland was not interested in, and didn’t give due coverage to, climate change and the impact that comes with it”.
“We repeated all the time that renewables are the alternative and these will create thousands of jobs, but they’re not going to kill or threaten the 64,000 jobs on the Great Barrier Reef or the Murray Darling Basin. And every farm in the Murray Darling Basin is threatened by Adani.”
But one way or another the protests created a lightning rod for counter-protests, largely held at Clermont’s Grand Hotel Motel. These saw support from federal Industry Minister Matt Canavan, Pauline Hanson, Clive Palmer, Bob Katter and Adani Australia chief executive Lucas Dow.
Hotel owner Kel Appleton, a strident supporter of Adani and denier of climate science, made headlines for refusing service to anti-Adani protestors, and rejects claims Brown’s convoy did anything to engage with residents or discuss alternative projects. Appleton denies any direct links to Adani itself despite his Facebook page “Don’t Go Cold on Coal” publishing a high-quality video of the counter-protest, which thanked Adani for providing footage of the event.
“Bob Brown brought us the stage and the people of Clermont performed well,” Appleton says. “Labor and Greens had turned their back on the miners who had voted for them all their life and just come back and bit them so hard. We weren’t preferencing anyone, I know there’ll be stuff in the paper saying it was Labor bashing [but] it was Labor bashing because they didn’t come over and say ‘let’s go Adani’.”
Where to next?
Appleton denies Bronwn’s convoy did anything to engage with residents or discuss alternative projects. The pub owner is open to renewable projects, such as Labor’s floated hydrogen plant in Gladstone, and even possible hydro plants along the Queensland coast, but maintains coal mining in the region should go ahead.
“When asked what they’re going to do: ‘oh we’ll transition’. Well, transition into what? We haven’t got batteries, we have not got wind and we have not got solar. And we cannot build wind turbines without coal, we cannot build solar panels without coal, and we cannot put it together with batteries.”
Going forward, it might be difficult to find any “moderates” who were outright turned off by Brown’s campaign. As Brown says, a case could equally be made that Labor’s soft approach along with CFMEU Queensland’s public campaign against the party on the issue meant “a lot of Labor votes went across to One Nation and Clive Palmer, and that sent preferences back to the Liberals”.
This was despite Labor’s candidate for Capricornia Russell Robertson publicly supporting the mine and spruiking his credentials as a “proud third generation coal miner [fighting] for local workers against the Greens who want to take jobs away from our region…” (Labor’s primary vote suffered a 13.7% swing against it in Capriconia).
Brown maintains he will double-down on opposition to the mine, and notes that Morrison never mentioned the Adani mine during the campaign and therefore does not have a mandate on the issue.
Despite all this, the mere perception that the mine is crucial has scared Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk into rushing deadlines for approvals and, perhaps more positively for those still concerned by climate action and jobs, the prospect of a “Green New Deal” going into 2022.
Bob Brown hasn’t had a real win since the Franklin. He needs to hang up the gloves. The Greens have done nothing but play a spoiler against Labor with no capacity to actually do things. If the Greens were fair dinkum about their policies, the way to get support is to win the hearts and minds of those who have a lot to lose with change. Telling people what they should do without the capacity to help them do it just pisses them off. An extraordinary Australian conservationist, Peter Hitchcock died the other day. Huge loss locally and internationally because he showed governments and locals what the problems were and how they could be fixed. His science and persuasion methodology worked.
No Vasco as far as Hitchcock’s legacy they didn’t, otherwise we would not be increasing land clearing and habitat destruction 8 fold in NSW and Qld. Science has no impact on those who do not want to know and the LNP in particular are like the pope who would not look in Gailieo’s telescope. You are I think, unfair to Brown, but his stature was such that they have failed to replace him nationally.
First up Brown was campaigning for the Greens and their vote went up the most out of the majors in Qld. He wasn’t campaigning for or against the ALP. Green policies contain details of transition options but they can’t do much without electoral support and seats in power. They can’t get their message to people who don’t want to listen and prefer to hear only opportunists.
Coal mining jobs have declined 20 % in the past six years but somehow it’s blamed on politicians rather than coal companies.
The manipulation is sordid. The locals love coal because the jobs pay well. They pay well because of a strong unionised history. Conservative politicians allege support for mining jobs while remaining silent on job losses and committed to crushing unions.
Exactly Mark,
Michelle Landry got an 11.3% swing on the back of $60,000,000, anti- Labor advertising blitz from Clive Palmer, who the day after the election put in his application for his coal mine right next door to Adani.
Hopefully his application will be viewed in conjunction with Adani’s, as his mining lease area co-incidentally, is the conservation area for the black throated Thrush, as far as Adani is concerned.
It may end up as one or the other, which will be a choice between doing business with the Indian dodgy brothers of mining or alternately, doing business with the man who has trillions, not adverse to taking legal action and has a runaway nephew, who isn’t answering questions regarding the collapse of Queensland Nickel.
Spoiled for choice, really!
Did it backfire?
You bet it backfired. Not just in helping to deliver a raft of Queensland seats to the Coalition (Queenslanders just love southerners coming in and telling them what to do, especially when that involves not having a job), but by generating coverage throughout Australia showing them being out-demonstrated by pro-Adani locals and being refused beers in the local pub.
I think this article misses the point somewhat. First Queensland has an abominable record on environmental destruction( which NSW is trying to match). I wonder who all those Lock the Gate rurals voted for. Nationals I would bet. But the big thing is if you tell a Queenslander he shouldn’t do something and you are form Tassie, Vic or NSW it gets their back up. Joh played this like a violin. “Now don’t you come up here from those, those universities down south. You.. you don’t understand how we do things here in Queensland” or words to that effect. The Greens are sincere, bit they have presided over two disasters which empowered the conservatives 1. The rejection of emissions trading under Rudd and then their hypocritical opposition to Gillard’s Malaysia plan which empowered the odious Abbott and condemned the ones on Manus and Nauru to their fate.
Really it was the ALP policy of having a bob each way on Adani that hindered their ability to run a thorough campaign explains job opportunities in new technologies. Shorten did mention hydrogen production but never scratched the surface of explaining more. They also failed to explain the fact that any jobs Adani did create would be at the expense of the loss of jobs at existing mines around the country.
Adani is only one mine but the ALP and Greens managed to make it symbolic of all mining and all 20th century industry. Then they went on to lose the argument and alienate many of their traditional supporters.
Agreed Rabs. Labor did a fine job shooting themselves in the foot. I have lived and worked in National Party heartlands most of my life. Labor and the Greens need to offer a viable alternative with jobs, infrastructure and opportunity. Ignoring the reality of people’s lives and their priorities adds insult to injury. It’s a case of don’t tell me, respect me and show me.
The Greens haven’t been making any real headway for a decade now and with their apparent belief in themselves as being ‘correct’ they are unlikely to make any progress because their tactics seem to be alienating people rather than winning them over. They may be right in their beliefs but if you don’t take people with you you are effectively irrelevant and if you keep trying the same approach and getting nowhere you are simply proving Einstein’s dictum about madness to be correct. Or you may simply be demonstrating that you are so sure of yourself that you think that the population at large don’t matter, which seems to be the message that’s getting through and that’s not what we need to clean up the mess. The Greens vote in Queensland may have gone up in the south east but it didn’t go up enough to make a change and the damage in the rest of state effectively cancelled that out by handing the state to the LNP. Australia needs something better than that.
Dear Unimpressed, I suggest you look closer at the numbers; the Greens are hardly getting nowhere. It might not be the news you want to hear, but 6 Greens senators look like being re-elected for 6 years making 9 Greens senators in Canberra altogether.
Also, Warren Entsch gave second preferences to the Greens in Leichhardt (Far North Queensland) which helped to give them a positive swing. In Queensland, after the Dawson division (for the absentee encumbent, go figure) the biggest swings against the Greens were in Hinkler and Wright in the southeast – probably due to the large retiree vote, not to angry coalminers.
So, your proposition that the success of the Greens is isolated to the southeast corner of Queensland is a myth. While the Greens were undoubtedly helped by the demise of Nick Xenophon, most of their latest success in Queensland is probably due to effective campaigning with a consistent message.