By Felicity Wade
In the second in a series of articles on future directions for the environment movement, FELICITY WADE takes up some of the issues being discussed in the Wilderness Society about the way forward for the conservation movement. The first article in the series, by Friends of the Earth's Cam Walker, was printed in the September 25 issue of 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly.
I have been angered and amazed by the suggestion by some in the left that the Wilderness Society's failure to support the ALP in the federal election was tantamount to betraying the entire social change and left agenda. In no way do I defend the Coalition and the havoc they are wreaking on the community, but to suggest that continued support for the ALP would bring environmental change is naive and not pragmatic.
At the end of 1995 we confronted the likelihood of significant political change. The Keating government had failed spectacularly on the environment. Its performance on forests, uranium and greenhouse had been appalling. The combined environment movement had made it clear to that government that its December 1995 woodchip decision was the clinching opportunity to make a pro-environment decision. It failed. Amid smug confidence that the conservation movement would support it regardless, the ALP made it impossible for the Wilderness Society to support it in the 1996 federal election.
Politics is a hard game. There is no room for sentimental loyalties to old allies. Wilderness Society is a very focused organisation — our mandate is "to promote, protect and preserve wilderness". Our strength is our singularity and the diversity of personal ideologies which gather around a commitment to wilderness. This is not to say that the Society does not see itself as part of the broader social change movement, but we are a very goal-oriented and pragmatic organisation.
It had been a long time since the Daintree decision or the saving of the Franklin River. The ALP had settled into seeing the conservation movement as an "easy win" arm of itself. The only way for environmental protection to stay on the agenda was for it to become a bipartisan issue. There was little difference between the policy platforms of the two major parties and nothing to distinguish either as worthy of support.
The Wilderness Society has no commitment to the institutional left. The ALP is not our benefactor. We play policies, not parties. The fact that both big, lumbering, arrogant, mainstream parties failed on the environment means that neither of them retained our support.
I have personally been an ALP supporter all my life, but when I came up close with a clear agenda for change I found that the party had no heart. Perhaps a time out "in the wilderness" will help it re-find that heart, and find a more sophisticated view than simply choosing between unions and issues like the environment.
The left is not somewhere I want to share with the timber division of the CFMEU. It is a union that aligns itself to big business on the basis of a short-sighted argument which puts workers above everything, screwing the environment and their members in a blind commitment to the dying native forest industry. That sort of thinking doesn't herald a new, fair and safe society.
As the Pauline Hanson debate has shown, progressive ideas are hardly overwhelming the community. We've got some serious work to do on communicating our agenda to middle Australia. If the left has been asleep, it's truly time to wake up. Sentimental hysteria about the "good old days" of the ALP will, I hope, pass and we will become very focused and clear on our goals, strengths and objectives.
As Cam Walker outlined, there's a sense of shell shock in the green movement, and probably more broadly. There are too many fronts to fight and not much political hope on which to build a strategy. It is time to go back to basics, to rediscover our strength which is the grassroots — not narrowly defined as inner city activists, but the broad community who don't want our natural heritage trashed.
Associated is a re-radicalisation. No matter how much many people within my organisation would argue otherwise,"sucking on the teat" of the ALP was our fate also during the Keating years. We ended up with a lot of energy focused on Canberra. We were "civilised" by the ALP — it brought us in, served us tea, and gave fewer and fewer returns.
Now at least we know where we stand. We're well and truly outside, back on the other side of the barricades.
The Boycott Boral campaign and the sister campaigns against other woodchip companies are about rebuilding a grass roots. They have all the chaos of any other direct action campaign matched with a simplicity around which each mum and dad can make choices when they visit their local hardware store.
As a result of the last 20 years of activism, the environment is now a mainstream issue. We need to think hard about this and get better at using the opportunity this creates, while also dispelling the complacency it has brought. To move this government we need to mobilise our members in John Howard's electorate. It's a time for the "blue rinse and green" set to get active.
There will be interesting years ahead — a time of challenge in which new ideas need to flow and give the great surge of community concern for environmental protection voice and power. We are looking to the passion and vision of activists, which has given us the great legacy of action in the past, to create new and effective ways forward.
Our medium term challenge is to see the ALP resolve the choice it perceives between unions and the environment. Until this is worked out in a more constructive way we will continue to have difficulties finding a way to work with it. But the role of the ALP and the left more generally is crucial to advancing the environmental agenda. We look forward to Labor building a more sustainable platform and restoring the confidence of the environment movement that it once enjoyed.
[Felicity Wade is NSW campaign coordinator for the Wilderness Society.]