Locking the Gate on Coal and Gas

Abstract

In this chapter we move out of Australia’s capital cities to the nation’s rural towns and farms to examine a surprising alliance formed in 2010, evocatively called Lock the Gate. Similar to its environmental predecessors, Lock the Gate is grass-roots-based. Yet, unlike earlier elements of the movement, almost 100,000 environmental activists, farmers, Indigenous people and, as contemporary politicians refer to them, ‘mum and dad Australians’, are united in their stance against ‘unsafe coal and gas mining’ (http://www.lockthegate.org.au/about_us). We examine the way the leaders of Lock the Gate constructed environmental issues to attract rural landholders to the alliance in its early years. Although the alliance attempts to prevent the expansion of key causes of anthropogenic climate change, our research findings raise questions about its willingness to publicise global warming as a key environmental issue.

Profile: Chloe Aldenhoven

Friends of the Earth , Quit Coal and Lock the Gate

When I was young, my dad worked as a pilot in Singapore and I went to the International School there. I first learnt about climate change in primary school, when I was about seven. It’s been part of my understanding of the world ever since, and it’s been a truth for my generation in a way that it perhaps wasn’t for previous generations.

When I was about 11 I moved with my family from Singapore to a hobby farm in rural Victoria , where climate change wasn’t spoken about as much. My dad had grown up on a farm and was keen that I would have that experience and learn about what real Australia was like, after being a sheltered ex-pat. Attending a public school in Avoca was probably the biggest culture shock of my life. I got a big dose of reality. I think it was important in helping me understand life in those rural communities, and the people there.

I went to a private high school in Ballarat, and then to the University of Melbourne , where I did an Arts degree that included a couple of classes in environmental politics. The last lecture in one of my courses was about climate change . It was so emotional that a lot of people ended up weeping in the lecture theatre. The lecturer implored us to go out and do something, so I spent 300 bucks to get myself to Sydney for the 2009 Power Shift conference run by the Australian Youth Climate Coalition . It was a big conference that year, with 1,500 people. After that, I went to Ballarat as part of a schools campaign by the AYCC , and also ran one of its Melbourne University groups.

In 2010, I agreed to attend the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change conference in Cancun , Mexico, even though I had just finished a university essay on the UNFCCC and the COP process in which I’d concluded that it was completely incapable of achieving anything. When I got to Cancun, I found it difficult to know how to intervene as an activist and exactly what our critique was, or what we should be asking for. About 200 members of the peasant movement La Via Campesina blocked traffic and stopped the delegates from entering the conference centre, then they pretended to hammer down the centre with a big blow-up hammer. I felt it was the first time I’d seen people confront neoliberalism and colonialism in a meaningful way, and I was influenced by them and their politics. I also met a lot of American activists there and participated in a protest by the Global Justice Ecology Project about people who’d been excluded from the process, such as Indigenous people and women.

When I came back to Australia, I had an existential crisis in my activism. But Quit Coal impressed me because it worked to empower communities and campaigned on very specific issues rather than abstract targets or appeals to the federal government. Quit Coal is a collective that opposes the expansion of coal seam gas, tight gas and shale gas in Victoria . So now I’m a coal and gas campaigner wearing a couple of hats. My role is administered through Quit Coal , which is affiliated with Friends of the Earth . We get a lot of administrative support and advice from Friends of the Earth , but I’m also one of two Lock the Gate Coordinators for Victoria and I use many of their strategies. Lock the Gate has a larger legitimacy across the political spectrum. There are some places where you could walk in and say you’re Friends of the Earth and there would be no prejudice against you, but other places where there would be. And there are definitely places where there would be prejudice against a group called Quit Coal . When I go into a community I do say I’m from Friends of the Earth , but we primarily present ourselves as Lock the Gate. It’s been useful to be able to communicate with different parts of the community by having these three hats. So far the partnership has worked really well. All of the organisations have an ethic of non-hierarchy and distributed leadership. It’s a constant negotiation, but one that people come to in good spirit.

Leadership

When I read Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything I noticed there were parallels in the way values were being expressed and similar tactics used internationally. What’s emerging in Australia is emerging in so many other places in the same way. It’s interesting that it’s formed so similarly in such different places when actually we don’t speak to fracking activists in the US particularly much about tactics or how we organise ourselves. The campaign in western Victoria is largely made up of people between the ages of 45 and 65. Being young and female, I was worried about gaining people’s respect. Sometimes it is really hard, but environmentalists have a history of opposing environmental degradation, and we’ve learnt the tactics and methods needed to fight corporations. Farmers and rural people don’t have that history. They need our experience to be able to take on what they’re facing now. Usually the people who are affected by environmental degradation are poor, or people of colour, or both, but now we’ve got a whole lot of white, upper-middle-class people who are suddenly facing the effects of pollution and dispossession. I think that respect exists because they suddenly see that they really need the tactics and strategies of environmentalists if we’re going to stop this from happening. That’s why I can make it, but it is difficult.

Intercultural Understanding

The concept of Lock the Gate is very much based in property rights and the idea that you should be able to have control over your own land, and be able to stop people from invading your land to mine it, but we see it as having expanded much further than property rights. It’s about communities, self-determination, democracy, and collective problem-solving. Values of stewardship, life and water have become primary drivers of the movement because farmers, rural landholders and Indigenous people are central to the campaign. Rural Australia has a long, often unacknowledged, history of violence, dispossession, genocide, exploitation and segregation of Aboriginal people. Some farmers have historically remained very antagonistic towards Aboriginal people, but for some this campaign has brought them to realise something of what it’s like to be dispossessed in that way, and to have a landscape and a country that you hold very dear being destroyed by what someone else thinks is a better use for that land, and exploits it for their own profit. Many people who are affected by unconventional gas do feel dispossessed. They’re no longer able to use the land in the way they used to, and their daily lives are being interrupted by gas companies. Their health is suffering, they’re no longer able to do the things that they used to do, and their water quality is deteriorating. In some places this has created new links between farmers and Indigenous people, creating a space for empathy and discussion. A new opening for recognising and acknowledging the dispossession of Aboriginal people. Aboriginal communities and campaigners are teaching settler communities a lot about Aboriginal history and the history of Aboriginal resistance and they are fighting together. In the States they refer to it as the Cowboy and Indian Alliance. Some Aboriginal people remain critical of Lock the Gate, especially because of the name and how it invokes a history of Aboriginal people being locked out of their own lands, but many communities are using the movement as a site for this dialogue. One of the most amazing things about Lock the Gate—and something that isn’t spoken about enough—is the stories of reconciliation.

Media

If community sentiment doesn’t manage to dominate local media, the campaign can be hurt by coal and gas companies. There are places in Queensland where gas companies have much more unfettered access to local media, and you can see how that results in the gas industry being able to infiltrate those areas. In New South Wales it was quite a slow and difficult process to get the media onside. In Gippsland and southwest Victoria we try to build it as a story of community. Our surveys tell us that more than 95% of people in most communities don’t want gasfields in their area. Once the movement had evidence of mass community mobilisation the newspapers became receptive to the story. That has been important to show that the industry has no social licence, and if it has no social licence when it comes to a community, it is invading that community. We’ve had fantastic local media, and a couple of journalists are doing amazing investigative reports on the issue.