From an earlier blog

I have also argued with some head scientists and heads of governments against their "only saving species of significance" in the 1980s, while they were abandoning subspecies to fate, a fate that was highly influenced downwards by introduced cats and foxes, and camels and rabbits and toads and whatever... — all because of "budget restrictions"... It has always been my strong view that "subspecies" (quite numerous in this continent) are the essential links to our understanding of evolution — their variation in specific environment leading to new species being fascinating...

from the ABC

Greens leader Bob Brown says the Government's approval of the Gorgon gas project off the Western Australian coast is environmental vandalism.

The project involves injecting 3.5 million tonnes of C02 a year into a reservoir under Barrow Island. The carbon capture technique will cost Chevron and its partners more than $1 billion and is the biggest geo-sequestration project of its type ever undertaken.

But Environment Minister Peter Garrett says he is satisfied that the $50 billion project will not cause unacceptable damage to the local environment.

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More black sludge from the former man of midnight goo... Environmental vandalism. And this Peter Garrett — the minister for happy holes, dancing lumberjacks and joyous bulldozers — had the gall to blame former environment minister Malcolm Turnbull for the project being approved by Peter Garrett...

Unacceptable damage? All damage is unacceptable. 28 new conditions full of holes like swiss cheese... A near pristine environment to become sooner or later like a dump, once the process of vandalism is started... Then it will be proven in courts that whatever extinction occurs was not linked to the project thus the space vacated by the loosing species can be taken over by the miners, and so on and on. And in regard to dumps, someone is still advocating that Australia should become a nuke dump... Brother. See this line of comments...

barrow island from google earth

From Unleashed

So people who think trees, and kangaroos, and parrots, and flying foxes, are pests, and obstacles to progress, the obvious response after watching a documentary might be to change "pests" to "attractive pests".

Andrew Bartlett recently wrote of the "five per cent of people who allow more than one per cent of their daily thoughts to be occupied by matters political". That is, he was pointing out, in effect, those of us who are consumed by politics/current affairs, and who assume as a consequence that everyone else is too, are completely wrong.

That is why political junkies always get a shock when they find the general public uninformed about, say, Iraq, or emissions trading, or leadership turmoil, or utegate (rather in the way that those, like me, who allow none of their daily thoughts to be occupied by matters motoring, can't understand the enthusiasm of the rev heads at Bathurst). To extend Andrew's analysis we could speak of the "five per cent of people who allow more than one per cent of their daily thoughts to be occupied by matters environmental".

Whether the other 95 per cent watch nature documentaries or not, they don't care about the fate of the subjects of those documentaries.

We need a new cunning plan.

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What we need is some people that are not turncoats when elected pollies. Garrett is a prime example of such. On one hand declaring new protected habitats and on the other hand hastening the destruction of others. The two do not cancel nor complement each other. As eventually, the erosion of wild space in favor of facilities leads to the building of ten storey hotels next to the Niagara Falls and 300 foot high viewing platforms. In Aussieland, some might boast that we don't do this sort of thing... Bollocks. In many places, even at Uluru, bus parking stations have been built from the best vantage points so the tourists can hop out before the glorious sunset and on after the glorious sunset. 10 minutes of wonder. King's Canyon has suffered a similar fate. And as tourism and population expand hand in hand, new facilities will need to be created — soon smothering the purpose of the visit with entertainment, when nature has gone into the night, with gambling joints, bars and video arcades for the kiddies.

Some people say that we are part of the environment and that's fair enough. But we need to care enough not to disturb the fragile, rob the weak nor stab the beautiful. We have done more than enough of this already.

Earlier this month an Uluru tour guide told the ABC that tourists climbing the rock are sometimes defecating at the top because there are no toilets available.

The Director of National Parks continues to assess submissions on a draft management plan for the Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park, which proposes banning climbers from the rock for cultural, safety and environmental reasons.

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It’s Midnight hour for ‘woke’ politics

John Howard once revealed that his favourite Midnight Oil song was Beds Are Burning. This naturally triggered countless sniggers that he would nominate a song whose message – centred on giving land back to Indigenous Australians or at least “paying the rent” – could hardly be more diametrically opposed to his own politics. It’s a song Midnight Oil pointedly played at the Sydney Olympics closing ceremony to embarrass Howard over his refusal to apologise to the Stolen Generations. Those sniggers, I suspect, missed the point. By adopting the song, Howard was showing he was happy to roll with the punches, to be in on the joke, that he wasn’t precious.

But whatever the case, what other song could Howard plausibly have chosen? US Forces, for the man who followed George W. Bush into Iraq? Blue Sky Mine, for the prime minister whose support for the mining industry suggests he might honestly believe “nothing’s as precious as a hole in the ground”, and whose politics on workers’ rights wound ultimately to WorkChoices?

No, there is no option, and that includes not nominating a song at all. Howard was asked because Labor had just announced Peter Garrett as a candidate in the upcoming election, and Midnight Oil was such an Australian institution that prime ministers were more or less obliged to like them, in the same way they are obliged to have a football team.

Which, in a time like ours, is an extraordinary thing to consider. Here was a band whose anthology consists almost entirely of protest songs, yet whose success is so thoroughly mainstream that even Coalition prime ministers will play along. There is no one like that today. Indeed, could such an act even exist now? If Beds Are Burning were released this week, it would be dismissed in several quarters as woke nonsense: a divisive, radical-left screed completely out of touch with mainstream Australia. It would then immediately become a way of planting one’s flag. There would be no neutral way of liking the song, because your pre-existing politics would determine the matter. In 1987, it blasted across commercial radio. Lord knows how a station like Triple M would handle it today.

The point here is not that Australia was a more progressive place in 1987 than in our time. Surveying the ubiquitous acknowledgments of Country, the broadcasters and sporting bodies frequently noting Indigenous place names, the change in any number of social attitudes on race, gender or sex, that would be a difficult argument to make. It is hard to imagine that “paying the rent” had more devotees in 1987 than it does today. What has changed is our response to such things; our way of receiving political ideas. What changed are the conditions that made Midnight Oil possible.

And no one has described them better than Garrett himself. Here’s what he told me in an interview last year, which has stayed with me ever since in a way so few interviews do. It’s worth reproducing his response in full:

“I think that the internet’s changed everything as we know, and people will react very instantaneously to things, either like or dislike … I mean, they think about it, but it’s also very reactive. Whereas I think with our stuff, we gave people a chance to reflect on it.

“Because one of the things that really strikes me looking back on it is that in some ways, we wanted to push the boundaries of music-making and telling our truth and those sorts of things – which I think are important for artists – but at the same time, we liked to get down and dirty: play hard and play loud, go to where the people were – go to the suburbs – and actually sweat it out with everybody else. And that gave people a chance to like, dislike, think about it again, chat amongst themselves about it, shout something off the floor of the pub to me about it and I’d shout something back.

“So, it actually evolved, dare I say it, in a more organic and timely way, and over time I think it meant that whether you agreed with what we were saying or not, you believed it was worth listening to because you could see where it had come from.”

There’s so much in this for anyone interested in the debate about whether, in the wake of Donald Trump’s re-election, 2024 was the year “woke politics” finally died. That’s too messy a debate, characterised by too many fuzzy terms, for me to enter here in full. But it is clear that the ascendancy of a particular firebrand style of progressive politics has waned, that a repudiation of some sort – even if it ultimately proves modest – has occurred. And I’ve been thinking about Garrett’s observations ever since, because I think they help us understand why.

“Sweat it out with everybody else.” So much is contained in that phrase. Garrett may be expressing forthright positions, but he is not issuing verdicts from on high, lacerating all who fall foul of them. He’s not detached, separate, pure. He’s among. He’s face-to-face. He’s not demanding obedience: he’s accountable to the heckles. In short, he’s describing a relationship of peers, not proteges. He sees his audience, and they see him. Midnight Oil may have become iconic, but in the scene he describes, they are not behaving like icons.

The relationship is instead one between people, and not abstractions. Abstractions have no feelings, no sincerity, no experiences that form them. They are mere symbols you apprehend quickly, use as you wish, then discard. But people, you give your time. And it is only with time that persuasion becomes possible. If woke politics has been repudiated, it is that form which violates these rules. Which demands obedience over exchange. Which presumes bad faith in its opponents, and has no patience for persuasion. Indeed, which has no time for time.

Perhaps then, the objection is as much to a style as anything else. An objection that embodies a fairly basic principle of political advocacy: that if you have no time for people, they will eventually have no time for you.

Waleed Aly is a broadcaster, author, academic and regular columnist. He is a lecturer in politics at Monash University and co-host of Channel Ten’s The Project.

 https://www.smh.com.au/national/it-s-midnight-hour-for-woke-politics-20250108-p5l2xg.html

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