Extinction Rebellion Australia: Saints or serial pests?
Extinction Rebellion has caused chaos this week, so what drives these career activists and will their antics actually drive back popular support for climate change?
NSW
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Coal miner Philip Mansfield sat in his sitting room coated black with coal dust, a cigarette in one hand, a beer can in the other, after a long day working on an East Coast mine site when the epiphany came.
All his life he worked in places where fossil fuels like coal provided lifelong employment for parents, grandparents and neighbours but, in that moment, Phil, a married father of two, knew that was no longer his path.
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For years he listened to overblown environmental concerns and colleagues espousing their distrust of the government’s commitment to the environment, like Scott Morrison refusing days ago to answer when Australia will develop an emissions reduction strategy for 2050, despite signing on at the Pacific Islands Forum to a communique pledging to develop one next year.
“In those twenty seconds it hit me, Pink Floyd was playing ‘…all your touch and all you see is all your life will ever be…’ I never worked another full day since, I quit my job and gave my wife the house with $700,000 equity in it,” he said.
“I realised the elite, the large corporations, want us to buy a house, be in debt, and work until we drop. They don’t care if our children die.
“Now I drive around the countryside in my Volkswagen Caddy Van setting up blockades for environmental protesters.
“Call me selfish, I’m not; I’m doing this for everyone, for my grandson’s future, it was an awakening moment.”
Mansfield lives a meagre existence on a plant-based diet on the Central Coast Peninsular and has erected more than 12 blockades in the last year, including at Port Waratah Coal Services, the company responsible for receiving, stockpiling, blending and local coal for export in Newcastle, where he aided more than fifty protesters scale fences and chain themselves to machinery for more than 20 hours.
“I’m really proud of that one,” he opined.
“You need to hit corporations where it hurts, in the pocket, it’s the only way to get attention, if you march down the street like good little citizens, nothing gets done, it doesn’t cost corporations anything.”
On Monday the Extinction Rebellion activist’s luck for avoiding arrest ran out.
Mansfield, 54, the son of a piano technician, was one of a group of Extinction Rebellion activists who locked themselves in a pink water tank with the slogan “Blood of the Earth” while police tried to remove them from sit-ins from Hyde Park to Broadway on Broadway, near Railway Square, on Monday afternoon.
He was charged alongside 38 university students, pensioners, academics and professors and rally organisers for not following a move on order.
Mansfield was slightly shaken by the humility of being finger-printed at Day Street Police station for the first time and barred from going within 2.5kms of the Sydney’s Town Hall, or associating with other radical climate action group ER members, known for mass acts of disruption, chaos and vandalism in cities around the world, until October 31 when he is conditionally bailed to appear at Central Local Court.
NSW Police Assistant Commissioner Mick Willing said the Extinction Rebellion group “continue to set out to break the law and put themselves and others at risk”.
“You know, it’s never happened to me but I’d do it again, for my grandson, who deserves to grow up in safe environment,” said Mansfield.
“It’s propaganda that an elite group hijack peaceful, loving protests by chaining themselves and disobeying police. We all started out peacefully and marched liked good people.
“But disobeying police and being civilly disobedient is the right thing to do - it works - being civilly disobedient and obeying police is wrong.
“I set up blockades as a job, it pays me in lentils and yarns sitting around fires at night, Martin Place, Nimbin,… some people call me radical, but I’m a realist.”
Among the several few hundred ER activists who attempted to bring Sydney to a halt with their form of extreme protest form that mixes an unshakeable belief in science with a near-religious conviction that the end is nigh is marine biology lecturer Martin Wolterding, 75.
He was not so shaken up when arrested despite suffering a bruised wrist when police dragged him by the arms along on Broadway after refusing to get off the road outside the University of Technology Sydney.
“I’m an environmental scientist and marine biologist at Sydney University and these are the exact issues that I have been fighting for 50 years, arrests don’t faze me,” said the professor at Western Sydney University.
His rap sheet lists an arrest on 1 May 1970 for transporting garbage without permit when he marched brandishing dead fish and octopuses against a nuclear power plant in Miami, Florida, “it stank to high hell” he recalls, for protesting against a sewage plant dumping waste into the ocean and with the Revolutionary Youth Movement against the war in Vietnam in ’68, and ’69.
The former Peace Corps volunteer in El Salvador went on to marry an Australian and moved Down Under 1988 becoming a citizen in 1991.
“I’ve done the legal thing for 50 years to try to turn the environmental crisis around but the greenhouse gases are getting worse,” he said.
“I believe it’s time we broke the law to make a change, the situation is critical - I will put my life on the line if necessary to ensure my grandchildren and their grandchildren have a future in a safe environment. I’m not scared of spending time in the slammer.”