Warren Mundine: Greens are out to damage Australia
FAR-LEFT Greenies spell economic disaster for Australia — and they have no right to tell traditional landowners what they should do, writes Warren Mundine.
Opinion
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MARCIA Langton was spot-on in her recent speech when she said green groups are hijacking and undermining the interests of Aboriginal people.
She’s correct that “cashed-up green groups, some funded by wealthy overseas interests, oppose mining projects with often-flimsy evidence and misrepresent the evidence to the public” and that they “deliberately thwart the aspirations and native title achievements of the majority of indigenous people by deception”.
On the same day as her speech, Greens senator Larissa Waters illustrated the point, authorising a Greens political advertisement opposing the Adani mine. It said “No Finance. No Consent from Traditional Owners. No Way.”
This statement is false. Fact: Adani has agreed six Indigenous Land Use Agreements (ILUAs) with three traditional owner groups — the Juru, Jaeggi and Berrimah native title groups. Adani also obtained the consent of the vast majority of Wangan and Jagalingou (W&J).
The W&J ILUA, which was approved by a 294-1 vote of the W&J native title claimant group, was challenged in court by individual W&J people who oppose the mine.
The Federal Court found the vote valid, but said a majority vote wasn’t enough to approve the ILUA. Rather, unanimous approval of W&J native title applicants was required.
Waters is wrong if she thinks there’s “No Consent from Traditional Owners”. Why are the Greens telling Aboriginal people what they can and can’t agree to? Do the Greens only believe in Aboriginal self-determination if we do what they want?
It’s not really fossil fuels the Greens oppose. It’s energy consumption and economic growth in general.
Propaganda is the hallmark of far-left and far-right political groups who believe their cause is so superior that any means is justified to garner support, even lies. The Greens are a far-left group with a cause. Here the cause is opposing coal.
Green groups also lie when they say coal is on the way out and fossil fuel extraction and power plants will soon be “stranded assets” with wind and solar on the verge of taking over.
Fact: Wind and solar represent less than 1 per cent of global energy consumption (4EJ out of total energy consumption of 525EJ).
Coal, natural gas and crude oil make up over 83 per cent (160EJ, 124EJ and 155EJ respectively). Fossil fuel energy consumption has increased massively since the early 1900s, including an increase in coal energy consumption in the past 30 years. These assets are far from being stranded.
Green groups don’t believe coal is in decline. Quite the opposite. In 2011 a coalition of environmental activists produced a detailed strategy for crippling Australia’s coal export industry through legal challenges and public campaigns, which was leaked.
It said: “Australia is on the verge of an unprecedented coal boom with around 120 proposed new coal mines or mine expansions that, if built, would see a tripling of Australia’s coal exports by the end of the decade … matched by a rush to build new rail lines and massively expand coal export ports.”
It’s not really fossil fuels the Greens oppose. It’s energy consumption and economic growth in general.
They feign an alliance with farmers because of mutual opposition to gas fracking and water use for mining.
Green activism isn’t really about conservation. It’s about stopping all development.
I once issued a public challenge to green groups to name just one place in Australia where they would approve of a mine or oil or gas exploration. Silence.
Everything we touch depends on mining — obviously metals, but also synthetics and plastics (produced from petroleum). Even food, plant, textiles and timber production, which depend on machines and mined products.
If green groups don’t approve of any extractive industries in Australia, logically they’d have Australia import all natural resources and not export any. They want Australia to go broke.
It’s not just mining. Scratch the surface of green ideology and you’ll find opposition to farming, infrastructure, processing, manufacturing and any other development.
In Australia they feign an alliance with farmers because of mutual opposition to gas fracking and water use for mining. Pastoralists shouldn’t be so naive as to think green groups don’t have pastoral water use and environmental impact in their sights too.
In the US there’s even organised green opposition to solar energy farms in deserts.
Green groups consistently oppose projects and developments that create economic activity in remote and regional Australia.
They champion restrictions like the Wild Rivers legislation that made it impossible for Aboriginal groups in Cape York to do even the most basic things on their land, including things like horticulture and tourism.
Green groups hate people in regional Australia. They’d prefer nobody lived there at all, except in a subsistence existence with no impact on their surroundings.
Fundamentally, green groups believe Australia shouldn’t be touched beyond its current level of development. For people in regional Australia this means a very poor economic future indeed.
For all Australia, in fact.
Nyunggai Warren Mundine AO is Chair of the Yaabubiin Institute for Disruptive Thinking. His articles also regularly appear in The Koori Mail.
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