On the issue of oppressive laws, Australia has become something of a leader. Novel pieces of legislation that chip away and smother civil liberties is something of a speciality down under, encouraged by the glaring absence of a federal bill of rights. Since 2019, the states of Queensland, New South Wales, Tasmania, Victoria and South Australia have all passed legislation in this criminalisation frenzy.
Australia’s Environmental Defenders Office (EDO), in collaboration with the Human Rights Law Centre and Greenpeace, affirms the tendency in its 2021 report, further noting the prioritisation of deterrence and denunciation in sentencing practices in courts “particularly when climate defenders do not express remorse or contrition for their activism.”
Broadly speaking, the emergence of strategic lawsuits against public participation (SLAPP) has become a weapon of choice in government and corporate litigation. Environmental groups have also been the subject of extensive surveillance and infiltration by government agencies and corporations friendly to the extraction agenda.
In arguments about the role played by environmental defenders, their slandering by the publicity machines of governments in league with private interests conforms to a familiar pattern. They are pictured as privileged, pampered rabble rousers, ungrateful for what the earth’s plunder has done for them and, even more galling, the saintly role of mining magnates. Gina Rinehart, Australia’s wealthiest extractor, is the paragon of such views. “My question to the short-sighted is this: Do you really think we could survive without mining?”
The United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres sees it differently. “Climate activists are sometimes depicted as dangerous radicals,” he stated in a video message in April 2022. “But the truly dangerous radicals are the countries that are increasing the production of fossil fuels.” And how radical they continue to be in hiding the true cost of the extraction market.