Two weeks ago I got the kind of phone call a journalist loves to make and an activist hates to take. It was a journo from The Australian Financial Review (AFR) – my old alma mater – and he began the conversation by saying, “I’ve received a document that I need to get authenticated, can you help me with that?”
Funded by the CIA? Concerned Intelligent Australians, perhaps?
It very quickly became apparent that he had been given a version of a funding document we had been working on with a bunch of other people entitled, “Stopping the Australian Coal Export Boom.” It had appeared in his letter box in an unmarked envelope earlier that day. Helpfully someone had also included a power point presentation with the document – kind of an educational aid lest the document needed clarification.
We were briefly blind-sided by the document dump. The mining industry certainly wasn’t. Like a professional little choir, the industry spokesmen and Minister for Energy, Martin Ferguson, all sang from the same song sheet as the AFR and The Australian newspaper recorded their utterances.
Other media outlets had no such luck. When journalists from other media outlets tried to contact mining industry spokes people and Minister Ferguson that same day none of them were available, not one.
The mining industry clearly thought they had a gotcha moment. Next day the front pages of both national newspapers carried their anger and outrage. They were scandalised that anyone or any group would try to check their enormous ambitions and challenge their right to do whatever they wanted with Australia’s resources, the Great Barrier Reef and the communities that lay right in the path of their expansion plans.
Reading those newspapers the next day two lines of poetry kept running through my head. They were from William Yeats poem, The Second Coming: “…The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”
The passionate intensity was blistering, but the extraordinary aspect of this saga was slowly revealed over the following 48 hours. Far from lacking all conviction, the best and bravest people began calling Greenpeace to offer support of all kinds.
Lawyers offered their help, long-term supporters rang to ask what they could do, people who had never had anything to do with Greenpeace contacted us to offer their support and our friends across the environment movement went on the record to stand in solidarity with us. One fabulous bloke who had been a farmer all his life – and was about to lose his beloved place because coal seam gas had been found on it – asked us to let him know what he could do and he would do it with pride.
As an activist a lot of my thinking time is spent trying to deal with the passionate intensity of those in power. An intensity that comes from the fear of losing something they have and are afraid of losing or not getting something they want.
But the last couple of weeks have put to rest my worst fear and that is the fear that the best really do lack all conviction. For today, for Australia, it is the best that are driven by a passionate intensity – an intensity to care for and protect their families and country and the courage to stand up against truly mighty forces in the mining industry and their friends in government and say, no, beyond this point you will not pass. And I am very glad about that.
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