Windy Wollongong (No 2)
When I first moved from Albury to Wollongong as a child, the first thing I learned about the place was from a maths teacher who remarked, 'Ah, windy Wollongong'. How right she was. Wollongong is the windiest place I have ever known. If you leave the house without a jacket, even on a warm day, the wind is almost guaranteed to pick up and blow that chill southerly right through you. Windy Wollongong indeed.
It came as no surprise, then, when Wollongong was nominated as a location for large-scale wind farms. For local unions and the environment movement, it was the culmination of years of work to envision a green energy future for our coal and steel town. The 2009 Green Jobs Illawarra Strategy initiated by local unions sought to show how Wollongong workers and their industries could survive and thrive during the transition away from coal. It sought to create a just transition for skilled mining, manufacturing, and dock workers. Offshore wind has the potential to turn this vision into a reality.
No sooner had the public consultation period opened, however, than an anti-wind farm movement popped up on the Leisure Coast. Wind farm opponents submitted a petition to the House of Representatives containing over 10,000 signatures. On Sunday 29 October, they held a large rally at the lighthouse on Wollongong's Flagstaff Hill. Their objections included issues that seem superficially reasonable, such as potential impacts on whale migration. But below the surface lay a deeper current of conspiratorial and far-right belief that often relied on bad-faith arguments to sow doubt and confusion. No sooner had online anti-wind agitators started sharing a scientific article that they claimed showed offshore wind could kill migrating whales, for example, than the journal’s editors stated publicly that no such article had ever been published.
The anti-wind farm movement has clear connections with the conspiratorial movement that emerged during the pandemic to question the reality of covid and spread vaccine misinformation; and speakers at the October rally included representatives from the right-wing Shooters and Fishers and One Nation parties. The fear and uncertainty of the pandemic period and of the overlapping social, political, economic, and environmental crises we are experiencing are creating rifts in the fabric of our social reality. We have come to inhabit parallel universes, where the borders between our realities are produced and maintained through a culture war that feeds on outrage, division, and fear. Legitimate fears and questions about a major new development have been weaponized by cynical actors. We have even witnessed the spectacle of Dutton purporting to care about the fate of whales and other marine life. Meanwhile his party continues to deny the scientific consensus on climate change and to oppose measures that might ameliorate it.
The right have even capitalised on the confusion over offshore wind to summon up the ghost of nuclear power, posing this outdated and dangerous technology as a solution to the energy transition. This has been particularly disheartening for me, because I have been heavily involved in the campaign to stop a nuclear submarine base in Port Kembla. One of the key planks of our campaign has been the defence of the potential green jobs in and around the harbour that would be threatened by the siting of a nuclear submarine base in Port Kembla. The viral growth of anti-wind disinformation online was astounding, and the fact that I have friends and neighbours who have been taken in by it hurts; especially given how hard we have worked to build opposition to the more tangible and realistic threat of a nuclear facility. My sense is that the people who turned out to tilt at windmills in October last year live in a different social universe than the one that sustained the anti-base campaign. We share few points of contact, and our arguments have not reached them.
Local groups like the Good for the Gong Facebook group have tried to fight the disinformation and inject some rational, science-based balance into the debate. Many have contrasted the manageable threat of environmental harm associated with building windmills with the catastrophic impacts climate change is already having on the marine environment. As part of this effort, on Sunday 4 February a Family Fun Day was organised by the Yes 2 Renewables Alliance, a campaign group formed in response to the misinformation campaign.
When I attended this event, I was dismayed by the prominent place occupied by local Labor MPs and their supporters. It is true that locally, these MPs have supported the offshore wind industry. But since coming to office in May 2022, their Federal Labor Government has already approved four new coal mines or expansions, according to the Australia Institute’s Coal Mine Tracker. That is four more mines than we can permit if we are to have any hope of arresting runaway climate change. The party has pulled out all the stops to support continued fracking and gas extraction too. In November Labor pushed through the Environment Protection (Sea Dumping) Amendment. The legislation seems to have been designed to allow gas giant Santos to proceed with its massive Barossa fracking project by facilitating the use of the loopholes Labor built into its Safeguards Mechanism to allow fossil fuel companies to continue to pollute. The legislation will allow the company to claim offsets for its gas project by dumping carbon under the sea at Bayu-Undan in Timor-Leste, using unsafe and unproven ‘carbon capture and storage (CCS)’ technology. While the threat posed by the anti-wind crowd to the renewable energy industry in Wollongong is real, in the struggle to stop runaway climate change, their efforts pale into insignificance when compared with the climate vandalism that Labor Governments and their friends in the fossil fuel industry are carrying out right now.
The outrage politics that the anti-wind campaign has capitalised on has its roots in the widespread anger and frustration many people feel with the political system. Much of this anger is legitimate, and is rooted in a largely correct understanding that our so-called leaders are in thrall to the rich and powerful. The far-right are mobilising this outrage in the service of a dangerous authoritarianism that will only further erode democracy and ultimately benefit the self-same elites they claim to oppose. That is why we cannot allow something as important as the battle to stop climate change to be sabotaged by politicians who preach ‘the art of the possible’. The science of climate change shows that the ALP’s apparently ‘pragmatic’ and ‘centrist’ path of maintaining fossil fuel industry profits is both scientifically impossible and dangerously extreme.
Windy Wollongong needs a just transition, and a renewable energy industry and offshore wind are key to this. But how do we assert democratic control over the transition to ensure that it delivers justice for workers and communities? If we are going to survive the coming period, we are going to need the audacity to demand the impossible. Otherwise, the rising tide of climate chaos and authoritarianism that we are witnessing around the world gives us a pretty good idea of the kind of future that awaits us.