RUTHFULLY YOURS

The anti-nuclear movement had everything going for it, from copious funding and the support of international NGOs to sympathetic press coverage and parliamentary supporters. Yet its crusade petered out, laid low by bogus science and ardent, absolutist ratbaggery.
Australia’s environmental warriors have failed in their campaigns over the past 40 years to stop the Australia’s uranium mining industry. In the past decade in particular, the anti-uranium movement has suffered devastating defeats, as uranium mining has expanded with bi-partisan support from Labor and conservative parties. It’s instructive to analyse why.

The anti-uranium movement operated on a permanent basis through the nation’s foremost environmental organisations and hundreds of other smaller organisations. It had access to considerable financial resources[1], to sympathetic media and to Commonwealth and state parliamentary sympathisers. It was gifted three nuclear accidents as a platform for its advocacy.

Given these propitious circumstances, how did the movement fail so completely to impede the development of Australia’s nuclear industry? What accounts for this monumental failure of policy, strategy and tactics? First, let’s look at the past decade’s landmark political decisions in support of uranium. The process began with the Howard Coalition government, and the ALP followed suit.

The centre-left Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, endorsed uranium mining and exports ten days after Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant was destroyed by a tsunami
Eight months later, Ms Gillard announced her government would export uranium to India, a non-signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, contrary to ALP policy. Shortly after, the policy fell humbly into line with her decision
Four uranium projects were approved under mainstream environmental laws, despite the close involvement of the anti-uranium movement in the assessment process
In 2016, South Australia’s centre-left government began to implement a Royal Commission report that endorsed SA as a suitable place for a global nuclear waste repository.

The anti-uranium movement emerged in the early 1970s to protest French nuclear testing in the Pacific. The movement next turned its attention to domestic uranium mining, using the Fraser government’s decision to permit mining at Ranger as a focus for activism. By the end of the 1970s, an anti-uranium strategy had emerged: frame uranium as a class-based issue and connect it with a broader political assault on the capitalist status quo; establish many small, local opposition groups; coordinate their activities; frame the movement as large, vigorous and publicly-supported; focus on emotions, especially fear; and target traditional land owners as a key point of resistance to mining.

However, even as insiders conceded at the time, ‘the ’70s movement did not fundamentally threaten Australia’s nuclear industry’.[2] The movement declined during the 1980s. The rise and decline of the Nuclear Disarmament Party paved the way for the co-option of the anti-uranium movement by the Labor Party[3]. The movement then declined even more rapidly, and uranium economics became much more important in shaping uranium development.

By the mid-1980s, anti-uranium activism tried a more mainstream advocacy strategy of influencing public opinion.[4] By the late-1990s, the movement’s strategy had become, by default, ‘isolated campaigning’.[5] While some environmental NGOs continued to fund full-time ‘anti-nuclear campaigners’, isolated campaigning has become the norm.

Why did it fail? A first clue is found in this history. The policy, strategy and tactics of the movement were shaped by Marxist ideological[6] beliefs. This never appealed to a mainstream Australian audience, which is more interested in workable solutions for real problems. The anti-uranium movement also faced the global failure of its founding ideology: in the 1980s, the Cold War ended and Soviet communism collapsed.

The ideological failure of the anti-uranium movement was accompanied by a long series of startling policy, strategy and tactical errors, particularly in making claims that had no credibility. For example, anti-nuclear crusader Helen Caldicott once claimed[7] a Howard/Bush conspiracy, involving the owners of the Alice Springs-to-Darwin railway, to store America’s nuclear waste at Muckaty Station, once proposed as the Federal government’s low-level nuclear waste site. This vast claim was based on the small fact that a subsidiary of Halliburton, a company with which former US vice-president Dick Cheney was once associated, was one of the handful of companies in a joint venture, to operate the rail road. There are many examples of this kind, and they illustrate the weakness of the anti-uranium movement’s advocacy: policy makers won’t take you seriously if you prosecute your case with selective facts, used out of context and without perspective.

With an enthusiastic call for “sustainable urban development,” the United Nations has adopted a far-reaching document intended as a blueprint for the future of cities around the world. Described by the UN as an “inclusive, action-oriented, and concise document,” the “New Urban Agenda” (NUA) was approved on Oct. 21, the final day of the UN’s Habitat III conference in Quito, Ecuador.

The NUA, the UN proclaims, “will guide the next twenty years of sustainable and transformative urban development worldwide.” “It is a vision,” the UN explains, “of pluralistic, sustainable, disaster-resilient societies that foster green economic growth.” The centerpiece of the NUA is the promotion of “compact cities,” in which people will have little choice but to live in densely populated, high-rise buildings in order to lower their impact on the environment.

According to UN figures, some 30,000 people attended Habitat III, 10,000 of whom were international visitors, representing 167 countries.

New Urban Agenda

In keeping with long-standing UN tradition, the Habitat III conference was convened to address a “crisis.” This one involves the problems facing cities. They are said to require “urgent action.” And who better than the United Nations, aided by a coterie of self-described “urban exports” and “stakeholders” could provide the top-down solutions that will make the world’s cities a better place to live in the decades to come? Among the commitments contained in the New Urban Agenda are:

Ensure environmental sustainability, by promoting clean energy and sustainable use of land and resources in urban development; by protecting ecosystems and biodiversity, including adopting healthy lifestyles in harmony with nature; by promoting sustainable consumption and production patterns; by building urban resilience, by reducing disaster risks; and by mitigating and adapting to climate change.

And:

Readdress the way we plan, finance, develop, govern, and manage cities and human settlements, recognizing sustainable urban and territorial development as essential to the achievement of sustainable development and prosperity for all.

It is one of the stock hypocrisies of United Nations climate careerists, that while deploring carbon-emitting travel by everyone else, they have turned the UN into a prodigious generator of long, lavish and frequent “climate-change” conferences, held in enticing or exotic locales worldwide — in places such as Bali, Rio, Cancun and Paris.

From around the globe, participants board airliners (many of their tickets subsidized by your tax dollars) and carbon-emit their way to the next jamboree. From these grand climate shindigs, UN officials emerge to promise that if we’ll just trust them to allocate a couple of things of ever-expanding scope — for instance, the wealth of the developed world and the energy flows of the planet — they will aim over the next century or so to fine-tune the temperature of the earth to within a few decimal points of where it was on Al Gore’s 60th birthday…or something like that.

It’s the kind of performance that needs a skeptical eye, and full access by an independent press. It should be cause for great alarm when the conference authorities start walling out any reporters they suspect might dissent from UN climate doctrine.

Which is exactly what’s going on. Next month, from Nov. 7-18, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is planning a huge conference in Marrakesh, Morocco. The UNFCCC has approved press passes for some 3,000 journalists who wish to cover this event.

But it seems that dissenters from UN dogma need not apply. The UNFCCC has refused accreditation to a Canadian media outlet, The Rebel Media, home to The Ezra Levant Show (full disclosure: I have been an occasional guest on this show, discussing topics including the UN).