On Tuesday 6 May, Gomeroi people led a 150-strong crowd of trade unionists and climate activists on a march from the NSW Supreme Court to Parliament House.
The protest took place ahead of a decision by the Native Title Tribunal on whether resource giant Santos can establish a massive coal seam gas field in the Pilliga forest.
The Pilliga is a biodiversity hotspot in north-western NSW with huge cultural significance for Gomeroi people. Gomeroi have fought against coal seam gas for more than two decades and overwhelmingly rejected Santos’s project at Native Title meetings.
The Native Title Tribunal almost always rules in favour of resource companies seeking permission to over-ride the rights of Aboriginal people. The decision is expected any day as Solidarity goes to print.
Disgracefully, both the federal and NSW Labor governments support the gas field, providing evidence and submissions for Santos’s case in the Tribunal.
Hypocrisy
In his victory speech on election night, Anthony Albanese told the cheering crowd he “acknowledged the traditional owners of the land, their elders past and present, today and every day”, promising “we will be a government that supports reconciliation with First Nations people”.
This was a pointed response to Peter Dutton’s racist attacks on Welcome to Country.
Albanese also promised to govern “for every Australian who knows climate change is a challenge”.
But as Suellyn Tighe, a Gomeroi woman from Coonabarabran who travelled to Sydney for the protest, told Solidarity: “Albanese’s words are empty. Our elders in Coonabarabran are staunch, they are in their 80s and when Santos came to town for meetings they sat there in the sun for hours as part of a non-engagement protest.
“Elders of the Gomeroi nation don’t want these fossil fuel companies on our country. So where is Albanese’s actual respect for our elders? He needs to actually listen to them. We want climate action, we don’t want talk”.
Federal Labor is also backing Santos’s massive Barossa offshore gas development north of Darwin, despite consistent objections from Traditional Owners trying to protect their sea country from destruction.
The Barossa project was granted final federal approval in April and is set to start production later this year.
Therese Wokai Bourke, a senior Tiwi elder from the Malawu clan said in reaction to the approval: “I feel devastated by this decision. I can’t understand how the government can ignore what this gas project will to do our planet. It’s like they don’t care at all.”
Safeguarding fossil fuels
Despite his rhetoric on climate, Albanese’s first term failed to deliver any reduction in Australia’s domestic greenhouse gas emissions. Exports of fossil fuels increased.
Labor refuses to regulate to stop new coal and gas projects. Instead, their emissions reduction strategy relies on the “Safeguard Mechanism”, passed into law in April 2023.
This scheme is a scam. Instead of reducing emissions, fossil companies and other major emitters can buy credits to meet their meagre obligations.
Many of these credits are carbon offsets based on vegetation growth—but this will do nothing to stop the global warming caused by burning fossil fuels.
Disgracefully, after initially criticising the scheme for being based on carbon credits, the Greens voted for the Safeguard Mechanism.
Then Greens leader Adam Bandt tried to convince supporters that the party had used its position on the cross-bench to secure meaningful amendments to the laws.
He told the media after his deal with Labor, in March 2023: “Coal and gas have taken a huge hit … pollution will actually go down and we’ve derailed the Beetaloo and Barossa gas fields.”
Now Barossa is steaming ahead and it’s Bandt who has been derailed.
According to climate analyst Ketan Joshi, while renewable energy expanded under Albanese’s government in the first half of its last term, it then stalled.
“Renewables are about 39 per cent of the Australian main grid but the modelling that Labor relied on before they were last elected assumed it would reach 50 per cent. So that’s a really significant slow-down,” he said in a pre-election video.
Making any progress for Aboriginal rights and climate action will require a serious fight outside parliament.
Gomeroi people and supporters have shown the way, working hard to build support in the union movement, with strong contingents from the ETU, Teachers Fed, Nurses and Midwives Federation and other unions at the 6 May rally and speeches from union leaders.
We need to prepare to confront Santos’s Pilliga project on the ground, regardless of what the Native Title Tribunal decides, and build a force that can stop all new fossil fuels and force Labor to urgently invest in publicly owned renewable energy.
By Paddy Gibson
