Big Blue Sky

by Peter Garrett

  My view was that the government should take responsibility for this program, but not solely. Everyone seemed to forget that before the scheme there were no mandatory skill requirements in the insulation industry, and no agreements between the states that this was necessary. The states and their safety regulators, the companies involved and their work practices, and individuals exercising care for their workmates all had a role.

  But the notion that in every instance any government can and should be able to prevent bad things from happening set a standard no future government could ever hope to meet. A roads minister could hardly guarantee there wouldn’t be any deaths if people ignored traffic lights. It was a perverse manifestation of the culture of entitlement in overdrive—with Tony Abbott leading the charge.

  I hadn’t sought to apportion blame, despite the scheme originating in the prime minister and treasurer’s offices, and I certainly wasn’t going to make the government’s position any worse by pointing fingers in the middle of the brawl. In the end I took one for the team, because I came into parliament understanding this was what joining a team meant. As the minister with responsibility for the program, it was the right thing to do.

  I held this position right through to the 2013 Royal Commission into the Home Insulation Program that Abbott had instigated once elected. Intended to cause Labor political damage, the inquiry was a waste of public money. Despite having unparalleled access to cabinet documents and government communications (a serious breach of the outgoing government’s cabinet deliberations being off limits), some of which I’d never seen, it had failed to uncover any ‘smoking gun’ in relation to Rudd’s actions. The commission, while critical of the former government, delivered no adverse findings against myself or any other Labor minister, and found that I was not specifically advised of any risk of injury and death before the first fatality occurred. At the same time, the commissioner, Ian Hanger, went so far as to criticise the Abbott government for failing to hand over documents or suggest any possible witnesses, not even bringing forward ‘any evidence of its own volition’. After all the sound and fury the Coalition had generated on this issue, with Liberal senator Simon Birmingham from South Australia at one stage claiming that ‘the greatest threat to the safety of many Australian families’ had been the home-insulation program, the Abbott government provided no additional material for consideration to the $20 million charade it had initiated and funded. Nearly $7 million was redirected by the Attorney-General George Brandis from the Royal Commission on Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.

  Of all my regrets from this period, my assumption that employers and workers would take proper care of those under their charge is the greatest. That and expecting that senior members of the government, especially the prime minister, would back me instead of hanging me out to dry. Individual members of Caucus and the ministry were supportive, but in the initial flurry of controversy many in the leadership team, with the exception of Nicola Roxon and Gary Gray, were silent, and cabinet committee members, other than Julia Gillard, were reluctant to shut down the program, even though it had a fixed spending limit which was fast approaching.

  …

  In the week following the scheme’s closure, Barack Obama announced a large-scale home-insulation program to help American households reduce their energy bills and lower greenhouse gas emissions, and it was reported that Tony Abbott had got lost hooning around in the Northern Territory on a quad runner—he was just having fun.

  I headed down to Ruby Hunter’s funeral in the Riverland of South Australia. Ruby was singer Archie Roach’s partner, and along with Archie had come off the streets to forge a durable music career and inspire a generation of young Aboriginal kids to believe. I sat with the girls from the band Tiddas, Shane Howard and Paul Kelly as we mourned this feisty woman—only just past fifty when she died—and I licked my wounds, only too aware that four young kids for whom I bore some responsibility hadn’t made it.

  Then the drought in Queensland broke, and over Easter a Chinese ship carrying coal ran aground on the Great Barrier Reef. Life was returning to a semblance of surreal normality.

  …

  The first term ended in a flash. Looking back, I can see we managed to sprint through a lot more than people realised. The crisis period that reached a climax at the beginning of 2010 had, ironically, provided cover for a range of other important decisions we could just get on and make.

  The conservation estate was much bigger than when we switched on the lights on day one, and not a single major decision had been overturned—the environment laws worked if a minister was willing to use them. And even the work to construct a set of national environment accounts hobbled along, although the numbers men and women of Treasury continued to resist. The Kimberley region was now subject to a national heritage listing that would supply more reasons for protecting its extraordinary beauty and give the local community a greater stake in its future. And I’d persuaded Western Australian premier Colin Barnett to finally agree to jointly seek World Heritage listing for Ningaloo Reef, which came through a year later.

  We stopped Clive Palmer’s Waratah Coal in its tracks; in one of many micro decisions an important area of cassowary habitat at Mission Beach was now protected for the first time; and Newcastle residents didn’t have an eyesore on their most prominent headland.

  The marine bioregions planning process was well underway, with a declaration of a conservation zone, east of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park, covering nearly a million square kilometres of the Coral Sea, and now a number of marine national parks were ready to go.

  The largest ever roll-out of solar panels at homes and schools had begun, lifting the solar industry to such an extent that it would never look back, transforming the energy landscape right across the country.

  We’d revived the system of grants to community groups that had been stopped under the former government and established a national recycling scheme for televisions and computers.

  A new direction for the arts had been set with healthy budgets—later hacked into by the Coalition. There were artists in schools and suburbs reaching out, exciting the creative instincts of young people, and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists were supported more than ever.

  There was a bundle of other things we got out the door—the unreal business of being an activist in a suit—and I wished I’d had time to do more. I felt I had fallen way short, letting down myself and those around me as we stumbled along. There were times when it felt like I was wading through wet cement and the world was willing failure, but we’d survived. One night I had a strange dream about The Dakota building, where John Lennon was shot and the world stopped in a frozen moment. When I woke up I knew I just had to press on to that wide open road.

  31

  GREAT BIG SINGERS

  MY DEEPEST FEAR was that, in the blink of an eye, 500 million plus years of evolution was coming undone.

  Humanity’s is a supercharged history, one that, when I think about it, is both exhilarating and worrisome. I was elated by the triumphs of the incredible journey so far, distressed about where it might end if we didn’t get our act together.

  The oceans—where life on earth began—had once teemed with fish: the enormous cod migrations through the North Atlantic, the masses of tuna, swordfish and mackerel that swam in cooler waters. There were literally billions of shrimp and krill, and tinier organisms still, all part of a giant food chain that has at its apex the biggest animal that has ever lived: the great blue whale. Traversing whole oceans, covering vast distances, whales create intricate songs to assist their courtships and guide their way.

  Massive, gentle, slow-moving: once handheld spears gave way to the mechanised explosive harpoon, they were all too easy to kill and so were slaughtered in huge numbers. By the late 1970s, a perfect storm of dwindling stock numbers and looming extinctions blackened the horizon. Would one symbol of humanity’s progress be a museum exhibit with the inscription: ‘Here rests the last of th
e greatest sea creatures the world has ever seen’?

  Not yet, as it turned out, for a campaign to halt commercial whaling, begun by Greenpeace and soon joined by other environmental groups, captured people’s imagination and quickly reached a climax.

  Earlier efforts to contain the industrial slaughter of whales had proved ineffective, so an international body—the International Whaling Commission (IWC)—was set up in 1946 to supervise commercial whaling while ‘providing for the proper conservation of whale stocks’. Whaling for the purposes of Indigenous subsistence was also permitted. Over time, most countries with an interest in whaling joined the IWC, and the result of the anti-whaling campaign was a limited moratorium on the commercial killing of whales considered to be in danger of extinction. The moratorium was championed by Australia, where the last whaling station had closed in 1978, and was given effect by the Fraser government in the early 1980s. More and more countries signed up, and the moratorium came into law through the commission in 1986.

  At the same time, IWC members were allowed to establish their own scientific whaling programs, which saw a handful of whales taken for research purposes by some countries, including, at one point, Australia. Over time an uncomfortable truce emerged, with the Japanese instituting a large program of so-called ‘scientific whaling’. They eventually targeted over 800 minke whales and fin whales, and reserved the right to take humpbacks as well. Japan argued that whaling was a cultural practice, but national pride played a part too (no one tells us—a fishing nation that relies on the sea for our livelihood—what to do) and, importantly, the fear that a precedent would be set that might see other ‘fish’ similarly protected.

  And so Japanese ships would steam into the Southern Ocean off the tip of Antarctica—closer to Sydney or Auckland than Tokyo—for the annual whale hunt. There was no real science involved, and the cultural connection between Japanese domestic whaling and hunting down whales in Antarctic waters was non-existent. In any event, scientists can study whales without killing them, as is the case with other animal research. But the membership of the IWC included nations that had little direct connection with whales but backed Japan, which in turn supported them with sweetheart trade arrangements, soft loans and bribes.

  Successive Australian governments, from Fraser’s onwards, had opposed commercial whaling, while holding back on taking additional steps for fear of harming relations with a country that happened to be one of our most important trading partners. Meanwhile, IWC members kept bickering, and during the term of the Howard government, when Malcolm Turnbull was environment minister, the number of whales targeted by the Japanese had doubled.

  By the time the Rudd government was elected in late 2007, the issue was in stalemate. In Opposition, we had strengthened the Labor position, promising to consider taking legal action in the International Court of Justice (ICJ)—something I’d called for in 1994 as president of the ACF—along with sending a vessel to scrutinise the Japanese whalers and collect information for any potential legal case, and also appointing a whaling envoy to ramp up our diplomatic efforts in the IWC.

  Rudd, ever alert to the public mood, was aware that a large majority of Australians consistently opposed whaling, and he was prepared to go further than previous Coalition governments, which had shrieked loudly but done little. Thus, immediately following the election, with Japanese whalers again en route to the killing fields, the decision was taken to dispatch an Australian customs vessel, the Oceanic Viking, to monitor the fleet—a move that would signal to both the Australian public and the Japanese that we were serious. An Australian government aircraft would fly overhead and also relay data back to the mainland. This caused significant disquiet in diplomatic circles, especially considering the closer economic and political trajectory the two countries were on.

  I drove down to Canberra on a blustery day in January 2008 to meet officials in the Australian Customs Service monitoring suite. Here, images uploaded via satellite from the Oceanic Viking, tasked with shadowing the Japanese vessels across the wild reaches of the freezing Southern Ocean, were downloaded, and the exact location and activities of the fleet could be easily tracked. The graphic images confirmed that the operation was all about hunting whales and had nothing to do with science. We had all the evidence needed for a court action. Would the final step to launch a case against one of our most important allies now be taken, and, if so, what were the chances of victory?

  In the meantime, the ground needed to be prepared for a new approach for the IWC. I envisaged the whaling commission as a conservation-focused organisation with the management and conservation of all whales and dolphins (cetaceans) as its primary function. This new template would be informed by non-lethal research and developing policy around whale watching as a legitimate economic activity, as opposed to killing whales for commercial purposes. It was an exciting vision. Senior officials in the environment department were encouraged to bring forward their best thinking as to how we could get it to stick. This was the moment when the new government should do everything possible to turn the issue around.

  Within twelve months, we had launched the inaugural Southern Ocean Research Partnership, a multimillion-dollar initiative, driven by our view that the IWC should move from regulating the whaling industry to being an organisation that ‘stands for the recovery and conservation of global cetaceans’. Australia hosted the world’s first international workshop on non-lethal whale research in Sydney, with a good rollup, especially among Latin American nations.

  The IWC was holding meetings between sessions as officials tried to find a way through the deadlock between anti- and pro-whaling forces, and Australia had lodged a substantial paper outlining what a reformed IWC might look like. At the same time, a proposal had been floated through the US, New Zealand and others that would see Japanese coastal whaling accepted in return for an end to ‘scientific whaling’.

  This was never going to be acceptable to me, although other departments, including the Department of Foreign Affairs, didn’t exclude it as an option. I’d always been clear that a Labor government would never support a return to commercial whaling in any guise, and that we weren’t ruling out the possibility of taking legal action at a later date. Still, I was determined that Australia should stay in the tent—a tactic that led to accusations of compromise by the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society and others—and continue discussions at the next IWC meeting. Our position never changed, but participating in the talks bought us some time in which to gather support from other like-minded countries for the reform package.

  The hardest task was to prevent discussion going off the rails, for the commission was actually closely balanced between anti- and pro-whaling nations, given that any country could join the IWC if it could pay the membership fees—or its fees were met by another member nation, as was suspected in some cases. The efforts of the Japanese in courting small Caribbean states and tiny countries like Nauru ensured they could be relied on to vote with Japan and against our proposals. At this stage, it was all but impossible to garner the three-quarters majority needed to make a change of the magnitude we were proposing. In fact, we would have to strive like fury just to bring a simple majority along with us, so compromised were some countries by their relationship with Japan.

  The situation was further complicated by the fact that two of our allies, the US and New Zealand, were playing a double game. Both nations had always been strong members of the anti-whaling camp, and still were, but they had grown tired of the stand-off and were desperately searching for a means of breaking the stalemate. The Americans were chairing the special working group set up to find a way through, and former New Zealand prime minister Sir Geoffrey Palmer, who’d served as an IWC commissioner and was well respected in whaling circles, bought in with a paper aimed at delivering a short-term solution. The US was pushing an option that would enable Japan to begin coastal whaling, which would have sent a green light to other pro-whaling nations like Russia and South Korea to scale up their o
perations. The compromise variation offered by Palmer provided a ten-year period of limited commercial whaling in the Southern Ocean in return for a cutback in the number of whales targeted by the Japanese. This would have effectively ended the moratorium on commercial whaling that, until now, had held whaling nations at bay.

  I was aghast: it offered far too much for nothing in return, while acquiescing to a position we’d long opposed. The officials in charge of our negotiations agreed. Not surprisingly the chief Japanese negotiator described Palmer’s contribution as ‘a courageous proposal’.

  The omens were not good. A concerted campaign was underway to undercut Australia’s position and convince other countries and NGOs that the compromise proposal was the only sensible option. At one stage, two major environmental organisations, Greenpeace and Pew Charitable Trusts, under immense pressure from the Americans, had expressed qualified support for the proposal. Some of the groups we could usually rely on to stand firm were wavering.

  And so began a period of intensive whaling shuttle diplomacy, with whaling envoy Sandy Hollway, Australia’s whaling commissioner Donna Petrachenko and myself travelling to the far reaches of the globe to push our case.

  The government’s appointment of Hollway, a former senior bureaucrat, as our first Special Envoy for Whaling meant wide coverage was possible in our diplomatic efforts. He was smart and well versed in diplo talk, and kept discussions going as long as needed.

  My office and key officials made sure the line was held internally and with IWC members. I made numerous calls to environment ministers, travelled to Europe and twice visited the US. My first trip, in September 2009, was to communicate Australia’s reasons for rebuffing the compromises and to explain why we were seeking a new course for the IWC. Key US officials, including Under Secretary of State for Civilian Security, Democracy and Human Rights Maria Otero and Lisa P. Jackson, head of the Environmental Protection Authority, listened politely—but they were unmoved. The push-back from the Americans continued unabated. In October they were claiming the IWC was ‘coming unstuck’. By December the new options were described as a ‘normalisation’ of the IWC. We were now entering the familiar Orwellian realm of word warfare I dislike intensely, but it was a sign our opponents were pressing home their campaign.