Has the green movement, at last, no shame? Is there no sordid level to which it will not stoop? Not content with years of civil disobedience and protest marches and placard waving, now we learn from The Australian Financial Review (via front page coverage) and The Australian today of the worst yet: there’s a funding proposal for a strategy to use the law and democracy to try to thwart large-scale coal investment.
A Greenpeace-co-ordinated strategy, if funded, would use the courts, law reform and community activism to try to legally halt vast new coal mining projects that would add substantially to Australia’s greenhouse emission exports in coming decades. It would aim to capitalise on the deep unease felt by the community, particularly in regional areas, in relation to coal seam gas processes and the destruction of farmland and water resources by mining.
In addition to breathless shock-horror reports, The Fin‘s Matthew Stevens was given nearly a full page to lament this savage assault on capitalism, or “economic vandalism” as Rio Tinto called it. As usual, there was no disclosure from Stevens of his own connection to BHP (his wife is the company’s corporate spinner).
“The interesting thing is the timing,” Greenpeace’s senior campaigner John Hepburn told Crikey. “They have clearly had the document for some time … We think it was dumped today because UNESCO is arriving today and we have been having such a strong run with our report on the impacts of the coal boom on the Great Barrier Reef.”
As we know, the business community would never resort to the courts, and no company would ever resort to vexatious litigation with the intent of disrupting a competitor’s plans through endless legal manouevring. Nor has any company ever tried to silence environmental critics by suing them in the hope that they would be unable to afford the legal costs of defending an action. Nor have any of Australia’s biggest companies ever engaged in astroturfing to fake community opposition to a competitor.
And we know companies never seek to influence legislation and regulation in their own favour. And most of all, we know mining companies would never seek to entirely circumvent the policy process by running a misleading $100 million advertising campaign.
Although there are the occasional examples otherwise. Like Apple’s global campaign of litigation against Samsung to prevent the sale of the company’s tablets. Or Nine dragging ICE TV all the way to the High Court to disrupt its business model of providing consumers with television programming information. Or the recent efforts by sports rights holders to shut down Optus’s TV Now service.
And then there was Gunn’s 2006 attempt to silence criticism of the company by suing 20 people, including Bob Brown and Tasmanian Greens leader Peg Putt, and the Wilderness Society. Or Fortescue’s lawyers attempting to shut down online criticism of the company by demanding the removal of an embarrassing video last year. Or even, after its TV Now victory, Optus’s own attempts to stop Andrew Demetriou from criticising them.
Or there’s the examples of astroturfing that regularly spring from public relations consultants’ briefs to major corporate clients: Westfield’s famous ”North Strathfield Residents’ Action Group”, or, more recently, the front groups opposed to the carbon pricing package or plain packaging for cigarettes.
In fact if you didn’t know any better, you’d swear strategic litigation, use of legal processes to silence criticism and astroturfing were standard business practices in Australia.
Strange how that was omitted by The Fin and The Oz.
14 thoughts on “When one person’s vandalism is another’s sound corporate practice”
Cleaver
March 6, 2012 at 2:11 pmStevens is a BHP mouthpiece, has been for years and is married to one of their PRs. His boss is so pathetically obsessed with the ideological war he used to help run at the Oz that he’s willing to put page 18 briefs all over page one and elsewhere. It’s pathetic.
Coaltopia
March 6, 2012 at 2:21 pmFirst they ignore you, then they SLAPP you, then they orchestrate a propaganda campaign in both major newspapers you, then they demand politicians line-up to ridicule you, then they probably label you terrorists, then they fight you, then, much later, you might win a pyrrhic victory.
klewso
March 6, 2012 at 2:28 pmBut it’s different when the hose is turned back on the big money establishment –
what good is all that power if the little people can get at it too?
wade peter
March 6, 2012 at 8:57 pmYes spoilt brats will want to take their ball home. Diddums . Not sure about the alluded insincere motivation though. Surely the good guys playing by the rules is ok?
Sancho
March 6, 2012 at 11:07 pmI may be wrong, but Bernard seems to be using sarcasm somewhere in there.
Jones Rob
March 7, 2012 at 11:48 amGlorp
Merve
March 7, 2012 at 12:00 pmIt can be quite entertaining watching the legal stoushes the rich have with each other..
The mum and the kids, or the neighbours moving fences, or removing trees.
The swimming pools built illegally on public land.
AR
March 7, 2012 at 1:30 pmStrange daze indeed when the wrong people avail themselves of the Law. And only for the common weal! Where’s the profit in that?
Edward James
March 7, 2012 at 3:13 pmWTF is astroturfing? Please explain! Edward James
Stevo the Working Twistie
March 7, 2012 at 3:30 pm“Astroturfing” is a cute name for the practice of artificially creating a “grass roots” movement for or against something. A recent example was Big Tobacco’s campaign against plain packaging. It was supposed to look like a spontaneous revolt by “mum and dad” retailers, complete with a phony front organisation, but was very obviously underwritten by BAT, Phillip Morris et al.
And somehow these people still manage to sleep at night.