Geraldine Brooks delivered her first Boyer Lecture yesterday.
In it she said something Bob Brown and the Greens federal politicians should have considered before encouraging Greens to warmly welcome Barack Obama on his visit to Australia:
“When President Obama took office … he made a speech that promised his inauguration would mark the day ‘the rise of the oceans starts to slow and the planet begins to heal’. If only. Of all the disappointments of the past three years, highest on my personal list is Barack Obama’s silence — his failure to use his gifts of eloquence to explain our predicament and the necessity for urgent action. Instead, Obama greenlights Shell’s drilling in the Arctic, even as the toxins from BP’s blown-out well swirl in the Gulf of Mexico. He fails to act against a tar sands pipeline that would run from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico and that has been described as the fuse on a carbon bomb.”
