Thanks to all of you who came and joined Sunday’s awesome “Farmers against Fracking” rally!

If you missed out (do not fear, there will be plenty more opportunities to be part of the campaign!), here’s the low-down of what happened – hundreds of farmers and locals from Gippsland and rural Victoria descended on Melbourne, joining their city supporters to march the streets. Colour, costume, chanting and tunes were a-plenty as the protesters, led by the Riff Raff Radical marching band, passionately paraded, demanding a total ban on all new coal and unconventional gas projects in Victoria. MC Rod Quantock kicked things off at the State Library before speeches from Gippsland locals, including beef farmer Tanya Brown and Seaspray primary school teacher Kirra Boulton. Check out the photos from the day here.

A 10,000 signature petition was then presented to Greg Barber MLC, who is tabling it in Parliament today. We got some great media coverage on ABC and Channel 7 news, multiple radio stations, ABC online and importantly inlocal Gippsland media! In fact, our voices were even too loud for Energy and Resources Minister, Nick Kotsiras, to ignore. In response to the rally, he promised he would undertake extensive community consultations before making a decision on lifting the current moratorium on fracking in Victoria. This means that the moratorium may remain in place for months to come, giving us a crucial window to build mass awareness, momentum and pressure both in the city and in regional Victoria.

The fight is far from won. If Government and industry have their way, our beautiful Victorian countryside will no longer be. NOW is the time to GET INVOLVED and help us say goodbye to dirty fossil fuels forever! You can also make a contribution to the campaign and help us continue the fight against the expansion of the coal and gas industries in Victoria. All donations over $2 are tax deductible.

Sunday marked a massive step forward for the growing Australia-wide movement against the expansion of coal and gas mining. It brought the issue close to home for city dwellers, raising awareness that this is not just an issue affecting locals who live close to mine sites, but that techniques like fracking pose great risk of contaminating Melbourne’s water and food supply, not to mention the broader impacts that coal and gas mining have on climate change.

We thank you for your continuing support and look forward to fighting alongside you for a cleaner, healthier future for all Victorians.

by Noah Beecher Kelk

When the carbon tax was rolled out there was a lot of noise from everyone. Labor and the Greens were saying they’d saved the world while the Liberal-Nationals were complaining about their profit margins.

In reality, the carbon tax did very little. It’s a complicated system – some companies pollute less than they’re allowed and then sell that un-pollution to other companies who pollute more than they’re allowed. But now Rudd is going to get rid of it and replace it with an Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), an even more complicated system involving Europe that will be even less effective. The tax was set at $24/tonne of CO2 emissions and produced very little change. The new price will be around $6/tonne – a quarter as effective or four times more pointless!

It’s possible that the ETS will become more effective as the international price changes. The World Wildlife Fund Australia thinks the low European price is a temporary issue. But it seems to me that the really interesting part about the shift to the ETS isn’t the change in the actual price on carbon. It’s how the Rudd government has decided to make up for the budget shortfall that the new, lower price has brought.

Treasurer Chris Bowen has said he will save $3.9 billion with cuts to several areas, most of them climate-related. The Biodiversity Fund pays for reforestation, spreading of endangered species, and management of complex ecosystems. It has lost $213 million over the next few years. The Clean Technology Fund has lost $162 million which would have gone towards businesses that are trying to improve their carbon footprint. Both of these losses are bad, and should be condemned. But for once the Labor government has done something sensible and cut $700 million away from fossil fuel subsidies.

This is a big step for the Labor government. Last year they handed out $2 billion to mining companies to pay for petrol and another $8 billion to other big polluters. The Paid to Pollute campaign has clearly been successful and QuitCoal Melbourne is proud to have been a part of it.

If you look at the numbers, Labor has only cut about 1/15th of the subsidies to big polluters. However it is clear that the government has tried to cut expenditure that is counter-productive to a carbon tax. The biggest cut made to pay for the ETS is $1.8 billion taken from the Fringe Benefits Tax (FBT) which is a salary-sacrificing arrangement that allows people to buy cars on the government’s budget as a work expense.

While there is some debate about whether the FBT is used or misused, it is clear that this is a strong move away from the government’s close relationship with the automotive/petrol industry. With a peak oil situation looming ever closer, it’s likely that a car-based transportation network will be forced to shut down as the world runs out of petrol to power them. The government’s move to stop or at least slow the money pouring into a dangerous and unviable industry is a sensible one.

Ending fossil fuel subsidies; ending car-oriented planning; renewable energy targets; these are the sorts of government policies that are necessary for Australia to responsibly monitor our output of pollution. A carbon tax or trading scheme will make little difference while the government is shoving massive chunks of their revenue into the pockets of coal and gas corporations.

by Ursula Alquier
Gippsland Local, Quit Coal Campaigner  & Coordinator Lock the Gate Victoria

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For over eighteen months now Quit Coal has been supporting communities across Gippsland – helping them build resilient community groups and a regional alliance ready to Lock the Gate against the coal and unconventional gas industries.

RIGHT NOW the Victorian Government is preparing to lift the current moratorium on fracking. In the next few months, the coal and unconventional gas industries intend to turn Gippsland into a coal and gas field.

Gippsland is an agricultural hub for Victoria, producing $1.3 billion worth of food each year and houses a huge number of thriving regional communities. It is also an area rich in natural beauty and biodiversity and with pristine beaches, lakes and mountains, it is a popular tourist destination.

Yet despite all this, the Victorian Government has granted mining exploration licences to the coal and unconventional gas industries that cover over 80% of the region.

Local farmers, landowners, and residents have told us they are extremely concerned about their health and the future of their communities.

An explosion of coal and gas mining in Gippsland, means mass industrialisation, huge risks to human and animal health, the chance of surface waterways becoming polluted, groundwater being contaminated and a lowering of the water table.

But most of all it poses a great threat to their livelihoods – their farms, their businesses and their communities.

It’s important that we show these destructive industries that they have no social licence to operate in Gippsland - that while the government might grant them a licence to dig up Gippsland, local communities are strongly opposed to what they are doing.

Since Quit Coal began organising in Gippsland over eighteen months ago, we’ve seen the town of Poowong declare itself Victoria’s first ‘coal seam gas free community’.

We’ve seen the Mirboo North community collect almost 10,000 signatures calling for a moratorium on all coal and unconventional gas mining until it can be scientifically proven safe.

We’ve seen the Seaspray community organise into a force to be reckoned with since Gina Rinehart’s, Lakes Oil began testing their gas wells in May.

And we’ve seen a huge number of other Gippsland communities including Inverloch, Leongatha, Kongwak, Wattle Bank, Yarragon South, Allambee, Newry, Maffra, Sale, Longford, The Honeysuckles, Harmers Haven, Boolarra, Koo Wee Rup, Bayles, Drouin, Darnum, Toongabbie, Foster and Bena begin organising to join the fight against coal and gas.

We know the damage these industries can wreak on the environment, on ecosystems, on animals and on humans both internationally and on our own shores in New South Wales and Queensland.

We also know how effective the Lock the Gate community movement can be, with both Dart Energy and Metgasco, two huge mining companies, suspending their operations in the Hunter Valley and the Northern Rivers region of NSW after a prolonged, organised and intense community backlash and the resulting changes to government regulation.

With the moratorium about to lift, it is more important now than ever, that together with these communities, we protect Victoria from the devastating effects of coal and unconventional gas mining.

As Quit Coal supporters, we already know that you care about protecting Victoria from coal and unconventional gas mining. Without your support we wouldn’t be able to keep doing what we’re doing.

This weekend is your last chance to make a tax-deductible donation before the end of the financial year.

DONATE to Quit Coal and help us support Gippsland communities protecting their health, their farms, and their livelihoods from the devastating effects of coal and unconventional gas mining.

by Noah Beecher Kelk

No matter how you felt about Gillard, or the circumstances surrounding her exit from political life, we have to work with what we’ve got. While our first female prime minister made great strides with the National Disability Insurance Scheme and implementing the carbon tax, the change in leadership is an opportunity for the Australian public to reinvigorate discussion around some of the important issues that were either ignored or dealt with poorly during her term.

In 2007, Rudd said that “climate change is the great moral challenge of our generation”. In fact, it was the great moral challenge of the 80s, and they failed to rise to it. Instead, what rose were global temperatures, sea levels due to unprecedented Arctic ice melts, and the tolerance for climate change deniers. Climate change is an urgent issue and Kevin Rudd is in an ideal position to take urgent action.

What does Rudd need to do to save the world? He needs to retain the carbon tax, despite the rising pressure from the media to scrap it. He needs to shut down coal mining across Australia, because coal accounts for nearly half of Australia’s carbon emissions. Moreover, more than half of Australian coal is exported, which means that the Australian coal industry is responsible for more than 100% of Australia’s emissions.

Kevin Rudd must commit, before the election and after it, to making the fight against climate change a key priority and a key Labor platform. With many of the Nationals, the independent MPs, and the Greens opposed to unconventional gas mining (like coal seam gas and tight gas mining), Labor is threatened from all sides of politics by their wishy-washy support for clean energy policies. With ministers like Kelvin Thompson presenting themselves as strongly committed to fighting climate change, it just doesn’t make sense that Labor has implemented destructive and counterproductive policies and laws.

What is Labor currently doing wrong? To start with, they donate 32 cents per litre of petrol to mining companies. Thirty-two cents per litre! Compare that with the four cents you get from a supermarket receipt. BHP, Shell, Lakes Oil, and many other carbon-intensive and destructive fossil fuel companies are being paid to pollute. If we want any chance at preventing global temperatures rising above a dangerous level, it is imperative that the government stops funding the world’s worst climate criminals. This funding has continued despite the complete flop that was the mining super-tax; even as the mining companies showed a total lack of respect for the Australian people, the Gillard government continued to directly fund their destruction of the Australian land. The Rudd government must do better.

The Rudd government also needs to fight against ridiculous state windfarm laws. There is a massive lobby against windfarms claiming that they cause ‘vibroacoustic disease’ – a fictional condition which is ‘based on the study of just one person, a young boy whose only symptom was having difficulties at school’. As a result, Victoria and NSW have laws that give individuals power of veto against windfarms within 2 km of their home, which has crippled the renewable power industry in Australia and made it practically impossible to seriously attempt to move away from fossil fuels.

It’s insane that these laws are in place while residents have no legal recourse to prevent unconventional gas fields being built literally on top of their farms, when the unconventional gas mining techniques have been repeatedly shown to ruin important agricultural land, deplete and pollute waterways, and threaten endangered species. The same is true of residents near coal mines, who are drastically more likely to suffer kidney, heart, and lung disease but who have no power whatsoever to stop these deadly mines from injuring their families.

Mr Rudd – it’s time for Labor to step up their fight against climate change. We are barely years away from seeing irrevocable damage to the world and Rudd has a second chance to do some good. The government has an obligation to the people of Australia to rectify the injustices that allow the rich and powerful to hurt communities and the climate for their own personal gain.