by Cheryl Adam
In the early years of the twenty-first century, investigative journalism began to flounder following the decline of the traditional media industry and the rise of the blogosphere, which was wrestling ‘news’ from traditional mainstream sources. 9/11 in 2001 was seen as a pivotal turning point as bloggers were said to be the first purveyors of news of the burning towers in New York while the US mainstream media struggled to deal with the enormity of the event on its home turf. No one back then had heard of ‘fake news’ – never mind considered that it might be something that sells on social media and would become a hot commodity. This evolution in news gathering became a focus of my research as an academic.
Julia Bartrim,53 one of my Masters students at JCU who had enrolled in the investigative journalism subject, had researched the coal gasification debacle at Chinchilla about 300 kms west of Brisbane, the same area as the Linc Energy project. She canvassed the issues of the other major coal seam gas extraction projects and their effect on the Great Artesian Basin citing Dr Brian Smerdon, a Great Artesian Basin research scientist at the CSIRO, who told her: “The basin is also responding to geological timeframe changes … it is still responding to changes [from] 50–100 million years ago, it is constantly evolving, it is undergoing changes now that are not even related to us.”
She noted that, at the time, more than 30,000 gas wells were planned for the Surat Basin alone and also, that not enough research had been done on the effects of the CSG extraction. Bartrim wrote that much of the extraction had been approved by the Queensland Government “prior to the completion of rigorous scientific analysis of baseline levels of water quality and pressure within potentially affected areas.”
Julia Bartrim’s story described how one of these coal gasification companies wooed the locals promising the world. “It’s a dirty business,” one local had told her. “They start out sponsoring the local footy BBQ. On the surface they seem to be doing a lot of good.” It was the kind of tactic I witnessed Adani employing following its government approvals to build the Carmichael mine, as the company infiltrated local communities in Townsville, Bowen and Collinsville. Sponsoring the odd community event is the cheapest way to garner support for their dirty missions and pretend the company cares.
There is no doubt that investigative journalism is now harder to fund. At least encouraging students like Bartrim, who had the time to investigate major topics under the auspices of their university research, helped focus on issues often too time consuming to investigate for the mainstream media.
My books too, six of which were written in the true crime genre, have always followed my mantra to expose the truth. The most recent focused on tracking down those responsible for the murder of Daniel Morcombe, a 13-year-old boy who had been missing for almost a decade. The book was written with Daniel’s parents, Bruce and Denise Morcombe.
Only two weeks earlier in March 2017, on a whim, I had agreed to take part in this journey to India, organised and funded by the Australian Marine Conservation Foundation (AMCF) whose patron is the illustrious writer, Tim Winton. Imogen Zethoven is the Great Barrier Reef Campaign Director for the AMCF, a powerful, environmental campaigner who has fronted many an environmental baddie over the years. She has saved sharks in the Coral Sea and worked for the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) in Berlin. With startling blue eyes, she has an uncanny ability to ask just the right candid but well-informed questions demanding answers from some of the heavyweights in this global debate on climate change. Zethoven has been working on the Great Barrier Reef for more than 25 years.
In that time, she says she has seen its dramatic decline. “I first dived in 1980 when it was a beautiful ecosystem full of abundant coral,” she tells me, adding: “It’s become an entirely different ecosystem. I’ve now dedicated my life to trying to stop its destruction … Over 12 months the one thing that’s risen to the top is the Adani mine. We have to stop it.”
Having heard of the Queensland Premier’s trip to India, the idea was to find individuals whose occupations would be affected by the proposed Adani mine so that they could offer a different take on the facts and figures presented to the Australian public. The occupations included a ‘farmer’, a ‘tourism operator’ and a ‘businessman’ as well as an Indigenous person to fly to India to counteract the government rhetoric and provide an alternative viewpoint to the proposed Adani coal mine. Unfortunately, in the short two-week preparation for the trip, it had proved too difficult to find an Indigenous representative.
Tourism operators are difficult to find for obvious reasons. To proclaim the Great Barrier Reef is under threat of extinction is commercial suicide. Make hay while the sun shines – that is as long as the sun’s rays are not trapped for too long in the ocean, which will permanently bleach the coral. Denial means life can continue. Truth can be ignored in much the same way a patient refuses to visit their doctor to find out whether a darkening mole is a melanoma.
Will my view make a difference? I like the absurdity of this trip. To mimic the alacrity of the politicians, jump on board a flight and head to India. This story is unfolding in an almost comic strip narrative. Truth, after all, is stranger than fiction. More than that, though, this journey is one fuelled by desperation – to try to get the world – especially those making these irrevocable catastrophic decisions in a vacuum – namely our politicians – to notice.
But I have personal reasons, too. For almost 13 years, I have owned, along with my husband, Grant Lewis, a 62-foot Gloucester schooner, a bluenose replica once commonly used as Grand Banks fishing boats that take tourists, primarily from Europe, the USA and Australia, to snorkel on the fringing reef off the Whitsundays, and to stroll on one of the most photographed beaches in the world: the silicate sands of Whitehaven Beach.
Our introduction to what was to become our family heirloom, Providence V, began in March 2003 on our honeymoon. Back then, a Tasmanian neighbour had described his recent holiday in the Whitsundays in North Queensland as “one of the best weeks of my life.” Honeymoons should be about superlatives, surely. Ours was as spectacular as the neighbour had predicted. Diving off the deck of a 38-ft bareboat yacht, I was stunned at the magical world below revealed through my facemask: a hidden parallel universe waiting to be discovered. Each bay offered its own magnificence as though to upstage the one we’d just snorkelled. We saw stingrays and the comical Maori Wrasse with its humpy head and thick lips. More than once we saw dolphins and, of course, the ubiquitous green turtle that would ponderously flap past, rotating eyes beckoning me to follow. Fifteen years later, the photograph of us beaming from the back deck of the chartered yacht is on my bedside table. My love affair with the Great Barrier Reef, the only living organism to be seen from outer space, began the year we got married.
In May 2005, we embraced a sea change. We drove the family with two dogs (we have five kids between us) in our old Land Rover Discovery from Tasmania to North Queensland. Our luggage perilously perched on the roof, I exchanged my icy 40-degrees south homeland, after a decade in Tasmania, for the tropical temperatures of North Queensland. We watched the soil turn red as we drove north and the buildings drop away. Gazing at the land that fell to our west, we marvelled that we could travel for days without seeing the ocean. The vastness of this country swallowed us up.
Over the next decade, we established a tourism business: day and sunset sails from Magnetic Island. Our brochures proclaimed snorkelling on “magnificent fringing reef.” Back then we couldn’t have been accused of false advertising. But in 2015, ten years later, just before we left the island, I snorkelled in Florence Bay on the southern side of the island for the first time in several years. After corrective eye surgery I could finally snorkel without glasses. I was devastated by the difference I saw.
The colour in the coral had been drained from years of dredging. Cleveland Bay lies between Magnetic Island and the city of Townsville and the port stretches out from the city towards the island. Townsville, the largest urban centre in North Queensland and the unofficial ca
pital, was founded in 1864 as a port for the fledgling pastoral industry in North Queensland and is the country’s largest sugar, zinc, lead, copper and fertiliser port.
I learned later that the zooxanthellae, the algae that produces the colours in the coral, are susceptible to increased sediment as they rely on light to survive. Unable to withstand the onslaught of humans and the expansion of the Port of Townsville, the coral, and its dependent creatures, seemed to have given up dazzling. What was once a palette of vibrant colours appeared to be a drab muddy green. Before corals bleach, they are often a deep brown or khaki-green colour. We had tried to explain to our guests what was happening as they returned from snorkelling below: global warming, port expansions, dredging, pesticide run off … all man-made disasters. They would look back at us in horror. How was this happening, they asked? Australia, after all, pedalled images of pristine wilderness like the Daintree and deserts with icons like Uluru. That’s why they were here. The Great Barrier Reef had pride of place in their hearts. Surely Australia felt the same and always put the environment first?
In June 2012, a report by UNESCO54 delivered startling news. A joint World Heritage Centre/International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) reactive monitoring mission had undertaken a tour of the reef between 6 and 14 March 2012. The Report stated that the Committee was concerned about proposed coastal and port development up and down the eastern Australian seabed and how much impact it would have on the Outstanding Universal Value of the Great Barrier Reef. It said the reef was “one of the richest and most complex natural ecosystems on earth, and one of the most significant for biodiversity conservation.” The Great Barrier Reef, listed in 1981, is one of 19 World Heritage sites in Australia and has the world’s largest collection of coral reefs. The Report stated all of this development might place the reef’s World Heritage listing in danger.
I was strangely relieved that our reputation as custodians of the world’s largest living organism was in doubt. Finally, someone had caught us in the act. Now something might be done about it.
Industrial port construction, along the eastern seaboard, has been, and continues to play, a major role in the demise of the Great Barrier Reef. It was a similar story, we were to find, in India and with a similar timeframe. Perhaps the worst example in Australia is the Port of Gladstone, the largest bulk commodity port in Queensland and the sixth largest in Australia which services a range of industries including agriculture, coal, bauxite and liquefied natural gas (LNG).
The UNESCO mission’s Report strongly recommended an independent review of all environmental concerns of approved developments in Gladstone Harbour and Curtis Island. The area below the low water mark is within the Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Area (GBRWHA). In 2010 and 2011, the approval of three multi-billion dollar LNG processing facilities on Curtis Island attracted international news with the World Heritage Committee expressing “extreme concern” that permission had been granted for the construction of the processing and port facilities.
One of the mission’s recommendations was to “adopt the highest level of precaution in decision-making regarding development proposals with potential to impact the [reef] and to prevent any approval of major projects that may compromise its long-term sustainable development.” Interestingly, Julia Bartrim’s article, written in 2012, had discussed how the gas from the Surat Basin, which overlaps the Bowen Basin, would connect to the LNG export facilities at Gladstone. She had emphasised the experimental nature of these industries commenting that the three CSG projects in the Surat Basin “are the first of their kind in the world as never before have onshore gas resources been used as the primary supplier for LNG shipments.”
The three Curtis Island LNG plants, as it transpired, were the trigger for UNESCO to sharpen their scrutiny of how the Great Barrier Reef was being managed. Its Report stated that the LNG processing plant was approved by the Federal Government but “no opportunity was offered to the World Heritage Committee to consider its results” in view of the potential impact the plant would have on the outstanding value of the reef.
The Committee also noted that while the LNG plant granted to Santos Limited and PETRONAS Australia Pty Ltd was subject to a number of environmental conditions, there were contradictory statements which stated the LNG plant was “not expected to have significant negative effects on the area’s heritage value” but concluded there would be direct impacts on a range of issues such as seagrass, mangrove and “potential direct and indirect impacts on whales, dolphins, turtles, dugong and migratory birds.” What followed – a Category-5 cyclone, Cyclone Yasi in 2011 causing destruction of corals and seagrass meadow – could not have happened at a worse time. This caused, according to the Committee’s report, “15% of the total reef being damaged and 6% being severely damaged.”
The World Heritage Committee had requested Australia to report regularly on monitoring the situation. When they visited the Great Barrier Reef in March 2012, the mission heard, among other things, strong concerns expressed by some groups about the environmental management and governance of the Port of Gladstone. In calling for an independent review, the mission suggested it be carried out by internationally recognised and widely respected scientific experts. The World Heritage Committee (WHC) supported the mission’s recommendation in June 2012. However, the approvals for the aggressive industrial expansion were already in place. The environmental fallout was well and truly underway.
The dredging for this port in 2011 caused a 35 km plume of industrial sediment to flow into the World Heritage area stirred up from the harbour floor according to a study by James Cook University scientists. A Senate report into the port development dubbed it ‘an environmental disaster’. Mangrove and seagrass beds were threatened as well as dugong and dolphin populations. Diseased fishlife included an increase in lesions in fish and 39% of mud crabs collected around the harbour were found to have rust spots indicating shell disease from ingesting metals such as copper and aluminum as well as high levels of arsenic.
A report by the University of Queensland, ‘Investigation of contaminant levels in green turtles from Gladstone’ led by Professor Caroline Gaus55 noted that the large scale dredging and the dumping of dredged spoil occurring in Port Curtis/Gladstone Harbour during late 2010 through to 2012, was likely to have been the cause of the elevated metal levels found in stranded turtles. Clinical examination of 56 green turtles revealed infections. The blood of captured turtles was found to contain a high level of contaminants including arsenic, cadmium, cobalt, mercury, nickel, selenium, and vanadium according to the report.
The fishing industry, worth $40 million, was under threat with 65 businesses at risk that fished in the area according to multiple media reports, with a three-week fishing ban being imposed by the Queensland Government on Gladstone Harbour in September 2011.
The usual fanfare in the media focused on the 52 conditions and 102 sub-conditions relating to the development including the dumping of 11 million cubic metres of spoil in the outer harbour and where it was to be dumped. One solution presented by the Gladstone Ports Corporation then Chairman Ian Brusasco was to excise the port from the World Heritage Area. Senator Larissa Walters, the then Federal Greens Party environment spokes-person’s response was to the point when she said that such a suggestion proved the project had been an environmental disaster.
“It’s the mass dredging that should be stopped, not the World Heritage listing,” she was quoted as saying in The Australian in December 2011.
The question of monitoring compliance and what was to be done in the event of the breaching of these conditions was predictably left hanging. As is evident with Queensland Nickel’s Yabulu refinery and Linc Energy’s coal gasification project, the environment is sacrificed leaving an enormous clean-up bill to be funded by taxpayers following these industrial failed experiments. ‘Environmental conditions’, the catchcry used by ministers like Greg Hunt to justify approvals when approving the Adani mine, are not in any way sufficient insurance ag
ainst environmental wrongdoing.
Ports, meanwhile, continue to be part of a developing Queensland.
The UNESCO mission, when visiting Gladstone in 2012, discovered that there were no less than 45 proposals for coastal development pending, including 11 for port facilities. Thirty-five of these proposals were to be decided before 2013. Four of the priority ports, under the program Queensland Sustainable Port Development are earmarked for expansion and are positioned along the 2600 km Great Barrier Reef coastline, home to 2900 individual reefs and 1500 different species of fish.
In 2013–14, according to the Queensland Government’s Department of State Development,56 the priority ports represented trade worth $32 billion, or 77% of the total throughput of all Queensland’s ports. 131.8 million tonnes of coal were exported in 2016/17 from Queensland ports. The ports’ redevelopments fall within a wider state program with the Queensland State Government looking to invest approximately $33.7 billion in transport infrastructure over the next ten years.
While the Port of Gladstone filled the headlines, there was little attention paid to one of these proposals with the potential for perhaps the most catastrophic consequences.
In 2011, the Adani Group had paid $1.83 billion for a 99-year lease for the Abbot Point coal terminal, north of the Queensland coastal town of Bowen, designated as one of the state’s priority ports and a major port for 30 years. The then Premier Anna Bligh promised in a media statement that proceeds “would be set aside to fund Queensland’s share of the recovery from the summer of floods and cyclones.”
Abbot Point was Adani’s first home in Australia. It was also the proposed site of the new coal terminal earmarked to ship the coal from the Carmichael mine. The sale went largely unnoticed until January 2014, when the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority (GBRMPA) announced it had approved an application from the North Queensland Bulk Ports Corporation, responsible for strategic planning for ports, for the dumping of more than 3 million cubic metres of dredge spoil inside the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park so as to expand the coal terminal capacity. Under the proposal, the seabed would be dredged to create berths for six coal ships.