Lillian’s Eden

by Cheryl Adam

  Inside the darkened interior, the receptionist at the large, polished desk is dwarfed by the vastness of the lobby. “No,” she says politely. No one is expecting us. Cousins flourishes the Open Letter with around 90 signatories, signed, apart from the Chappells, by many other Australian luminaries including former Archibald prize winner artist Ben Quilty; Professor Terry Hughes; Pulitzer prize winner author Geraldine Brooks; Booker prize winner Richard Flanagan; twice Miles Franklin-winning author Tim Winton and former Greens Senator, Bob Brown. The letter urges Adani to abandon the Carmichael project.

  “True,” the letter reads, “the Queensland and Federal Governments are bending over backwards to fast-track this mine. True, they have changed water laws, stripped farmers of appeal rights, are attempting to change Native Title laws and have earmarked $1 billion of public money to build the rail line. But we urge you to think about global warming and public health and listen to the wishes of the people. It would be a great shame if this one project were to damage the image of India in Australia.”

  Cousins tells the receptionist, “We need someone – a company representative – to accept it.”

  Within a minute or two, as though by magic, a congenial businessman with an ample girth appears, all smiles. I duck to use the Adani toilet also off the lobby, stalling to see what will happen next. When I emerge, the same man is shaking everyone’s hand and introducing himself as Roy Paul, General Manager, Corporate Communications for Adani. He puts out his hand and accepts Cousin’s offering to everyone’s relief. He hands out his business card. Displaying years of perfecting confident handshakes, Cousins manages to find just the right blend of compliments and routine pleasantries. He receives an assurance from a still smiling Mr Paul that he will deliver the petition and letter to Gautam Adani. Then there is more grinning and chit-chat before we depart. We have been inside for perhaps ten minutes. Outside, the camera flashes pop. Cousins holds an impromptu media conference. The audacity of our move as we gather around him is beginning to sink in. Cousins is at his bristling best.

  “We have just presented a letter to the Director of Corporate Communications for the Adani company which explains that nearly 100 very prominent Australians, including two former Australian cricket captains and many famous businessmen oppose the Adani coal mine in Australia, but it would very much support investment in renewable energy and clean energy.”

  “What is the basic problem you are facing in Australia?” asks a bemused Indian journalist.

  “This will be the biggest coal mine ever built in Australia right next to the Great Barrier Reef …” Cousins answers. “The Lancet published an article saying that they regarded the Adani coal mine as a serious risk to public health. India doesn’t need more pollution. It needs less.”

  We all trot out our by now well-rehearsed takes on our purpose. I speak as a tourism operator and talk about the mind-blowing prospect that we will have no jobs and no reef if we continue mining fossil fuels and we are forced to confront more coral bleaching from global warming.

  The Indian media contingent seem faintly incredulous as though they can’t quite believe we have fronted up to God Adani Headquarters to have our say. A man cycling past, in a dark blue shirt and black pants, plastic bags swinging off his bike handles, gazes at us. He is in no hurry. Clearly captured by the street chaos, he exhibits the kind of Indian curiosity where time stands still. We are all still on edge. It is surreal; anti-climactic even. Where is the reaction we expected? The handcuffs? A prison cell?

  A bare electric light bulb and interrogation followed by the expected official response to our incarceration from the Australian Government: “We cannot interfere with the laws of another country.”

  Windows from Adani’s HQ hierarchy of floors look down on the street. Perhaps someone is using a long lens to identify us later when we will be pursued? After five long minutes of conducting media conferences outside the HQ, a man in a white shirt finally appears at the door waving angrily.

  “You must not stand here. You must go.”

  Cousins briskly tugs at the lapels of his light-blue flecked jacket as though he has been awaiting this signal and heads off down the street. He is followed by a few of the TV cameramen. He looks, for all the world, like a character on set in a TV drama doing a major shoot.

  Later, Cousins writing of the incident in a chapter in The Coal Truth by Greenpeace’s CEO David Ritter (2018),89 reveals that our ground crew had told us not to enter Adani HQ and especially not to convene a media conference outside. He had been told it was illegal to hold a media conference in the street and we could be arrested, or worse. One of the ground crew, Cousins wrote, when questioned if the security people were police or Adani security, had replied they are “one and the same.”

  And then, it is over. As we scramble into the car, an Indian man appears at the driver’s window.

  “Where is your hotel?” he asks.

  Cousins tells him.

  “Why did you tell him that?” Zethoven and I ask both panicked.

  “He’s one of us, isn’t he?”

  “No,” we chorus.

  We drive swiftly to the hotel and begin packing even though we have booked for one more night. Now, though, moving hotels seems to be a good idea for other reasons. Cousins receives an update in the car. He has done a quick bit of research and deduced that Annastacia Palaszczuk and her entourage are arriving at Bhuj airport the following day for her visit to the Mundra power plant.

  For days, we had been trying to work out the Premier’s itinerary. After all, one of the objectives of our mission is to “create turbulence for politicians supporting the Adani coal mine” and to “disrupt the all-systems-go Adani mine’s narrative of the Palaszczuk Government.” But no one, even the most friendly of journalistic colleagues, is letting on where she might be. I am struck by how much the media’s sense of duty nowadays seems to lie in protecting rather than interrogating the Government.

  In 2008, I conducted a research project measuring the number and type of sources of news in two North Queensland newspapers: both Murdoch owned – The Townsville Bulletin and The Cairns Post. Almost half of the sources in news articles, randomly selected from that year’s coverage in both newspapers, came from one level of government. Massaging the message is critical for every politician’s wellbeing. Courting the journalists is part of that mission.

  We leave Ahmedabad. By early evening, we are passing near the Rann of Kutch, about 270 kms west of Ahmedabad. Adani’s port and power plant at Mundra is about 141 kms away on the coast. The darkening sky promises an impending storm. Wherever we look, massive pylons populate the landscape like alien beings. In between there are salt pans which lie like decimated white rice paddies. It is an arid land devoid of population reaching out to the Arabian Sea although ecologically important for local and migratory birds and home to the unique Indian Wild Ass. During the monsoon months this entire area is under water, which, in October, begins to recede. In between the salt pans are Hindu temples erected to honour one or another of the Gods.

  The Little Rann of Kutch has been a traditional source of salt production for 600 years. Back in the days of British rule, it was used to partly fund the military expenses of the British Government. Around 75% of India’s salt is generated in this area.90 Children begin working there as young as ten years old. Like the camel owners and fish workers, they live in temporary shacks, using the traditional methods of their ancestors: raking the salt, sorting out the crystals which are worth more money and leaving them in piles to be collected later. Coal dust, however, contaminates the salt with toxins from the fly ash, we are later told, including mercury and arsenic. There are around 3000 salt panners who have continued the same ancestral tradition through the ages. They lease around three to five acres to dry out the salt for sale. Hearteningly, these salt panners have been helped by a partnership between a US based renewable energy company and the World Bank which has replaced 232 diesel pumps91 with hybrid pumps that run on solar during the d
ay and on diesel for four hours at night. This has halved the expenditure on diesel and increased the salt production by 15%. The solar panels have also greatly reduced the cost of electricity bills and there are plans afoot to increase the number of hybrid pumps.

  Surprisingly, among the salt pans are multiple wind turbines. India only entered the wind power market in the 1990s. By the end of 2015, however, India had the fourth largest installed wind power capacity in the world, a tagline it continued through to 2017. That same year, renewable energy accounted for 18.37% of the country’s total installed power capacity. Much of the country does not have an electrical grid, which is a perennial issue. One of the first applications of solar power has been for water pumping to begin replacing India’s four to five million diesel powered water pumps.

  By the end of October 2017, the total installed wind power capacity was 32.72 GW (Gigawatts). Wind power accounts for nearly 9.87% of India’s total installed power generation capacity and generated 46,011 million KWh (Kilowatt hours) in the fiscal year 2016–17 which is nearly 3% of total electricity generation.

  Even Adani has jumped on the solar bandwagon. Six months after our Indian visit, it opened what the company claims is the world’s largest solar power plant in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu producing 648 MW (Megawatts) at a single location. Typically, again, however there has been criticism over the project reported in the Indian media92 dating back to 2015 involving unfair land deals and media reports stating that Adani had assured it would provide jobs for locals, free water and electricity. The promises have reportedly not been kept. Instead, locals claimed the solar power plant was a ‘water guzzler’93 which was allegedly sourced from bore wells only five kilometres from the village without permission from district authorities who were also angry that Adani had allegedly signed a deal with the State Government to sell the power at a higher rate than could be found elsewhere. The taking of resources and upheaval of communities seem eerily familiar.

  Back in Australia, Adani has declared it will build a solar plant in the heart of the Australian coal country – a 100–200 MW plant at Moranbah in Queensland’s Bowen Basin. In its first phase, 65 MW of solar at this plant is said to be due for commissioning in October 2018, according to a tweet from Adani Australia.

  Ironically, it was a Labor State Government aided by the Federal Liberal/National Party Coalition Government that helped pave the pathway for Adani to access Australian coal.

  Annastacia Palaszczuk was a junior minister to Premier Anna Bligh in 2009 in the early days of Adani’s courtship. Her father had been Minister for Primary Industries in Queensland. She was also adviser to the Minister for Resources, David Beddall, from 1991 to 1995 and worked on Tony Blair’s 1996 campaign after receiving an academic scholarship. She is the thirty-ninth Premier of Queensland. Between 1998 and 2006, she was Senior Ministerial Advisor to former Premier Peter Beattie when the then Premier’s portfolio included Mines and Energy as well as the Environment. In 2006, Palaszczuk entered parliament and from 2009 held various portfolios under Bligh. In 2012, when Bligh was overwhelmingly defeated by Campbell Newman’s LNP (Liberal National Party), Palaszczuk was one of only three surviving members of Bligh’s cabinet. She announced she would stand as a candidate for the head of Queensland Labor and thereby as Leader of the Opposition. After that defeat in 2012, no one had expected Labor to win the next election. But win they did. In 2015, Palaszczuk was thrust into the role of Premier following the resounding defeat of her opponent, then Premier Campbell Newman. She became the first woman in Australia to take a party from opposition into government.

  Politics is in her blood. Her father Henry Palaszczuk, who was born in Germany to Polish parents, was a veteran State MP. Her father’s announcement that he would be retiring at the 2006 election prompted her to join the ranks of politicians. She had been studying to become a solicitor. Instead, she stood and won her father’s former seat in Inala, a suburb in south-west Brisbane, then considered to be the safest Labor seat in Queensland. In 2015, one of her first commitments as Premier was to return to “core Labor principles,” which included “worker’s rights, protecting the environment and investment in education” (my emphasis).

  I had met Annastacia Palaszczuk once before back in October 2016. Her chosen venue for the launch of the Whitsunday Community Cabinet meeting was the Cruise Whitsunday’s arrival hall at Port of Airlie in the Whitsundays. Turquoise and pastel giant-sized photographs of turtles and white sands in aqua-blues flank the walls offering the kind of welcome you might expect from a gateway to the Great Barrier Reef. I’d spent the afternoon at Proserpine State School in a lacklustre hall where state politicians shuffled papers, tried not to look bored while feigning concern about their role as one of the caretakers of the world’s largest living organism.

  At the launch that evening, Palaszczuk told the enthusiastic crowd of tourism operators and businesses that the reef was her passion. To prove it, she pointed out that she had, in 2015, even appointed a Great Barrier Reef Minister, Steven Miles, adding this title to Minister for National Parks. Her government, she claimed, had done more to protect the reef than any other government. It was, and still is, one of her favourite phrases. Behind her, a dazzling photograph of the reef lit up like the super imposed screen behind a nightly television newsreader lending her a faux authority to speak for the reef itself. The mostly local crowd nodded as she spun the rhetoric. “In fact, tourism is worth more than $3 billion to the Mackay and Whitsunday region and supports more than 13,000 jobs,” she cooed.

  I wanted to shout out loud: “And you are doing your utmost to wreck those jobs by soliciting the building of Australia’s largest coal mine with an ultimate 4.6 billion tonne carbon footprint!”

  As I scanned the crowd that evening, no one else appeared to mirror my angst.

  During the canapés of prawns and calamari, I had spied Steven Miles, a fresh-faced, amiable youngish punter, then still in his 30s, entrusted with the care of the reef itself. Miles’ PhD thesis was on union renewal but he had listed, on the parliamentary website, the Australian Conservation Foundation as one of his community group memberships. I also discovered that in 2007, he had joined Al Gore’s Climate Leadership Program.

  I began by asking him what his job as the Great Barrier Reef Minister entailed.

  Part of the art of the journalist is, of course, to open with what in the trade is described as ‘icebreakers’ to encourage interviewees to reveal information. No one blurts out the truth without some prompting. Steven Miles has an undergraduate degree in Political Science and Journalism. I began to relay my personal story, telling him of witnessing at first hand the corals beginning to disappear on Magnetic Island, albeit through dredging, but nevertheless man-made, and the effect it had on our business.

  “… it is evidence you see every day that the coral may never come back,” I finished.

  Miles shifted uneasily. Statistics are the province of politicians. Anecdotal talk backed by personal experience is harder to combat. It has the potential to make politicians uncomfortable. Perhaps as a former journalism graduate he sympathised or maybe he had been exposed to some good sources on climate change?

  I came in for the kill.

  ‘‘Why then is this Government pursuing this coal mine that has the capacity to kill the Great Barrier Reef? How could your Government consciously do this?”

  “The only person who can answer that,” he said looking swiftly around to ensure no one is eavesdropping, “is …”

  His head gestures towards the podium where Palaszczuk is standing with her trademark red lipstick smiling in that lopsided, amiable way of hers for a crowd of admiring locals. According to Madonna King writing in The Sydney Morning Herald’s Good Weekend in April 2015 shortly after Palaszczuk’s appointment as Premier, she had been told by her offsiders to smile because when she forgot, her brow furrowed and her voice lacked authority making her sound “unsure, nervous even.”

  King quoted Palaszczuk: “There were
a few people saying, ‘Just keep smiling … everything lights up when you smile’.”94

  I headed for the podium.

  Relaying the same story, she displayed the attentive look cultivated by politicians, lots of eye contact and that same smile, brown eyes warm and inviting.

  “What I can’t understand … have been really trying to understand,” I said, “is how you can give such overwhelming support for a mine that, according to an Adani representative in the Land and Environment Court, is only going to provide 1454 jobs. The 10,000 jobs is a lie that came from Tony Abbott when he was Prime Minister and has been repeated by many other politicians including the current Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull. There’s never been anything to back that up.”

  The look that crossed Palaszczuk’s face truly surprised me. Her jaw literally dropped. Her eyes widened. In keeping with the poker face of a journalist, I quickly hid my astonishment. She didn’t know? Surely, she can’t act that well?

  “What do you mean?” she blurted.

  “The mine isn’t going to save regional Queenslanders by providing jobs. That number is on the record from the Adani company itself. It’s going to destroy 69,000 jobs in Queensland tourism largely created because of the Great Barrier Reef.”

  Half an hour later Palaszczuk’s entourage was leaving. A woman who had been standing nearby when I was talking to Palaszczuk approached me. I had presumed she was with the Premier’s entourage.

  “You don’t understand,” she said hurriedly. “What these media people tell her – they give her figures … and she has to rely on these …”

  I found out that six months earlier, upon announcing her Government approving the three Adani mining leases, Palaszczuk had told the Brisbane Times that the leases had undergone “extensive government and community scrutiny” and were a step towards creating jobs in the region outlining that Adani had estimated more than 5000 jobs during construction and a further 4000 during the operation of the project.95 And this from a Government that had invoked a critical infrastructure status to fast track the mine (this status had never before been bestowed on a Queensland mining project) which involved less public scrutiny. According to the ABC, in an article published in December 2017, out of ten personal meetings with the Premier, six of these meetings were with lobbyists pushing the Adani cause.96