The protest signs at last week’s rally against renewables in Canberra spoke of hyperlocal concerns – but also cabals and plots of global proportion.
Some spoke of immediate worries linked to environmental policies: “Oberon betrayed by state forestry”; and “Say no to Twin Creek wind farm”.
But others decried a supposed “Attack on humanity: the great reset” – a reference to conspiracy theories about a a plot to reshape the world using the Covid-19 pandemic as a cover.
A red ensign flag, which has come to represent Australia’s anti-lockdown movement, flapped above the stage in front of Parliament House as an irrigator described solar projects as “environmental terrorism”.
The event, billed as the Reckless Renewables rally, is part of an increasingly loud fight over clean energy, as the government pushes for 82% of power to come from renewable sources within six years. There were about 500 people at the event, according to ACT police.
Some speakers raised concerns about potential damage to the natural environment and the adequacy of community consultation in areas where these projects may be rolled out – an issue of social licence recently acknowledged by the Australian energy infrastructure commissioner. Others, veterans of decades-long campaigns against climate action, repeated claims that renewables will take up vast amounts of prime agricultural land.
But the sprawling network of Facebook groups that helped to promote the event suggests the issue has attracted the attention of a wide coalition of interests ranging from mainstream political parties to the wilder fringes of anti-government movements energised by Trumpian themes, pandemic lockdowns and a host of grievances apparently unrelated to protecting Australia’s farms, forests or oceans.
‘Laundry list’ of grievances
The day’s first elected speaker, Coalition senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, said that during a recent drive to Coober Pedy, nothing angered her more “than the sight of wind turbines”.
“Nuclear energy is certainly the direction we need to go,” she said.
The United Australia party senator Ralph Babet, who was up next, called climate change science “a new religion”, and railed against the parliament building behind him, calling it “filthy, disgusting”.
“It is rotten to the core”.
As the day wore on, it also became apparent the movement had, at least in part, been corralled into what Tim Graham, an associate professor in digital media at the University of Queensland, called a “laundry list” of grievances.
One of the threads that runs from the pandemic’s anti-lockdown protests to some of the agitation against the Indigenous voice to parliament, and now to the Reckless Renewables rally, is anti-establishment sentiment, he suggests.
“Politicians see this is an opportunity to build their base, to expand their narratives,” he said. “Not only can they capture that audience … but also co-opt it and cultivate it.”
Canberra was certainly eager to capitalise on the energy. More than a dozen politicians from the Coalition, One Nation and the United Australia party – including some known climate sceptics – lined up to speak at the rally. One organiser said they had been more or less “swamped” by politicians eager to take the stage.
Community groups from up and down Australia’s east coast were bussed to the capital to be heard, and some organisers were at pains to emphasise they were not anti-climate change or anti-all renewables – only concerned with how projects were being rolled out.
Sandra Bourke, one of the event organisers and a member of the Hawks Nest Tea Gardens Progress Association, told Guardian Australia the movement was a “very broad church”.
Bourke said she invited speakers from all sides of politics to speak.
“We wanted to get attention drawn to what we’re trying to say to the government … too fast, too costly, at terrible cost to the environment,” she said of a possible offshore wind energy zone in the Hunter.
“From our perspective … no one was hearing us,” she said. “You tell me how we should have got a voice for our community.”
However, the event was also promoted by key figures associated with the anti-lockdown movement, including 2022 Convoy to Canberra figurehead and former Qantas pilot Graham Hood, who has more than 143,000 followers on Facebook.
Craig Kelly and Babet of the UAP, which tried to woo this constituency during the 2022 federal election, railed against any kind of renewable energy target, linking it to well-worn populist themes.
“Net zero is a sell out to the globalists,” Kelly told the excitable audience. “It is a wealth transfer from the Australian nation to the Communist party of China.”
He later posted what appeared to be an AI-generated image on his X account of “Albaneseville: A NetZero [sic] community” – a tent city in a barren landscape, with wind turbines in the background.
Also in the crowd was Matthew Sheahan, executive director of the right-wing lobby group Advance Australia, which led the campaign against the Voice. The organisation, a longtime opponent of renewable energy targets, told subscribers via its email newsletter it was “proud to back the rally”.
“We’re not going to stand for them wrecking our way of life,” it read.
Barnaby Joyce calls up an army
Imogen Richards, who researches environmental crises and far-right politics at Deakin University, said mainstream politicians at the event risked endorsing not only the issue for which they ostensibly gathered, but all of the associated commentary.
She suggested there was a political dynamic in Australia that attempts to exploit the anxiety some people feel about environmental and social challenges, and pit people against each other – the regions against urban areas, for example.
“[It’s] a coming together of all of these different forms of crisis, and people feeling powerless,” she said.
As Barnaby Joyce took to the stage, a man bellowed into the microphone: “We need someone like Donald Trump to save us. Watch what he does in America.”
Joyce told the crowd windfarm and solar projects were “dumps”, as he encouraged the crowd to think of themselves as an “army”.
The National party MP claimed a key role in unifying groups involved in the renewable energy backlash. Joyce told Guardian Australia he helped bring together some of the regional anti-renewable community organisations, promoting a group called the National Rational Energy Network (NREN) on Facebook to “coordinate national action” across Australia.
A farmer from the Central West, Grant Piper, is the chair of NREN, which organised the rally. He is concerned about the possible rollout of new transmission lines for renewable projects on his property, but he acknowledged a diverse range of interest in the event.
In a YouTube video shared in advance of the rally, Piper said he had been contacted by those concerned about other issues “whether it’s the Covid royal commission, whether it’s the war on cash”.
Piper extended a hand beyond immediate environmental concerns. “A war is one battle at a time,” he said in the clip. “Just like the Voice last year, maybe we’re prosecuting the renewable energy net zero ideology … Maybe if we crack that one, and I think we can, then the other issues will fall one by one as well.”
NREN’s treasurer is Ian Coxhead, the chair of the National party’s Tamworth branch, but Coxhead said that did not mean there was any formal link between NREN and the Nationals.
“Whilst I’m involved in both of those organisations, they are totally separate and treated as such by me,” he said.
In fact, the “reckless” renewables line has been floated by the Nationals for at least a year. In March 2023, the Nationals leader, David Littleproud, tested the line on Sky News. There is a “senseless and reckless race towards renewables”, he told Chris Kenny.
Joyce said it was now time for him and the party to step back. “It can’t be a Barnaby thing and it can’t be a Nationals thing,” he said. “I want it to be seen as an organic [rally] of people from all sides of politics.”
But having helped unleash a movement, there is no guarantee any political party can control where it heads.
“I’m hoping that they’ll get off their arse and they will actually do something,” Piper said. “I can see, as much as anyone else, that the Liberals and Nationals have sold us out over the years.”
• Additional reporting by Sarah Basford Canales
