More fire power for MEL to seek compensation from NSW Govt.
The decision to suspend the drilling approval and misleading ICAC referral
was political. Good to see someone pointing it out in the lefty SMH.
Harper review opens the door to tackling green activism
Brian Robins
Published: September 26, 2014 - 7:37PM
It is where social media is beginning to rub up against the hard world of business. And while emotion – and distortion – is part and parcel of any argument, the ability to use new media platforms to distribute falsehoods with direct economic consequences is readily apparent, whether it be dishonest or distorted reviews complaining of the poor state of a hotel room to supposed "black rain" from drilling by Origin Energy for gas.
Twitter and websites such as TripAdvisor and the like have given consumers ready venues to vent their views, complaints and grievances, whether true or not. Most of us have had the experience of a hotel manager who readily – even cheerfully – agrees to a refund to avoid another disgruntled customer airing their whine in public. Suddenly, the consumer really is king or queen.
When it comes to areas of public policy, however, when emotions are charged, distortion emerges soon enough, with proponents pulling levers to spin the debate in their favour.
As the oil and gas industry has found, overreach by environmental groups is part and parcel of the debate surrounding drilling for coal seam gas or shale. In Western Australia, a local conservation group took out a newspaper advertisement earlier in the year criticising fracking by explorers. After an oil and gas lobby group complained, the newspaper publisher found that each of three claims in the advertisement – that fracking shale could turn underground water into a "dangerous chemical cocktail", that US research had found 6 per cent of fracking wells leak into groundwater in their first year and that once water is contaminated, it will be contaminated forever – were each "misleading and deceptive".
The oil industry is big enough to look after itself, but the increased aggression of some environmental campaigning is hard to overlook.
Global warming and the desire for a swift policy response is the moral justification for some of the environmental activists. Equally, the chopping and changing of state and federal government policy in this area over the past five years or so has helped to fuel some of that anxiety.
The increasingly confrontational approach of some of these groups is nudging up against the legal system – not just with the civil protest seen in northern NSW this year when the state government, fearful of the political fallout of drilling continuing close to the forthcoming state election, backed away from previous drilling approvals – but potentially a whole new area of the law as well.
The Harper review into competition policy, which was released earlier in the week, sparked talk of the likely fallout for the supermarket sector, especially with a new price war as some of the chains introduce super-cheap bread. Given the power of the dominant supermarket chains, that was the ready "takeout" for many in business, and also the media.
But perhaps of equal importance was an area which passed with no comment: the potential to apply secondary boycott legislation to environmental and consumer lobby groups – and this is where the increased aggression and use of social media to marshall forces has opened the door for the reach of the legislation in this area to be broadened.
In their submissions to this review, consumer and environmental groups argued either that their existing exception be either retained or expanded. Unsurprisingly, business groups wanted it curtailed, or removed altogether.
The Harper review noted that a public campaign by an environmental group which was based on false or misleading information could damage a supplier. It suggested that perhaps competition law needed to be extended to bring these groups into its ambit.
"A question might arise whether a public campaign undertaken by an environmental or consumer organisation against a trading business, advocating that customers ought not purchase products from the business, should be subject to the laws prohibiting false, misleading and deceptive conduct," the review noted.
"Presently, those laws only apply in so far as a person is engaged in trade or commerce."
And as examples of increasingly extreme action opposing new developments in the resources sector multiply, the push for increasingly onerous legal restraint, too, will mount. Take the Maules Creek mine development, notable for the protester who issued a false public statement to the sharemarket a few years back which caused a sell-off in the mine developer's shares. This protester was given a suspended sentence.
Recently there have been allegations from the mine proponent, Whitehaven, that the mine site was broken into with a series of drill holes attached to explosives tampered with and which would have the potential for a fatal outcome. Whitehave has faced a sustained campaign of harassment, even though the development has complied with all state and federal government environmental controls.
As for Origin Energy, its "black rain" was nothing more than lerps, an insect commonly found with eucalyptus trees. But that did not stop more than 20,000 signing an online petition criticising the company for the incident, irrespective of the truth of what had occurred.
The Harper review called for more debate over this potential expansion of secondary boycott provisions and the hardline activities of some may give that call increasing resonance. Truth may well be the first casualty in war, but for some environmental groups, the increased aggression of their fight may rebound.
This story was found at: http://www.smh.com.au/business/comm...-tackling-green-activism-20140925-10l7fc.html
