Newcastle Coal Port shutdown by ecofascist protest; barely reported.
Image: Aljazeera.
Yesterday I received an email with the following alert:
Rising tide is a radical group of greenies who are up to anything controversial in order to stop 'carbon producing' power stations and anything to do with climate change.On following the link provided I discovered that the action had started at 05:30 AM and indeed there was little on the news items on the web. The only references at that stage were the local edition (Newcastle) of the ABC and Reuters Africa, with a Sydney Morning Herald item coming up later. The Web editions of the Australian, and the Courier Mail had nothing. The main ABC news bulletin at 7:00 PM had nothing, but curiously they put it up on the web at that time well after it was all over.
Today they have stopped work on the transport of coal at the Newcastle facilities. Strangely, the web based news at this time, 10.30am, have not reported on it. What I have found is from Rising Tides website.
At the current time there has been little addition to this with most coverage being overseas or ethnic, - The Hindu, Aljazeera, etc.
This event if reported widely, would have been highly embarrassing for the Gillard ‘government’ which is pretty much controlled by the parent body of these protestors, the Greens. Perhaps this is the first visual sign of what Gillard calls her “new paradigm.”
Fortunately, it has received the coverage it deserved in “The Daily Grind”:
Around 40 anti-coal activists from the group Rising Tide brought Newcastle’s coal terminals to a standstill for five hours today.
The group is thought to include all three Hunter residents opposed to the coal industry.
The Rising Tide banners were highly visible because they were perched high atop an enormous pile of coal. This makes the advertising perhaps the most carbon-intensive in human history.
The activists demanded the state set a carbon price, which it did at $550 each.
Police removed the protesters from the coal facility and issued 32 of them with fines. How different it would have been 200 years ago, when they would have been arrested and sent to coal facilities in Newcastle.
Rising Tide hopes to end Newcastle’s dependence on coal and promotes a future in which the city’s main export activity is watching the Hunter River flow into the sea. ….
Damn. Meant to blog that but got side tracked with the battle of the Moribunds for the UK Labour Party leadership. I like the group's name, though. Can they float all boats, do you think? On reflection probably not mine unless they're pro-nuclear power or something.
ReplyDeleteYes Angry, I noted the Labour leadership thing.
ReplyDeleteIt seems odd that in the eyes of the media this doesn't seem to have happened at all. The papers have the excuse of it happening after their print editions had gone out, but that doesn't explain why it failed to make the online editions or why it wasn't reported the next day. Something stinks here.
Yesterday the Greens are opposing the development of 30 million tons of high grade coking coal at Tairo, just north of here. Today a Uranium mine in the Territory has been knocked back.
That new paradigm is definitely here.