Images from Mathew Berryman, ABC News , ABC News and The Conversation
By Situation Theatre 22/11/2019
As the Prime Minister continues to deny the factual links between the climate, bushfire, and drought emergencies devastating the nation, there can be no doubt that the Australian state has been completely captured by fossil fuel and media billionaires.
Scott Morrison says there is no evidence linking Australia’s carbon emissions and the severity of its bushfires. This bald-faced denial of physics from the nation’s leader is not just dangerous, deceptive, offensive, infuriating, and negligent.
It’s yet more evidence in the open and shut case of state capture.
A simple definition of state capture is “the domination of policy making by private, often corporate, power”. It encapsulates how “public bureaucracies become dominated by strong and powerful interest groups”.
There are varieties of this phenomenon but the one we are most interested in is systemic state capture, which according to The Conversation, “refers to “institutions” that affect the internal and external sovereignty of the state and limit its policy options to those that favour powerful sectors, which stand to benefit”.
The BBC puts meat on these definitional bones when it says “state capture describes a form of corruption in which businesses and politicians conspire to influence a country's decision-making process to advance their own interests. As most democracies have laws to make sure this does not happen, state capture also involves weakening those laws, and neutralising any agencies that enforce them.”
They quote Abby Innes, Assistant Professor of Political Economy at the London School of Economics, who said “state capture is not just about biasing public policy so that it systematically favours some corporations over others. It's also about strategically weakening that part of the state's law enforcement mechanism that might crackdown on corruption."
According to Dr Innes, "Full-on state capture is where corporations can influence the nature of the legislative process, and political actors allow them to do so for private gain. The whole policy-making structure of the state becomes commodified - something that politicians are willing to sell."
We could probably leave the article there because it’s patently obvious that the concept maps horrifyingly well onto the Australian political landscape.
But just for laughs, let’s take a look at the tip of the melting iceberg.
First, is there any evidence of “corruption in which business and politicians conspire to influence a country's decision-making process to advance their own interests” when it comes to the coal industry?
That’s a tough one.
For starters, Morrison’s staff is a regular who’s who of coal industry luminaries. His Chief of Staff, John Kunkel, used to be mining giant Rio Tinto’s Chief Advisor for Government Relations and before that he was Deputy CEO of the Minerals Council of Australia for over six years. His Principal Private Secretary, Yaron Finkelstein, is the former CEO of Crosby Textor (now C|T), a multinational lobbying firm with close ties to the mining industry. C|T’s corporate clients include coal giants Glencore and Mitsubishi Development, along with the Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association and the Queensland Resources Council. They ran a 2017 campaign to undermine confidence in renewable energy on behalf of Glencore which included fabricating news stories and spying on environmental groups. Andrew Hirst, former Crosby Textor Director, is now Liberal Party Campaign Director.
According to the Greenpeace/Michael West documentary below, “mining billionaire Gina Rinehart is a Coalition donor, whose staff have included former Liberal MP, Sophie Mirabella, and Adam Giles, former Liberal Chief Minister of the Northern Territory. Rinehart maintains a close relationship with former Deputy PM Barnaby Joyce, whose campaigns she’s also helped fund.”
“As co-owner of major coal mining licences in the Galilee Basin, Rinehart stands to receive significant benefits if the area is opened up, via approval for the Adani-Carmichael mega coal-mine, currently being pushed through by the Coalition Government.”
Environment Minister Melissa Price gave approval for Adani’s groundwater plan, despite advice from the CSIRO. She used to be the Vice-President at a mining company owned by Mitsubishi Development, co-owners of a portfolio of Queensland coal mines.
Advocate for coal expansion and Federal Resources Minister Mathew Canavan has a brother, John Canavan, who was once an executive at coal giant Peabody Energy and now part owns Queensland’s Rolleston coal mine. No conflict of interest there.
Matt Canavan has ministerial responsibility for the $5 billion Northern Australian Infrastructure Facility Fund. Five of the seven board members have strong mining industry ties.
Ian Macfarlane, the Resources Minister who scrapped the mining tax, shocked the world when in 2016 he took a job as CEO of the Queensland Resources Council.
Current Energy Minister, Angus Taylor, consulted for the Minerals Council of Australia (MCA – otherwise known as “The Bad MCA”) before becoming an MP.
In 2017, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull appointed Sid Marris, an MCA Director, as his senior advisor on energy, climate change and resources. He’s now back at the MCA.
In 2018, Turnbull and Josh Frydenberg gave $444 million in taxpayer money to the Great Barrier Reef Foundation without a competitive tender or application process. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that the chair of that tiny body is John Schubert, an executive of Esso, owned by ExxonMobil. The Foundation’s Chairman’s panel is tied to Peabody and BHP, both members of the bad MCA.
Not to mention that in 2017, coal lobby ads were the biggest third-party political expenditure, and in 2017-2018, fossil fuel companies donated $1, 277, 933 to the Liberal, National, and Labor Parties.
Could all of this have anything to do with the Government’s 194 actions to sabotage environmental policy over the last six years, the $29 billion given in subsidies to the fossil fuel industry in this country each year, or Scott Morrison’s wilful denial of the clear link between the climate emergency, drought, dust storms and bushfires?
Dunno, maybe?
And what about the Murdoch Press? Any undue influence there?
Not unless you think Morrison’s speechwriter, Matthew Fynes-Clinton, who was the Deputy Chief of Staff and Editor of The Courier Mail, his Press Secretary, Andrew Carswell, who was the Chief of Staff at The Daily Telegraph, and his advisor, Thomas Adolph, formerly of The Australian, might play some role in Government policy?
Lest you think this is a Morrison phenomenon, Clive Mathieson, former Editor of The Australian, was Malcolm Turnbull’s Media Advisor during his Prime Ministership.
Could being surrounded by agents of the radically pro-coal and anti-climate action Murdoch empire, an organisation so steeped in denial as to even deny the presence of climate deniers, be in any way related to Morrison’s crackdown on environmental protests?
Hard to say.
Unless you’re a News Corp consumer who has accidentally stumbled upon something truthful, no doubt all of this discussion of state capture feels very intuitive.
The real questions are how can we strip these billionaires of their power before it’s too late? How can we return power to the people before the narrow window for emergency evasive climate action closes for good and our current bushfires, droughts, and dust storms somehow get at least three times worse?
One promising answer has a lot to do with The Greens and civil society joining together to wage a class war on the captured establishment, but that’s an article for another day.