First lockdown, then the voice, now renewables? Anti-government groups find new

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…