Where my anger sits
Here’s what I want to do:
Sit down somewhere and not get up.
Greta showed us that sitting down can be catalytic, when it channels the hearts and souls of millions.
I don’t want to sit in front of traffic. I don’t want to hold people up on their weary way home from work to see their kids. Or make people late to work, and lose them pay. I don’t want ordinary Australians to pay for the crimes of a few. I know that most Australians want something done about climate change, even if it costs them. They have wanted this for at least 12 years. They agree with us.
I don’t want to sit down at a council chamber, or at the bottom of a glittering tower of cabinet ministers. I suspect that most people in politics and the bureaucracy also agree with us and are not in denial about climate change. Some of them are, to be sure. But most want the chance to make better decisions. They think they can’t.
But I do want to go somewhere and sit down, silently, refusing to move. The target I would choose is not the government or the people but someone from a small list of people and corporations and corporate leaders that have consistently, over years and years, undermined or flatly opposed action on climate change in Australia. I’m starting a list.
If I were in Sydney, I would go and sit down inside the HQ of Glencore. Glencore chief executive Ivan Glasberg is sixth on the list of individual people world wide who have the most wealth invested in coal. In Melbourne, I’d go to the Business Council of Australia. As ACF explains, this group is wrecking climate policy in Australia and it has been for years. If I were in Perth, I would sit down inside the office of Shell. Shell is ninth on the list of 100 companies that have most responsibility for all the greenhouse pollution ever created. The company’s global CEO recently singled out people who eat strawberries in winter among those that need to change their actions to deal with climate change.
As I’m in Newcastle, I will take leave from work and go to sit down inside the headquarters of Port Waratah Coal Services, which is co-owned by Glencore and Yancoal, the two biggest coal mining companies in the Hunter Valley. Maybe I’ll take some lamingtons for the reception staff.
These businesses and their executives are the obstacle to all our good hopes. They are causing climate change and they have prevented or obstructed successive governments in Australia from taking action to stop it. Governments and politicians are weak. These corporations and their elite leadership are the kryptonite that weakens them. They are the ones who must feel the flame of the people’s anger.
What holds most politicians and bureaucrats back is a refusal or an inability to see what role they could possibly play in solving the problem. We have a system of government that is compelling good people to make decisions they wish they did not have to make. Look at poor Leanne Enoch. They feel they have no choice.
What I want to do by sitting down is lift these people’s burden, and the burden of individual Australians, including coal miners and commuters, and dissolve the obstacles they imagine or perceive that hold them back from making better decisions.
I don’t know when I’m going to begin my sitting. I feel the urge every day to do this, but I have a job and I think the work I do is useful and important.
One day soon I think I will do this. If you want to do it too, that might help me get started.
