Autobiographical essay 2

Un-planned

My planning career was untoward and fleeting but scarcely boring. In my second professional job and the first with statutory responsibilities starting in 1979, with engineering consultancy Gutteridge Haskins Davey (GHD), my role was to review and process land use planning schemes for local government clients. One of those clients, the City of Portland, wanted to rezone uncleared land at Point Danger industrial to facilitate construction of a massive aluminum smelter by Alcoa. Besides destroying a rare stretch of remnant coastal heath and woodland, the development required a new high-tension power line spanning half the state and the installation of additional base load brown coal electrical generation capacity in the far-off La Trobe Valley. A GHD engineer seconded as an expert advisor in the in-camera negotiations at our premises between Portland Council, the ministerial team and Alcoa was scathing of the whole enterprise. He divulged to me and a few colleagues his personal conviction that the Alcoa-funded environmental impact statement was deceptive and shoddy and that Portland council and the state government were being hoodwinked into believing the aluminium company would pull the project if taxpayer money didn’t subsidize the port upgrade, land acquisition, power line build, bolstered power output and electricity price. I shared his reservations. Nevertheless, certain management would sack me if I didn’t, I reluctantly signed off on the rezoning.

One morning a couple of months later my departmental manager, Kevin Anderson, an experienced engineer and planner who appeared to never let his Catholic faith or social conscience interfere with his professional role, asked me to locate an innocuous letter (I can’t recall what it was) from a thick bundle of A4 documents he plonked on my desk. I thought it odd he asked me, a relatively well-paid graduate and not one of the casuals or secretaries, to undertake such a mundane task. I plodded through the stack page by page until about halfway down, I came across not what I was asked to look for but a pair of recent letters clipped together stamped ‘Confidential’. One was from the State Electricity Commission (SEC) to GHD confirming an agreement to investigate potential sites in the state for a nuclear power station. The other was from GHD to the SEC specifying the list of coastal sites for immediate consideration as nuclear power station locations – including one adjacent to the proposed smelter at Portland. In response to the nuclear accident in March that year at Three Mile Island in the USA the SEC and the state government had repeatedly reassured the public that they were not considering nuclear power. The letters showed they were lying.

In my lunch break I slipped out and surreptitiously photocopied the correspondence in a nearby shop, posted the facsimiles to a friend, environmental activist Philip Sutton [who has since sadly deceased], and returned the originals to the pile. A week later my photocopies formed part of a cache of incriminating material tabled by the Labor Party opposition in State Parliament. The consequent public uproar steered the next Labor government led by John Cain to pass legislation in 1983 prohibiting the construction and operation of nuclear power in the state. I never found the document my boss had asked for, but when I returned the stack to him after lunch he asked whether I had come across anything interesting. When I answered a quizzical ‘no’, Kevin looked at me with an expression of amused disbelief, lowered his gaze, and smiled. I had done what he couldn’t but hoped I would.

I spurned planning after my GHD experience and tried activism. In 1982 I took a casual job with the Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF), working on their Victorian Alpine National Park campaign. I had to do frequent live radio interviews and, on one memorable day, give a formal presentation to the then state Liberal and National Party shadow cabinet fronted by dour shadow treasurer Alan Stockdale. Their leader (and next State Premier) Jeff Kennett conveyed his apologies. A generous view of my radio performances would be I was a lacklustre communicator. A magnanimous assessment of my skill trying to convince an audience of conservative politicians to review their support for high country cattle grazing and the clear-felling of alpine forests was that at least I was courteous.

The final straw came in 1985 when ACF asked me to discuss the conservationist case against continued old growth native forest logging with a group of forest industry representatives. It was a rainy evening. The venue was state environment minister Joan Kirner’s personal office. I was accompanied by a woman from ACF, who was also a member of the Labor Party left faction, sitting in as an observer. The three burly forest industry reps from Orbost glaring at us across the table looked like lumberjacks selected by a screen test for South Park. I read them my notes about the ACF plan for a state-assisted transition out of old growth forests to plantations and the idea for a retraining and re-employment scheme for displaced timber workers. My nervous formality was interpreted by the forestry reps as arrogance. Interrupting me, the trio’s spokesperson, a sawmill shop steward, fists on the table, rose up out of his chair and leaned over me growling how he and the owner of the sawmill he worked for were as one against their common enemy, conservationists like me. I was a “typical fascist greenie” who needed cutting down like the trees. It was a nonsensical accusation considering the policy I was espousing was unequivocally left (even socialist) whilst his perception that he and his employer’s class interests coincided was a classic case of what Marx famously labelled ‘false consciousness’. The fact that forest industry job numbers were collapsing from mechanization instigated by people like his employer, not preservation, that at the rate they were cutting the old growth resource his job depended upon would be all but gone in a few years or that plantations were the most economical way forward for the industry were evidently irrelevant to him. He and his two comrades had attended the meeting to attack the messenger not to consider the message. I left the meeting shaken and ashamed. The ACF observer concurred that I had failed to make political headway, again. I already knew I wasn’t cut out to be a planner. Evidently, the same applied to activism.

*

Struggling to assuage my sense of wordly ineffectiveness, a week or two after that troubling winter meeting I volunteered to hand out how-to-vote-cards in a suburban Ringwood polling booth, a public state school, for the centrist Australian Democrats, then the nations only significant environmental political party. The voiding of the Victorian state election results for the upper house seat of Nunawading Provence earlier in the year triggered the bi-election re-run. As usual outside Australian polling stations candidate advocates stood each side of the entry path to offer their printed instructional material to passing intending voters. The atmosphere, as with most Aussie polling places, was happy and congenial, a mood assisted by the mouth-watering odours wafting from the public sausage sizzle staffed by local volunteers. I had wanted to stand alongside the contingent of my erstwhile political bedfellows, the left-leaning Australian Labor Party (ALP) but had to make do with a space next to a young woman handing out Democratic Labour Party (DLP) leaflets. The then infamous DLP was the predominantly Catholic labour grouping that split from the ALP in 1955 over opposition to the parent organizations communist sympathies. The electoral cost of that split kept the ALP out of government until 1972. The DLP lady and I exchanged polite greetings before attending to our mutual appointed task of engaging queuing electors. We hadn’t spoken for the initial quarter hour until, along with everyone else in the forecourt of that school, we watched in fascination as a hulking sable limousine, a gleaming vintage Bentley, pulled up and parked across the No Standing zone directly in front of the schools entry footpath. The car’s four doors swung open and out stepped six clean shaven men in their twenties, who, peculiarly for a Saturday morning, were each attired in immaculately tailored formal wear. Heads held high they strutted passed us in single file along the path carrying expressions of contempt directed at us all, bar the conservative Liberal Party standard bearers, from whom each seized a paper guide, as they passed.

When the Young Liberals emerged one by one over the following twenty minutes from the booth they maintained their imperious demeanor. Back in the vehicle, as it started up, the two in the nearest seats wound down their windows and gave us the finger – with a contemptuous smirk. DLP politicians were allies of the similarly anti-communist Liberals so I didn’t expect the woman to respond as she did. Facing me she complained “Those young men are so full of themselves. So privileged. So entitled. Show offs. They are not of good character”. I agreed, but queried why she was criticizing them when the party she represents supports theirs, the Liberals, and its elitist policies? “No”, she replied. “I’m not like them at all. I’m guided by my Catholic faith. I believe in and want a fairer and more caring society. But I think that depends more on each individuals moral and spiritual make up than direction by government”. She shared my social and environmental concerns but argued it was our individual mentalities (especially our compassion) and collective actions (such as unionized labour) that mattered more. Conversing over the remaining one and a half hours of our parallel shifts we came to realise our ideals and our values couldn’t have been more alike. It was our explanations of the causes and solutions that differed. I was an agnostic who believed in an essential human goodness corrupted by capitalism: to my dialogist, our species had a propensity for evil that could only be allayed by an ethics braced by faith. She saw herself as a ‘conservative’ and I saw myself as a ‘progressive’ but we concluded we were really on the same side. Before departing we hugged and bid each other warm goodbyes. We wished each other the best of luck with the election of our preferred candidate. I don’t recall that we exchanged names. The rightness of my growing commitment to influencing hearts and minds obliquely through writing and photography and not by direct institutional or political action felt somehow certified, by that encounter.