Labor accused of ‘gaslighting' Australians on climate crisis as fossil fuel projects keep getting approved

The Guardian

2 days ago

Australian federal and state governments have approved a wave of fossil fuel developments over the past six weeks, sparking accusations Anthony Albanese and other leaders are 'gaslighting' the public – claiming they take the climate crisis seriously while pushing up emissions.
Peter Dunn, a former commissioner of emergency services for the Australian Capital Territory, says the Albanese government is 'trashing its integrity' and has 'lost their licence to lead, days after the election'.
Dunn, a member of Emergency Leaders for Climate Action who lived through the 2003 Canberra bushfires and the catastrophic 2019 fires at Lake Conjola on the New South Wales south coast, is furious about the government's decision to greenlight Woodside's extension of the North West Shelf gas processing plant.
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'I'm bloody angry, bitterly disappointed, and I see a government that I was really hopeful for doing great things trashing its integrity,' he says.
'That's the thing that's really got me worked up at the moment – because there is no integrity in what I'm seeing [from the government] in the climate space whatsoever … You lose your integrity, you lose your licence to lead. They just lost their licence to lead, days after the election.'
Federal and state governments and agencies have approved several fossil fuel projects since April, ranging from large developments to smaller extensions.
They include the production operations for Santos' Barossa offshore gas project off the Northern Territory, two coalmine extensions in NSW, Viva Energy's floating gas terminal in Geelong, and nine new areas for gas exploration in Queensland. Decisions for other major projects are looming.
On 22 May, Albanese and the NSW premier, Chris Minns, travelled to Maitland to get a better grasp of the scale of the flood disaster extending from the NSW Hunter up to Coffs Harbour.
The prime minister told communities 'You are not alone', acknowledging that due to climate change 'tragically, we're seeing more extreme weather events'.
Six days later, the environment minister, Murray Watt, a former minister for emergency management, announced provisional approval for the extension of Woodside's project to 2070 with 'strict conditions'. A final decision is due soon.
When asked before the widely anticipated announcement how giving Woodside the green light aligned with Labor's climate commitments, Albanese said last week 'It is net zero, not zero' and 'You don't change a transition with warm thoughts'.
'I was really upset when I heard the prime minister say it's net zero not actual zero,' says Serena Joyner, the chief executive of Bushfire Survivors for Climate Action.
'It's gaslighting, because you have to actually reduce emissions or climate change will just run away.
'It's a cognitive disconnect.'
Joyner lives in the Blue Mountains, another region badly hit by the 2019-20 black summer fires. She estimates her family has a few years left in the area before they will have to move due to the difficulty of insuring as bushfire risk grows, driven by the climate disaster.
Bushfire Survivors for Climate Action (BSCA) was formed in 2018 to help ordinary people affected by climate-fuelled disasters engage with leaders. The group has spent years meeting with MPs, repeatedly sharing their stories and trauma to highlight the urgent need for climate policy action, which Joyner says brings a heavy emotional toll.
She says the early weeks of the re-elected Albanese government have led to 'a reassessment of how to engage, because what we've been doing with Labor in the last couple of years, it's hard to see how it's working'.
'Being cooperative and playing nice with Labor isn't getting us anywhere,' she says.
'We're an organisation that works very hard to be reasonable, sensible: we don't go to rallies, we don't go to protests. We have meetings with politicians and tell them our stories.
'They offer sympathy and then just go and approve massive fossil fuel projects anyway.'
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BSCA member Angela Frimberger says when governments approve new fossil fuel developments and expansions 'climate-affected people want to know what governments are thinking, and do they care about their problems at all'.
'You just want to sit across a table from them and say, 'What do you think is going to happen?',' she says.
Frimberger lives on the edge of Lake Innes, south of Port Macquarie, on a property she and her family manage for biodiversity conservation.
Their house survived black summer but fire tore through half of the habitat, which they have since worked to regenerate and restore. The fires were followed by floods in 2022 and then the record-breaking event of May this year.
Days before Watt announced his North West Shelf decision, a soaked Frimberger stood in the rain filming a video for BSCA's social media pages, saying: 'It's happening again, another unprecedented event' and 'Minister Watt, please remember those of us out here'.
She says she was 'devastated that our government would do this while reeling from a current disaster and still struggling to recover from past disasters'.
'The government is approving projects such that regular people like me have to pay the cost,' she says.
Georgina Woods is the head of research and investigations for the Lock the Gate Alliance, a national organisation that developed out of community opposition to fracking proposals. She says people feeling the effects of climate change are frightened about what the approval of new fossil fuel projects means for them.
'The business model of coal and gas companies is based on demand assumptions that are wholly inconsistent with preventing catastrophic levels of global warming,' Woods says.
'By giving these companies approval to expand their operations, the Australian government is telling all of us it expects this outcome too.'
A government spokesperson said that 'only Labor has a concrete, real plan to see our emissions reduce while ensuring our economy continues to grow'.
'As we've consistently said – gas has an important role to play in the transition as the ultimate backstop for renewables,' they said.
The government pointed to climate action during its first term, including reforms to the safeguard mechanism, which they said had 'already begun to work'.
'This [North West Shelf] project is subject to those reforms, which means this plant is required to bring their emissions down each year and reach net zero by 2050 under the safeguard mechanism.'