View from Canberra: Keep Australia green...v.2 | ADM Aug 07

1 August 2007

By A Special Correspondant

The protesters who tried to disrupt EX Talisman Sabre last month displayed all the signs of relevance-deprivation syndrome and ignored a basic military tenet: know your enemy.

Their ignorance about the exercise and the military more generally was slightly mystifying considering the trouble they were taking.

There was a time, around a decade ago, when the major events of any defence reporter’s year were defence exercises.

That was because there just wasn’t much else happening of great importance. This was of course before the current abundance of real operations.

With troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, it’s unsurprising that the media interest in Talisman Sabre 2007 was somewhat constrained.

Outside Queensland it hasn’t been a major deal, although it is significant because it’s the first time the joint training centre concept has been tried out properly.

Of much greater interest to the mainstream media was the prime minister’s decision to intervene in Northern Territory indigenous communities, making use of the ADF for basic logistic support.

So Talisman Sabre was run and won (we presume by the good guys) and outside the defence community and those intimately involved, the people paying the most attention were members of the assorted peace, environmental, anti-war and anti-US groups, intent on bringing it all to a halt.

They failed but not for any shortages of press releases, which outnumbered those from defence PR by around three to one. Some were actually pretty amusing.

Green alert
A fundamental premise was that Shoalwater Bay Training Area faced environmental catastrophe on account of all this live firing and joint Australia-US military activity.

Shoalwater Bay has been a military training area since being acquired by Defence during the Vietnam War. This started out as drought ravaged and degraded farmland and its current environmental merit stems from it being protected from what really wrecks landscapes, excessive human contact.

Putting high explosives on places isn’t necessarily beneficial for the environment but most of Shoalwater Bay isn’t used for live firing.

The major impact area, used for the heavy stuff including artillery and aircraft bombs, is Townsend Island, which as the name implies, is away from the mainland.

Each of the major exercises at Shoalwater over the last decade have been preceded by dire predictions of environmental disaster.

That there is still plenty of pristine landscape left over from previous exercises suggests that perhaps some of the predictions have been just a bit overblown.

Breaking in
Intent on bringing Talisman Sabre 2007 to a sudden and well publicised halt, a bunch of activists broke onto the training area, filming themselves disappearing into the bush.

A statement from the group released on June 19 said they planned to stay inside as long as possible. But, a day later appeared yet another statement.

It seemed that defence had committed that most appalling of sins in dealing with protesters. Rather than calling out the troops, launching an immediate search and getting all flustered, it ignored them completely.

“This is not a stunt,” thundered spokesperson Treena Lenthall in the statement. She claimed these protesters were putting their lives on the line and that one was a 66-year-old grannie while at least two others had children under two.

“We want a commitment from ADF that according to normal defence protocols live firing will cease until they are found,” she said.

Presumably what they had in mind was for the entire exercise to be called off while the troops and police went chasing through the bush after protesters who would surely have done everything in their power to protract the process.

No way. A defence spokesman queried whether there were any protesters on the base at all.

Indeed there were for on June 23 came another statement in which seven protesters said they had been loose on the base for four days and were safe at all times.

By the end of the exercise, all two dozen protesters or so had been charged with offences such as trespassing and being a public nuisance, including a pair who chained themselves to a US military vehicle when it stopped at traffic lights in Rockhampton.

All this of course had negligible impact on the conduct of Talisman Sabre. Far more media coverage was devoted to a US soldier arrested in Sydney after travelling down from Rockhampton to meet his new internet friend who he thought was a 14-year-old girl. She was really an undercover policeman. Not a good look.

Thou dost protest too much . . . maybe
All this raises questions about just what impact this sort of protest has on the general community and the powers that be.

The government isn’t about to back down. The war in Iraq is certainly unpopular but the vast majority of the Australian populace remain supportive of the ADF and of the alliance, although tempered with some growing cynicism about the US of A.

Most everyone agrees that peace is a really good thing and hardly anyone disagrees with the right of protesters to protest about heartfelt issues, no matter how at odds they might be with community sentiment, provided they don’t step over a certain line.

Former Labor foreign minister Gareth Evans, no stranger to protesters on any number of issues, once remarked to the effect that one could rightly query just how seriously should be taken the public policy stance of those who sought to make their point while dressed in koala suits.

In other words, they might get on the news that night but no-one took them that seriously.

Yet the world has also changed. Whereas years ago, defence might not have given a stuff about the landscape on which they exercised, they now maintain and enforce environmental management plans for training areas. Some day the Iraq conflict will end.

Perhaps Australia’s biggest and most violent anti-military protests since the Vietnam War occurred in November 1991 outside the Australian Defence and Equipment Exhibition staged at the Canberra showground.

For what was billed as a non-violent protest against a gathering of the merchants of death, this featured much violence and numerous arrests.

Even Nuclear Disarmament Party Senator Jo Valentine remarked that some of those protesting seemed to be operating under a different definition of non-violence.

But to this day neither Canberra or any other Australian city has hosted a major defence exhibition along the lines of AIDEX. It’s simply more trouble than it’s worth. Australia’s principal defence showcase is now the less provocatively titled Australian International Airshow, staged at Avalon outside Melbourne.