Peter Whish-Wilson (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the Senate for giving me a 10-minute contribution during this afternoon's adjournment debate. This morning I missed out on speaking on the Electricity Infrastructure Legislation Amendment Bill, which is essentially a bill on offshore wind. It's a technical legislative change. The Greens support offshore wind and the renewable rollout. Of course, we want this done properly. We're very focused on making sure we have the right processes in place for that.

I met with the department a couple of years ago. In fact I met with them on numerous occasions to ask them how they would be rolling out their offshore wind projects and what the consultation processes were around that. I remember being alarmed that the model that they were going to use was similar to what NOPSEMA currently manages as regulator, where zones are permitted and companies can come along and apply for licences. Then, if you get a licence, you go through an environmental impact statement and community consultation. If you get to the end of the road, you can proceed with your offshore wind farm project.

Many of the offshore wind zones may not be looking at established projects until potentially the 2030s. It wasn't so much the licence process that I was concerned about, although we obviously want to make sure it's extremely rigorous and that wind farms are put in the right place and have minimal impacts. I was concerned about the social licence for these projects. As I said to the department, if you leave it for five or 10 years and you leave it to these big companies that are going to manage the wind farm process, you may well lose your social licence, because there is an incredible amount of disinformation out there already about these wind farms.

That's what I want to talk about today, and I'm glad Senator Scarr is in the chamber today. He gets to hear part 2 of how we have a very organised, very deceitful, very dishonest global disinformation campaign underway in relation to offshore wind farms.

Senator Scarr, you can spend your five minutes responding to me, as you did the other night. I'd be very happy to see that.

Right now, before the Senate Environment and Communications References Committee, there is a Senate inquiry into the offshore wind consultation process. There's a very important contribution from Dr Jeremy Walker from UTS. He has written a paper for the Senate outlining these disinformation campaigns and how they've worked in the US and how they're now being unfolded here in Australia. There's also some really good research there from the US. I'd urge all Australians who are interested in this and interested in democracy to go onto the environment and communications website and have a look at these public submissions for themselves. He finishes his contribution of 14 pages that he wrote for the Senate by saying:

The systemic disruption of offshore wind consultation processes by disinformation and astroturfing, the targeting of Australian local councils and state and federal parliaments, is part of a foreign-influence campaign traceable through local actors to powerful, highly organised, far-right forces bent on preventing democratic governments from protecting their constituents from the catastrophic consequences of the fossil fuel industry. We ignore at our gravest peril the fossil sector's shadowy Atlas Network, its disinformation assault on clean energy, on the integrity of our public sphere and democratic institutions and processes …

He has put some meat on the bones in terms of this conclusion in his submission to the Senate.

I have already talked about the Atlas network this week but for those who aren't aware—you talk to Australians about this and they haven't heard about it. I must confess, I didn't really know a huge amount about it myself until I did some research on it recently. They've done a really good job flying under the radar, which is amazing considering this US group has 550 global affiliates, all designed to try to prevent action on climate change, progress their conservative agendas and line the pockets of some of their big donors. We have some pretty high-profile subsidiaries here in Australia.

Professor Walker talks about the global infrastructure of these think tanks driving disinformation and opposition to clean energy and climate policy since 1988. He said they have been 'targeting community consultation … council, state and federal elections' particularly in Australia in relation to offshore windfarms. It is interesting research that he has attached that traces back to the US. He says:

As has been clearly demonstrated by research published by the Climate Policy Development Lab at Brown University, Rhode Island USA, and numerous articles in the US press, the proliferation of 'save the whales from windfarms' articles and memes were first propagated by The Heartland Institute … the Caesar Rodney Institute and the Texas Public Policy Foundation, each of which are or have been listed by the Atlas Network as affiliated organisations, and each with amply documented histories of fossil-fuel derived funding, including from ExxonMobil, the Koch Foundations … Chevron and Alcoa [subsidiaries] …

There is a lot more information in his submission about that. He said:

Atlas operatives working with these 'institutes' assisted in catalysing the formation of anti-offshore wind 'community' groups near offshore wind zones, mobilising 'community anger' against wind projects based on false claims widely circulating on pop-up Facebook groups that windfarms are causing whale deaths, and setting up anti-wind campaign websites, often disguised in the language of environmental NGOs. The intentional creation and fostering of ostensibly 'grassroots' political action groups by strategic communications experts is termed 'astroturfing', intending to convey superficial authenticity to what are in fact highly professional PR/disinformation campaigns.

If you look at the lengths that these organisations have gone to to deceive communities, it is quite extraordinary. I have been a campaigner for 20 years and I have to show some grudging respect to the resources and the lengths these people have gone to, to deceive not just Americans but also Australians globally about the use of wind farms. It's all provided in this really amazing map. These groups include the Save Right Whales group in the US, with its own website, or the Green Oceans group, or the American Coalition for Ocean Protection—not to mention the Environmental Progress group. Go and have a look yourself. These fake groups, set up by the Atlas Network and their subsidiaries, are quite extraordinary.

Has it infiltrated Australia? Unfortunately, yes it has. The articles, memes and false claims that wind kills whales, generated since 2023 by Atlas think tanks and spinoff community anti-windfarm groups on the US east coast, are widely circulating in Australia on anti-windfarm groups—not to mention the Facebook pages of a few senators in this chamber. Cloaking pro-fossil-fuel industry narratives in the language of environmental and community concern by slick anonymous websites, this method is identical to the tactics used by the US branch of the Anti-Offshore Wind Network.

Much of the groundwork organisation of this anti-offshore wind campaign in Australia appears to be conducted by secretive, strategic communications experts. He actually lists some of the people directly involved in this here in Australia. For example, couched in the language and imagery of environmental concern, websites such as No Offshore Turbines, Responsible Future Illawarra, Australians Against Offshore Windfarms and their associated Facebook groups are notably silent on the catastrophic impacts of global fossil fuels but they're out there saying that wind farms kill whales and they're environmentally unfriendly.

He names a number of individuals, including Burchell Wilson and others who are behind these groups that have long-established histories with US Atlas-affiliated think tanks, trained in the US and almost certainly funded by these think tanks in the US. It's going to be really interesting. If we don't get a chance in this Senate inquiry to call these people as witnesses and interrogate their links to these international groups and these awful disinformation campaigns that are slowing down the rollout of renewable energy in this country and elsewhere—on behalf of their big fossil fuel donors, through these shady, dodgy secretive networks—then I would suggest to the Senate that in the next parliament we need a much more substantial inquiry into who's behind these disinformation campaigns.