Michael Green

Writer and producer

Renewable energy: power to the people

In Community development, Environment, The Age on

Locally-owned renewables are shaking up the energy market. Will government and industry join the party or try to shut it down?

CHEWTON Primary School – student population 40 – perches on a hill above the houses of the small Central Victorian town, which borders on Castlemaine.

Before the year is out, its red tin roof will be home to solar panels facing east and west, positioned to best offset its demand. The school is crowdfunding for a renewable energy system, by way of a new scheme called The People’s Solar.

“Our savings won’t go back into the big bucket,” says principal Julie Holden. “They won’t be used for staffing and books.” She’s promising to fund environmental initiatives by students around the town instead, as well as more energy efficiency improvements for the buildings.

Modest though its goal sounds, Chewton Primary is one front in a revolution.

In a speech in mid-October, Michelle Groves, CEO of the Australian Energy Regulator, described the coming change in the electricity industry that way: “a revolution”.

“Revolutions can seem threatening at first, but they also present opportunities,” she said.

In her speech, delivered to the Energy Users Association of Australia conference, she was discussing the rise of “prosumers” – consumers of electricity who are now also producers. Over a million households have installed solar panels in the last few years, she said, and that’s a good thing: along with smart appliances and batteries, this wave of solar generation is increasing both customer choice and the resilience of the electricity network.

But she warned that if existing networks resist these new, competing technologies, “there is a risk that a significant number of consumers will ‘walk away’ from the network”.

That is, they’ll leave the grid altogether, in favour of their own generation and storage, leaving its fixed costs to be defrayed among fewer users. “This would have major consequences for many consumers and for the efficient operation of energy markets,” Groves said.

Solar photovoltaic panels are booming for good reason. They’re a consumer item of malleable meaning, alluring for stubborn individualists and climate change activists alike.

But for a growing number of people, renewable energy promises something even more: an opportunity to rejuvenate communities and create local jobs. All around the country, volunteers are planning energy systems that will be owned by their community, covering a scale from single rooftops to entire towns.

“The buzz phrase is that solar power is democratising the energy market,” says Tosh Szatow, the founder of the People’s Solar, as well as a consultancy called Energy for the People. “But the democracy we’ve got isn’t serving our interests. This is something more – it’s energy owned by people, serving interests defined by those communities themselves.”

Around Castlemaine and districts, in particular, the solar citizens are rallying.

It’s a cloudless Sunday morning at Chewton Primary. Szatow explains the People’s Solar to his audience: “If the community gives the solar panels once, those panels will give back to the community for 25 years. So we turn $8000 of donations into $25,000, or more, of reinvestment in the town.”

Szatow is wearing a blue t-shirt bearing the slogan: “Stick it where the sun shines”. The event is called “Going off the grid” and it’s doubling as a fundraiser for the primary school’s panels. The People’s Solar has already overseen the installation of community-funded panels at Taradale Primary and Castlemaine Childcare Co-operative.

The region is becoming a hotspot for grid-connected solar households. In August, over 300 residents signed up for new rooftop systems by way of a not-for-profit, bulk-buying scheme called Mount Alexander Solar Homes.

Beforehand, Castlemaine already boasted nearly double the statewide proportion of solar houses, says the scheme’s coordinator, Neil Barrett. Because the new systems are much larger than most pre-existing ones, in total they’ll lift the shire’s solar generation capacity by up to a quarter. “It’s been a ripper,” he says. “It’s employed a lot of people for four or five months. We’re taking expressions of interest for a possible second stage.”

Volunteers with another organisation, the Mount Alexander Sustainability Group, are investigating renewable generation on an even larger scale. They’re scoping a range of options, including a solar farm, small-scale hydro and biofuels generation, which would account for a quarter of the shire’s total electricity consumption. They are planning to establish their project as a co-operative, majority-owned by locals.

The group has adopted the same model used by Hepburn Wind, a community wind farm that has been generating power since 2011. Its two turbines feed enough electricity into the grid to more than match the needs of nearby towns Daylesford and Hepburn.

Taryn Lane is the community officer for Hepburn Wind. She also works for its spinoff, Embark, which was founded to help similar projects start up. Right now, she says, the best option for community groups is solar, because there are several viable models, from bulk buys and donations, to investing in powering the local pub. There are at least ten community groups across the state working on it, from the Surf Coast to East Gippsland, and fifty around the country.

The outlook for wind, however, is grim. The federal government’s decisions to scrap the carbon tax, and review and reduce the Renewable Energy Target have slashed the co-operative’s earnings.

The Victorian government hasn’t helped. Its sudden blanket ban on wind power in the Macedon Ranges (among other locations), imposed in 2011, scuppered locals’ plans for three turbines in a nearby pine plantation. Previously, the community group had received a government grant for a wind monitoring mast.

“It’s a bit of a mess isn’t it?” says Lane. “It shouldn’t be this hard.”

She argues that the state government should exempt community-owned projects from the wind “no-go zones”. It should also introduce a state-based renewable energy target and establish a feed-in-tariff for community-owned solar – policy measures that have already been adopted in South Australia and the ACT.

But as the state election approaches, there’s no sign of change. In mid-October, the Napthine government released its energy policy. Renewable energy wasn’t listed among its seven priorities. The state Labor party has promised to review the wind no-go zones and other planning restrictions, and also, to expand renewable energy, but hasn’t announced how it’ll do so.

North of the Murray, the signs are more encouraging. The New South Wales government, also Liberal, has emerged as an unlikely champion of community-owned energy.

Last Thursday, Rob Stokes, the NSW environment minister, will launch the “Repower One” project, a 99 kW solar array on the roof of the Shoalhaven Bowling and Recreation Club.

He also announced a new round of grants worth $700,000 for community energy projects. Last year, the NSW government awarded $411,000 to nine different community-owned wind and solar farms.

The solar panels on the bowls club are an initiative of volunteer group Repower Shoalhaven. On the strength of countless volunteer hours, they managed to locate a profitable oasis in the regulatory morass, explains Chris Cooper, the group’s founder.

They raised $120,000 in ten days. More than half the investors are locals and Cooper says it’ll deliver them a good commercial return. The bowls club, too, stands to come out several hundred thousand dollars ahead over the life of the system.

Repower Shoalhaven is planning on doing it again and again – cuts to the RET notwithstanding. Already, they’re in discussions about rooftops on local universities, high schools, ambulance buildings and water authorities. “We hope to get another one up by Christmas,” Cooper says. “Every three months we aim to get another project out to our members and investors.”

Elsewhere in NSW, the government is sponsoring a project to establish Australia’s first “Zero Net Energy Town”. The winning town, somewhere in the northern inland region, will be announced in mid-November. It’ll be funded to develop a blueprint and business case to switch to 100 per cent, locally generated renewable energy.

The scheme’s coordinator, Adam Blakester, from Starfish Initiatives, a charity that works on regional sustainability, says the public shouldn’t underestimate the scale of projects, and the ambitions of those involved.

“Most people think community and they think cute and little,” he says. “People haven’t yet understood that this is about serious projects with serious engineering, money, law, governance and marketing. And it’s got to be one of the most professionally overqualified sectors I’ve ever worked in – it’s a long way from the lamington drive part of the community sector.”

All that knowhow goes only so far, however, because the challenge isn’t only technical; it’s also regulatory. Now, over half our electricity bills are consumed by distribution, he says, and the regulated charges are the same no matter how far the electricity travels. Local energy systems, especially in the regions, have the potential to cut those costs – if they’re allowed to.

“Until now, regulation has been about ensuring the generators and network operators don’t go bankrupt and we always have electricity,” Blakester says. “When you want to fiddle with it, you find out it’s very complex – and you bump into some of the most powerful vested interests in the world.”

Earlier this year, Blakester helped found a peak body, the Coalition for Community Energy, to help lobby for regulatory change. In June, it held a conference in Canberra. One of the speakers was Arno Zengle, the mayor of a village in Bavaria called Wildspoldsried. Last year, the village produced more than four-and-a-half times the electricity it consumed.

“In Germany there are more than 300 towns that have achieved zero net energy status,” Blakester says. “It’s like another planet compared to the centralised energy oligarchy we live in.

“Can we do it in Australia? It’s too soon to be confident the answer is yes. Technically it’s doable, but whether it’s culturally and systemically possible, well, that’s up to us.”

*

THE chasm in thinking about our energy future can be traversed in just 12 kilometres in Central Victoria, between the towns of Maldon and Newstead.

Late last month, the state government announced that Maldon, a village of 1500 residents only a short drive from Castlemaine, is going to get gas – by the end of 2017, approximately.

It’s part of the “Energy for the Regions” program, first announced in 2011. The state government’s latest tender, worth $85 million, will fund gas connection for 11 towns across Victoria by way of “virtual pipelines”. Compressed gas will be trucked to a station on the outskirts of each town. From there it’ll be distributed throughout the streets via a brand new pipe network.

The successful contractor, TasGas, a subsidiary of Brookfield Infrastructure Group, says the rollout will cover 12,500 homes and businesses.

In the middle of next year, the company will go on a “roadshow” of the towns, says CEO Roger Ingram, to explain its offer and pitch residents to connect. TasGas is still finalising its numbers, but Ingram estimates that the virtual pipeline will deliver gas 40 per cent cheaper than LPG.

Tony Wood, the energy program director at the Grattan Institute, thinks it will be a hard sell. The institute’s latest report, Gas at the crossroads, speculates that households will, if anything, begin switching away from gas. In the last 5 years, retail gas prices have risen by more than one-third, and they’re expected to rise significantly more. The wholesale price is tipped to double in the next two years.

“If gas prices go up as much as they might, a lot of customers aren’t going to connect after all. Or if they do connect, they’re going to be really pissed off. How would you feel if you connected and gas prices went up by 50 or 100 per cent in a very short space of time?” Wood says.

He describes the government’s spending on Energy for the Regions as “mindboggling”.

The $85 million amounts to a subsidy of $6800 for each house and business that could connect. But in reality, it’s much more. At the take-up rate estimated by TasGas – between 15 and 30 percent over the next decade – the government is shelling out somewhere between $22,667 and $45,333 a pop.

“I’m sure governments must have made worse investments, but I can’t think of them off the top of my head,” Wood says.

The residents of Newstead, 12 kilometres south of Maldon, want something different. For four years, the volunteers comprising “Renewable Newstead” have been working on a plan to become completely powered by renewable energy.

The group began by offering energy audits, which were taken up by 8 out of every ten residents. Then they began looking into creating a local micro-grid, fed by banks of solar panels.

“Our main interest is community building,” explains Geoff Park, from Renewable Newstead. “We’ve got the complete spectrum of views about climate change and sustainability. The number one priority for us is that whatever we do needs to add to the social capital of our community.”

Park anticipates that the scheme would offer electricity to locals at a slight discount from current prices, while also generating cash for to spend elsewhere in the community. And unlike gas, they don’t need the government to pay. A small grant would help scope a plan, but otherwise, it would be a commercial proposition.

Two years ago, when Park contacted the Liberal state government about the idea, he didn’t even get a reply. The group has had similar trouble dealing with the network distributor, Powercor.

Tosh Stzatow is advising Renewable Newstead on its plan to go 100 per cent renewable. He notes that if the money being poured into “Energy for the Regions” – $6800 per house – was spent on solar instead, it would cut an average household’s electricity bills close to zero for over 20 years.

“We really are at a crossroads,” Szatow says. “Every dollar we spend in centralised gas and electricity infrastructure takes us down a road to rising energy prices, non-renewable fuels and extractive business models.

“The other road is locally-owned and managed renewables, with stable or declining energy prices. That’s the one we want to walk down.”

Read this article at The Age online

Left to pick up the pieces

In Environment, The Age on

Plastic pollution in our waterways is getting worse fast. More and more citizens are cleaning beaches, but can we stop litter at the source?

NICKO Lunardi, from Newport, is wearing a black t-shirt with two skulls on it. He is 27 years old, an electrician, and a drummer in two punk bands. He’s also the leader of a small group of volunteer beach cleaners in Melbourne’s west.

It’s Sunday morning and a dozen people have slipped through a gap in the fence to the Jawbone Reserve in Williamstown, the closest marine sanctuary to the CBD. Parks Victoria’s website describes it as an “unspoilt place” and a “haven for coastal and marine life”. 

It is full of trash. Lunardi picks up a fistful of sandy debris, shot through with countless plastic chunks, lumps and specks. “What can we do with that?” he asks.

In the next hour, the group fills 16 large bags with plastic waste: wrappers, bottles, straws, lighters, labels, lollipop sticks, thongs. Plus rope, parking meter tickets, innumerable unknowable broken bits, half a dozen syringes and a tyre.

Lunardi had been in the habit of cleaning up litter by himself. “I felt weird telling people I picked up rubbish,” he says. “But then I realised: ‘No, I think they’re weird not picking up rubbish’.”

Laura, Nicko and Luke (foreground) from Scab Duty, cleaning the Jawbone Reserve, Williamstown 

So in June he started Scab Duty. The name comes from the slang for “yard duty” from his school days in Werribee. Now, every Sunday morning, a small group of volunteers spends one hour collecting refuse. And they like it – sort of.

It is Luke Fraser’s second week on Scab Duty. He’s sporting skinny black jeans and gumboots. “It makes me feel better afterwards,” he explains. “I didn’t realise how bad it is – I thought there were programs in place. I miss ignorance.”

Ignorance has just become much harder, for citizens, industry and policymakers alike: CSIRO has released the damning results of a three-year study of marine debris around Australia’s coastline and seas. Three-quarters of all the refuse is plastic, and almost all of that comes in small pieces. In Australian waters, it found up to 40,000 pieces of plastic per square kilometre.

The report states that “plastic production rates are intensifying” and “the volume of refuse humans release into marine systems is growing at an exponential rate”. Dr Denise Hardesty, the study’s lead author, says plastic has devastating effects on wildlife. She estimates that in the last few years, between 5,000 and 15,000 turtles have been ensnared in abandoned fishing nets in the Gulf of Carpentaria alone.

Nearly half of all seabirds have plastic in their guts; by mid-century it will be 95 per cent.

But some species fare worse already. For a decade, Dr Jennifer Lavers, a marine biologist from University of Tasmania, has been studying the Flesh-footed Shearwater population on Lord Howe Island. They are deep-diving, large brown birds with a broad wingspan – and plummeting numbers.

Every Flesh-footed Shearwater in the Lord Howe Island population has ingested plastic, Lavers says.

“Plastic is absolutely and utterly everywhere. There is no even miniscule corner of the ocean that is not impacted by marine pollution right now. It’s been found from the Arctic to the Antarctic,” she says.

Many people have heard of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, the floating refuse soup in the North Pacific Ocean. But there are actually five oceanic gyres – rotating ocean currents – which have come to trap our debris. One reaches close to the coast of Perth. In any case, oceans don’t need gyres to have a plastic problem. During their breeding season, Flesh-footed Shearwaters feed only in the Tasman Sea. “It is not unusual for a three-month old chick to contain more than 200 pieces of plastic,” Lavers says.

For the CSIRO research, which was funded by Shell, students and “citizen scientists” surveyed the beaches at Port Melbourne, St Kilda and Williamstown. As in other urban areas, they found more rubbish than where the coastline is clear. Above all, they found “cigarette butts, lots of cigarette butts”, Hardesty says.

EPA Victoria has modelled the way plastic circulates once it washes into the bay. From the rivermouth, it blows east and strikes the shore, often in the shelter of headlands. What doesn’t get beached will end up in Bass Strait within a year.

The consequences of all this plastic are two-fold. It can clog up some animals’ digestive systems, causing starvation or dehydration. But scientists have also discovered that plastic acts like a magnet for toxins in seawater. Contaminants concentrate on the plastic’s surface and are absorbed into the animals’ bloodstreams.

“It’s not just a problem of bottles on our beaches or plastic in our seabirds’ guts,” says Dr Jennifer Lavers, a marine biologist from University of Tasmania. “Microplastics are infiltrating zooplankton and filter feeders like clams, mussels and sea cucumbers. These are creatures at the absolute base of the food chain. That has repercussions for every other level.”

Stony Creek Backwash, beneath the Westgate Bridge

After the clean up at Jawbone Reserve, Lunardi drives to Stony Creek Backwash, a small park beneath the Westgate Bridge. Parks Victoria describes it as a “Wetland Wonder” containing a rare stand of White Mangroves. It could add that the mangroves are surrounded by a wide and deep crust of extraordinary filth, in which grimy soft drink bottles and rusty spray cans comingle with a stained rainbow of degraded plastic scraps.

Most of this refuse has flowed from citizens’ hands onto the streets, into stormwater drains and then, the waterways. But some is industrial. Among the bottle tops and polystyrene, Lunardi draws my attention to thousands of “nurdles”. They are tiny plastic pebbles, 3 to 5 millimeters wide, the raw material for plastic manufacturing. In the Stony Creek Backwash, they seem to comprise a significant portion of the soil.

They’re a problem all around the world – and elsewhere in Melbourne too. At the same time, directly across the river, Neil Blake and volunteers from a group called ‘Port Melbourne Beach Patrol’ are conducting their own a “nurdle survey”.

Blake has been the Port Phillip “Baykeeper”, a volunteer position with the international Waterkeeper Alliance for the last six years. Each waterkeeper is a local advocate against the pollution their watershed, all in the name of swimmable, drinkable and fishable water worldwide. Blake has the long, snowy white beard of a storybook seaman. “Apparently the early waterkeepers were known as the greybeards, so I was in the running immediately,” he jokes.

He’s also the director of the Port Phillip Eco Centre, and the subject of ‘Baykeepers’, a recent documentary made by Michael J Lutman about plastic waste our waters. “The plastic age has really snuck up on us,” he says. “We haven’t been conscious of its proliferation and because it’s so cheap, we haven’t worried too much about where it goes.”

Since August 2013, he has been surveying the numbers of nurdles each week at various beaches – the most collected was over 5000 in an hour at St Kilda West, but he’s observed that numbers always spike at the high-tide line after heavy rain. Blake has also conducted several trawls of the Yarra and Maribyrnong rivers. “There’s an ongoing influx of them from industrial sites,” he says. “Once they get out into the waterways, it’s economically impossible to remove them.”

He points at the foreshore, where a few volunteers are picking up nurdles up one-by-one. “We can collect a few thousand in an hour, but if we get that many, how many million must there be along this rock wall?”

Dr Randall Lee, senior marine scientist at EPA Victoria, says the nurdles are spilled in transit and onsite by manufacturers. “They’re so small that people tend to think they’re too hard to clean up,” he says. “It’s fairly well understood that the solution, particularly for nurdles, is not at the end point. It’s at the source.”

However, despite requests, the EPA could not provide any examples of investigations or penalties enforced for nurdle spills, or any work to improve industry practices. 

The EPA says Port Phillip Bay is “generally healthier and cleaner than comparable bays near large cities”. It monitors levels of chemicals, nutrients and sediment, but hasn’t conduced litter surveys since 2007. Until then, its results showed that rubbish on bay beaches had decreased slightly overall, but gotten worse at St Kilda and Port Melbourne.

While the possible sources of nurdle spills number in the hundreds, they’re few in comparison with the sources of discarded packaging – that is, everyone, everywhere.

Packaging itself is tied up with our economic system. Food manufacturers, for example, face a challenge: humans can only eat so much. To profit, companies must constantly market new processed products and whet appetites with their wrappings.

Last week, the Packaging Industry Council revealed the finalists in its 2014 packaging design awards. Among those shortlisted for the “sustainability” category is Barista Bros, an iced coffee produced by Coca-Cola Amatil. It has a shrink-sealed label that comes off easily, leaving a fully recyclable, clear PET bottle.

But is this kind of incremental change help or hindrance? The council’s CEO, Gavin Williams, says that over decades, packaging has diminished in one sense – it’s much more streamlined. To save money, businesses try to limit its cost and weight.

This innovation doesn’t always boost recycling rates, however. Lightweight plastic containers – soft films, pouches and shrink labels – are increasingly replacing glass, aluminium and steel. The latter group is more readily recyclable.

Williams contends that packaging trends are a symptom of demographic and social change. In the food industry, single-serve packs are on the rise. Smaller households want “ready-to-eat quantities that suit their purposes”, he says. Working parents want quick, microwavable meals. “Yes, there is more packaging,” Williams says, “but that’s not because the industry is inflicting it. The industry didn’t create those trends; it is responding to them.”

While the plastic in our waterways accumulates, however, our leaders dither. State and federal governments have completed a three-year consultation process to devise a national anti-litter policy. Ten models were considered, including a government-funded campaign, a voluntary industry scheme, a flat fee on all packaging manufacturers and a container deposit scheme (such as the popular 10 cent system in South Australia). 

In April, all state and federal environment ministers met to consider the options, but they deferred a decision. Five months later, there has been no progress. The final policy recommendations have not yet been made public.

The Victorian environment minister Ryan Smith says his government has funded a dozen new litter traps, more recycling bins and litter prevention officers at the EPA. It supports a national container deposit scheme, as does the state Labor party.

But a national scheme won’t happen, because the Queensland government opposes it.

Jeff Angel is the convenor of the Boomerang Alliance, a collection of environment groups campaigning for strong government regulations. “The vast majority of the community want this plastic pollution problem solved,” he says. “Consequently, they’re willing to support things like container deposits, banning lightweight plastic bags and the removal of plastic micro beads from soaps and shampoos.”

The industry favours a voluntary scheme administered through the Australian Packaging Covenant, which is signed by over 900 businesses. It has consistently campaigned against container deposit schemes. In early 2013, legal action by Coca-Cola Amatil put a temporary halt to the Northern Territory’s cash for containers program.

Several policy reviews have found that deposit schemes are among the most expensive anti-littering measures. Even so, the recent CSIRO research found strong evidence that South Australia’s scheme is effective. There, drink containers are three times less common in litter surveys than in other states.

The Victorian government spends about $80 million each year cleaning up rubbish. A large number of submissions to the federal policy process stated that industry should bear more of the burden for litter.

By that view, public money spent on packaging waste can be understood as a subsidy: companies profit from selling a convenient, single-use product, while taxpayers and marine life pick up the costs – if they’re picked up at all.

The Packaging Council argues that’s a mistaken view of the problem: while companies must do what they can, the balance of responsibility lies with individuals.

“What do you do about the person who goes out drinking beer on a Friday night and drops their bottle in the street?” Williams says. “I think it’s a bit of a stretch to say the company is responsible.

“Litter is a behavioural issue. In the long run, the only way you can change it is by consistent educational campaigns – not just for one or two years, but for a decade.”

Luke, from Scab Duty, cleaning up rubbish at Jawbone Reserve, Williamstown

On that Sunday morning, before they began the “nurdle survey”, the volunteers from Port Melbourne Beach Patrol cleaned up a 70-metre stretch of sandy riverfront on the Yarra. In an hour, they collected enough rubbish to fill twenty green shopping bags (polystyrene was particularly prominent).

Like Scab Duty, Beach Patrol is powered by concerned citizens. And much like the plastic problem, it has been growing exponentially. In 2009, the first group was founded in Middle Park. At the beginning of this year, there were five patrols at different bay beaches. By the years’ end there will be 14, stretching as far south as Chelsea. 

Terry Lobert, an IT project manager and the president of Beach Patrol, says volunteers come from all ages and backgrounds. Mostly they aren’t stereotypical greenies. “Plastic debris seems to worry everyone, which is good,” he says. Lobert co-founded the St Kilda chapter, where about three-dozen volunteers show up on the second Saturday of every month.

Beach Patrol is tallying its results for the year so far, in volunteer hours (over 1200) shopping bags of rubbish (over 900) and kilograms collected (nearly 3500).

“We’re collecting all this data to drive for change,” Lobert says. “Governments at all three levels could do lots of things that would solve the problem quite dramatically.”

He plumps for several policies: cash for containers, direct bans on plastic bags, straws and other single-use items, and more litter traps on stormwater drains, as well as public education campaigns. There’s no time to waste.

“In my ideal world there are no Beach Patrols because they’re not needed,” he says. “I don’t want to be doing this forever.”

Read an edited version of this article at The Age online

Mining morality or vilifying coal?

In Environment, Social justice, The Age on

Churches, universities, superannuation funds – they’re beginning to divest from fossil fuels. And the mining industry doesn’t like it.

IN mid-July, the peak body of the Uniting Church in Australia voted to sell its investments in fossil fuels. The decision was available online for anyone who cared to peruse its minutes, but the church didn’t get around to issuing a media release until a month and a half later, on the last Friday afternoon in August.

“We didn’t think it was the most earth-shattering news, because it’s a pretty mainstream issue in the Uniting Church now,” explains the church’s president, Reverend Professor Andrew Dutney. Yet its resolution included a moral claim that may be confronting for most Australians, who, by way of their superannuation funds – at the very least – own a stake in coal, oil or gas projects.

“Further investment in the extraction of fossil fuels contributes to, and makes it more difficult to address climate change,” the church states. Given the harm climate change will cause, “further investment and extraction is unethical”. “A number of people have found that to be a strong statement,” Dutney says. “But it’s very hard to argue against.”

Australians have two key facts to consider, he says: we’re among the world’s highest emitters of carbon dioxide, per person; and on top of that, we have enormous reserves of coal set to be exported for electricity generation.

“If we were to extract and burn all those reserves, then global warming will be much more disastrous for the poorer nations who are our neighbours.”

Since its belated media release, the church has been overwhelmed by the public response. News of its decision had “all but gone viral” on social media, Dutney says. “The reaction has been remarkable – I can’t remember a statement of ours having this kind of impact. It has made us realise that there are a lot of people who think this really is a big deal.”

The church’s decision is the latest move in the dizzying campaign for divestment from fossil fuels, which began in United States in late 2012, spurred by the writer and environmentalist Bill McKibben and his activist group 350.org.

McKibben toured Australia in mid-2013 and since then, advocates for divestment have emerged wherever institutions and individuals are investing their money. There are dozens of campaigns targeting universities, churches, councils, superannuation funds and banks.

In Australia, there are divestment campaigns at 19 universities, including the University of Melbourne, Monash, Latrobe and RMIT, calling for the institutions to sell whatever investments they have in fossil fuel companies.

Off campus, nearly 1000 residents in Melbourne’s inner north have petitioned Moreland City Council to go fossil free. And following a campaign headed by 350.org, UniSuper has just launched its revamped “sustainable investment” fund. It now screens out all fossil fuel companies, including the utilities Origin and AGL. On Friday, HESTA, the health industry superannuation fund, announced that it would restrict its investments in coal for electricity across its entire portfolio. It is the first Australian super fund to do so.

Thea Omerod, chair of the Australian Religious Response to Climate Change, says “a whole swag” of church organisations have pledged to divest, or are considering it: “They’ll be coming thick and fast.”

In July, the World Council of Churches, an umbrella group representing over half a billion Christians, announced its plans to fully divest from fossil fuels. The same month, the Anglican Church of Australia passed a motion encouraging its diocese to divest. A global campaign for the Vatican to divest has just been launched.

Father Brian Lucas, general secretary of the Australian Catholic Bishops’ Conference, says divestment is “actively being researched and considered” by the Catholic Church, but it will be hard to reach a clear resolution. “It’s too simplistic to say you can’t invest in coal mining companies – there are other factors to do with how emissions are mitigated,” he says.

The proliferating calls for divestment have also prompted an increasingly vocal counter-campaign – extolling the virtues of coal in particular – led by the mining industry and championed by Prime Minister Tony Abbott.

At a mining industry dinner at Parliament House in May, the Prime Minister said his job in government “is to keep mining strong” and that it is “particularly important that we do not demonise the coal industry”. He said the fundamental problem with the carbon tax was that it promoted the idea that coal should be left in the ground. “Well really and truly, I can think of few things more damaging to our future,” he said. The Prime Minister did not mention climate change.

Charlotte Wood, the campaigns director for 350.org in Australia, says the divestment movement is growing precisely because of that kind of attitude.

“We’ve tried for many years to get ambitious political action on climate change, but until we address the influence of the fossil fuel industry on our political decision makers we’re not going to see the change we need in the time we’ve got left,” she says.

“Divestment is about trying to unlock the deadlock that shackles our leaders to the fossil fuel industry. And it’s about speaking to the industry in the only language they understand, which is money. It really does have the power to erode the industry’s social license to profit from wrecking the planet.”

Researchers from Oxford University released an analysis of the campaign last October. They concluded that divestment would have little direct effect on companies and their share prices, although some coal businesses were vulnerable.

The report, funded by World Wildlife Fund UK, said the movement’s real power lies in its ability to stigmatise the industry. “In almost every divestment campaign we reviewed, from Darfur to adult services, from tobacco to South Africa, divestment campaigns were successful in lobbying for restrictive legislation affecting stigmatised firms.”

It identified three stages of divestment, beginning with churches or bodies such as public health associations – who are motivated by ethical priorities – then moving to universities and councils or cities, and finally, investors such as banks and pension funds. The fossil fuels divestment campaign had moved rapidly to the second stage, the report said.

Nearly 30 cities have now pledged to divest, including San Francisco and Portland in the United States and Dunedin in New Zealand, as well as 13 universities and colleges in the United States. In May, Stanford University, in California, committed to divest from companies that mine coal for energy generation. Its endowment fund is worth about US$19 billion (AUD$21 billion).

A fortnight ago, the University of Sydney announced it would suspend further investment in coal companies while it reviews its ethical investment policy. It is also assessing what to do with its existing $900,000 holding in Whitehaven Coal Limited, owner of the controversial Maules Creek mine in NSW. The decision followed a brief, intense email campaign orchestrated by Greenpeace, adding to a longer-standing push by students.

The same week, students at the Australian National University held their annual elections. This year they voted on an extra question, about divestment. Over 80 per cent said the university should stop investing in fossil fuels. The university has refused to comment.

Students at University of Melbourne and University of Sydney are holding similar votes this week.

The campaigns for the third wave of divestment – superannuation funds and banks – are also thriving.

One of the key advocates is Market Forces, which is affiliated with Friends of the Earth. The group has been digging into the finance behind fossil fuel projects for the last 18 months. Its founder, Julien Vincent, argues that as well as the environmental imperative not to invest, there’s also a financial case, especially for long-term investors such as banks and superannuation funds.

That argument is based on the idea of the “carbon budget”: there are already far more proven reserves of fossil fuels than can be burnt if we’re to avoid runaway climate change. As the world moves to limit carbon emissions, some of those reserves will become “stranded assets” and lose their value.

Market Forces has just launched a website called Super Switch, which helps people compare various funds’ investments in fossil fuels, based on publicly available information.

It is also one of more than a dozen groups pushing Australian banks to rule out funding the recently approved Carmichael mine in the Galilee Basin and the expansion of the Abbot Point port on the Great Barrier Reef. The project is owned by the Indian multinational, Adani Group.

The activists are encouraging people to “put their banks on notice” before a public “divestment day” in mid-October.

“The big four banks play a critical role in financing fossil fuel projects,” Vincent says. “If you want to get a major new coal mine, coal port, or gas export plant up, you need money from the big four.

“But this movement is going to keep getting bigger and bigger until the banks do what we want.”

Unsurprisingly, the banks have gone to ground – all four major banks declined to be interviewed for this article, as did Adani Australia.

Meanwhile, the environmental groups have celebrated the commitments of several international banks – including Deutsche Bank, the Royal Bank of Scotland and HSBC – not to invest in the expansion of the port at Abbot Point.

But the reality is less clear-cut. Deutsche Bank, for example, hasn’t ruled it out. It has only said it won’t invest while there’s disagreement between UNESCO and the federal government about the risks to the reef. That situation may change.

Likewise, Bendigo Bank has been praised for stating it won’t invest in coal and gas projects, but its position is more coincidence than commitment: it is a small bank and those are very large projects. Neither Deutsche Bank nor Bendigo Bank was willing to be interviewed either. Fossil fuels remain a touchy subject.

Perhaps that’s because the mining industry is biting back. Soon after the University of Sydney announced its pause on coal investments, Whitehaven Coal boss Paul Flynn accused campaigners of “green imperialism”. He said the industry needed to spend more time and money countering the divestment movement.

Asked what he thinks of divestment, Brendan Pearson, CEO of the Minerals Council of Australia, says coal must not be stigmatised. “We want to make sure that an environmental campaign doesn’t get dressed up as investment advice. We can’t let claims about ‘the end of coal’ go unanswered,” he says.

He argues not only that the coal industry is good for the Australian economy, but also contests the notion of the carbon budget, maintaining there’s no limit to fossil fuel extraction. Pearson says more efficient coal power plants, as well as “carbon capture and storage” technology will change the equation.

The industry has also begun to press an ethical claim of its own: new coal projects and exports are necessary to reduce world poverty. “The cheapest electricity is coal,” Pearson says. “If people are in energy poverty, they are absolutely likely to be in poverty, because the correlation between energy access and economic growth is incontrovertible.

“To me it is not just condescending, it is morally bankrupt to say: ‘We have it, but you can’t’.”

Debi Goenka, from the Mumbai-based Conservation Action Trust, lodged a submission with the Queensland environment department opposing Adani’s Carmichael coalmine and rail project. His organisation works with rural communities near several of the company’s coal-fired power plants in India.

Goenka is critical of the industry’s claims about reducing energy poverty. “Even assuming they had physical access to an electricity connection, people living below the poverty line would not be able to pay for the electricity,” he says. About 400 million people in India have no access to the grid.

It’s not an argument that convinces big investors either. Nathan Fabian, from the Investor Group on Climate Change, says the industry’s claims about energy poverty appear “disingenuous”.

“If the industry was serious about eradicating poverty it would understand that runaway climate change will wipe out the development achievements of the last three decades,” he says.

Fabian’s organisation represents over 50 superannuation funds and major investors, which together manage approximately $1 trillion. It helps members understand the impact of climate change on their investments and how best to deal with the risks. He’s got feedback for both the campaigners and the coal barons.

Divestment is a “campaigning concept”, he says, which doesn’t match the complicated reality for investors. “It takes time to identify which energy investments may underperform, which fossil fuel exposures to reduce, and how fast. It’s not as simple as saying ‘Just sell all those stocks today’.”

But he also says that some NGOs are providing more credible information and analysis about the implications of a carbon budget than the miners, who often use “the most ambitious assumptions”.

Earlier this year, the Investor Group videoed a mock board meeting for the fictitious “Perfect Storm Pension Fund”. In it, the trustees debate resolutions for considering climate risks in their investment decisions.

“It simply isn’t the case that campaigners are forcing investors to do things they don’t think are right,” Fabian says. “Investors have been tracking this climate risk issue for years, they know it’s a problem, and they’re working on it.

“But it is moving quickly, so if the NGOs want to continue to be relevant, they will need to improve their sophistication on the issues.”

While some investors are looking hard at the business case, the Uniting Church is hell bent on the ethical dimensions. Its NSW/ACT Synod resists publicising how much money is at stake, insisting that there is “no cost to ethical decision making”.

Reverend Professor Dutney says the Uniting Church’s decision was strongly influenced by the worries of its sister churches in the Pacific. “We’re already seeing the results of climate change across the globe and it affects the poorest people disproportionately badly,” he says.

“For us, the idea was simply to do the right thing, regardless of what anybody thought about it. The idea is to accept our responsibility for future generations.”

Read this article at The Age online

Read this related article about the carbon bubble

Let there be rock

In Architecture and building on

From the centre of a stage to the bottom of a mountain, heavy rock has formed the soundtrack to Andy Walker’s life.

Smith Journal, Volume 11

ANDY Walker pulls into the kerb to pick me up. Rocky, his bullmastiff, stands watchfully in the back of the ute. “If you’re up for it, I was thinking of taking you to Wollumbin tomorrow,” he says, after I’ve settled in. “Early early. Dark early.”

“Sure,” I say, not sure at all. He explains: Wollumbin – or Mount Warning, as Captain Cook named it – is the old volcano north-west of Byron Bay.

“That’s where the stone comes from, man. That’s the source,” he says. “From there you can see the way the lava flowed; you can see why this area is shaped like it is. It’s all from that mountain. That’s why I’ve got a job here.”

He pauses a moment. “It’s really beautiful up there.”

Walker is a stonemason. He’s also the frontman of a stoner rock band called Fort. They don’t play so often anymore, but he’s still got the look: low-slung, skinny jeans and a metal-studded belt; a surfer’s tan, tatts and a handlebar moustache. His worn, navy t-shirt is printed with the logo for his business – Bay Area Stoneworks – and its tagline: “Let there be rock”.

“Everything we build with is volcanic,” he continues. “Wollumbin erupted and blasted basalt all over this area. Drops of molten lava fell from the sky and landed on flat surfaces and cooled.”

And then, there was rock.

“Little rocks and rocks the size of houses. You get these nice shapes and beautiful flat faces. The rocks get rolled around and weathered and worn over the years. They’re 23 million years old: they look better with age.

“I love the feel of stone,” he goes on. “It’s old. You can’t beat that feeling of working with something that’s older than anything else.”

I’ve only been in the car with Walker five minutes when I find myself thinking this thought: “Maybe I could move to Byron Bay and be a stonemason like him.”

Actually, Walker moved to Bangalow, the small town nearby. It was fifteen years ago, when he was 21 years old. He rented a room in the pub.

The son of an Air Force helicopter pilot, he’d lived “all over” growing up: Townsville, Karratha, Perth, Canberra. Nowhere more than five years.

He inherited a healthy dose of wanderlust. After a long stint overseas, and many months in Melbourne, he loaded up his 1961 Holden sedan and headed north. He wanted warmer weather and open space; he wanted to be outside; and most of all, he wanted to play music.

Walker is telling me all this as we drive. He’s giving me a tour of several jobs completed by Bay Area Stoneworks, all of which seem to be in the most outrageously beautiful places along the coast and scattered through the lush hinterland of the northern rivers.

We’ve just left a big house on Cape Byron overlooking the brilliant blue sweep of the bay, where Walker and his team recently spent six months building large stone terraces down the hill. “It was easy to get used to that view,” he says.

We take the road towards Bangalow and he points at a stone entrance to a driveway, alive with lichen and moss. “That’s the first job I worked on. It looks like it’s been there for a hundred years, right?”

It does – and appropriately so, for this is where Walker’s story takes on a timeless, almost mythical, quality:

The Young Man was travelling and searching, as young men will. Then one day in the alehouse, an Old Tradesman whispered in his ear. The next morning at dawn he took the Young Man to visit the Craftsman, Tom Stonemason, from whom he would learn.

“Instantly, I thought: ‘This is what I want to be doing’,” Walker says. “I stuck by his side for seven years.”

Just as fortuitously, Tom Stonemason loved the other kind of heavy rock, too.

Walker had started a band, inspired by the ’90s Californian stoner-rock band Kyuss. The band members all lived on farms around the hinterland, where they could rehearse long and loud, then drive to the beach and surf whenever they liked.

The guitarist, Stu Hume, began working with Tom Stonemason too. “We’d work for a month, take off for a week. Go touring, go recording. He would always let us come and go, and still keep teaching us.”

Their boss went to their gigs and even kicked in cash for band publicity. “At the bottom of posters it’d say: Proudly Supported by Tom Stonemason,” Walker says.

Fort played Splendor in the Grass, toured all over the country at metal festivals and supported bigger bands like the Black Keys, Fu Manchu, Monster Magnet, Grinspoon and even a reformed Kyuss. A review in Rolling Stone declared: “this NSW quintet wield some serious axe”.

Walker had always played music: a hot trumpet teacher had been his muse in early high school, but when she left, he bought a guitar. His high-school band, Solar Cat, supported some big Australian acts. “I’ve always loved big heavy, guitar-based rock and roll ever since I was little. I like it loud,” he says.

Something else was alluring too: “I like being in the spotlight,” Walker admits. “It’s one thing I miss. Whenever we did a gig it’d be a party, a big blow out. Next day would be like, ‘Fuck, what happened?’ That was fun.”

Around that time, he began dating his wife, Poppy, who is a filmmaker. It didn’t work out. Walker generally has the makings of a mischievous smile at the ready, and now it breaks out. “We were seeing each other briefly, but she was living a very healthy lifestyle and I was not,” he laughs.

Now, however, his long rock-and-roll locks have gone. “I guess my lifestyle has turned around. I was totally infatuated with her all along. She kept saying, ‘One day I’m going to get you to build me a stone house’. Finally, five years ago she came up here, and I said, ‘Let’s build a stone house’. She’s been here ever since.”

The band stopped touring when he and Hume decided to concentrate on their stonework. But they still play sometimes – Fort supported Monster Magnet again in April – and Walker records and composes music for films. Poppy is pregnant now, and he’s piecing together a kids’ album comprising humorous heavy rock songs, with children’s themes: “Kinda like the anti-Wiggles,” he explains. “I think it’s got legs.”

When he was a boy, Walker had a recurring dream in which he found coins on the ground. “Didn’t everybody have that dream?” he asks me. “It felt so good!”

We’re in a paddock now, collecting rocks. He’s stalking stones about 200 mm thick, with flat faces, to suit the top of a wall. “Every job is like a treasure hunt, looking for the right rock,” he explains.

Rather than buy stone in bulk, and cut it to fit the job, Walker likes to leave the stones whole, and let their shape dictate the work. Everyday, they gather their quarry from nearby fields or farms, with the farmers’ permission.

Shifting rocks is hard work. It can take a quarter of the hours on any given job. Walker is a regular visitor to Mexico – he and Poppy were married there – and when he visits the Mayan ruins, one thing he ponders is how far the stone had to travel, without the benefit of wheels and fossil fuels.

Even so, he wakes happily. Work is no burden. “In the mornings when most people are heading into town to work, I’m heading out to the hills, which is what I love.”

After the treasure hunt comes the puzzle: sifting the pile for the perfect stone for each crevice. The puzzle takes time, and that costs money. The clients of Bay Area Stonework are lawyers, financiers, jetsetters and the sons of steel barons. But unlike stonemasons past, for Walker the trade is not a matter of servitude.

“Without people who really appreciate the work I do, and if they didn’t have the money, I wouldn’t get to indulge in these great projects,” Walker says. “And they usually throw good parties as well.”

Earlier in the day, we’d visited the sumptuous estate of a banker, where the Bay Area crew had built a series of stone tracks and bridges in the forest along a river. And before that, we pulled into an old banana farm where the owner, a Hong Kong–based high-flyer, had commissioned massive stone walls and an epic staircase cutting through a hill, opening up to a panorama of the valleys and sea to the east. “My brief was to make it look like the continuation of the mountain,” Walker had explained, pointing at the cliff above us.

Most times, a one-wall job becomes two, and then a fire-pit, and then a staircase, and on and on. “People get seriously addicted to stonework,” Walker says.

Stone building – carefully constructed, massive and ageless – comprises the perfect combination of order and disorder. “It transforms a house; it can make an ordinary place look really attached to its surroundings. It’s got this way of making a new place have old character.”

Walker bought a house in Bangalow about the time Poppy moved north and the band stopped touring. He always likes to have a project on the go – mostly fixing up old Holdens – but in recent years he’s turned his hands to their house, as promised.

It’s unmistakable. There’s no flimsy front fence, only solid stone walls. Pass through the gate and you enter a large stone courtyard, bordered by stone walls, with a frangipani growing in a circle of stone. Inside, you’ll find a wide, immaculate stone chimney. Out the back, an impressive stone-clad garage.

(Poppy says: “Keep building!” Too much rock is not enough.)

It’s well before dawn, it’s raining, and we’re sitting halfway up the extinct volcano. The local Aboriginal people, the Bundjalung, request others consider not climbing Wollumbin, so we avoid the ascent to its peak.

Walker had picked me up at 3.30 am, earlier than I’d thought possible. Along the path, he paced ahead, stepping lightly through the beam of his torch.

He has been coming here ever since he moved north, usually for sunrise. On a clear day, the mountain receives the first rays to strike the continent. But today isn’t a clear day; instead, the clouds gradually shift from dark to grey to lighter grey.

The rain grows steadier and then becomes a downpour. Walker is only wearing a t-shirt and shorts, but the storm doesn’t trouble him. I remember the recurring childhood dream he’d told me about yesterday – the joyful one about finding a coin. It occurs to me that it doesn’t only explain his pleasure gathering rocks, but neatly sums up his approach to life.

Slowly, the rainforest reveals itself: the tangled roots of figs; the strong, wet smell of bat shit; the bulbous, luminous fungi beneath branches; and high above, the thick green canopy.

For some humans, life is confusing; waking each morning is a rupture that never quite heals. Walker is not burdened with such fears. Sisyphus struggled with his rock. Andy Walker loves his, always has. The heavier the better.

This article was published in Smith Journal, volume 11

A stake in the business

In Community development, Environment, Social justice, The Age on

Can new workers’ co-operatives bridge old ideological divides?

JOE Caygill and Dave Kerin are the most unlikely of collaborators: one is a conservative-voting small businessman; the other, a Marx-quoting trade unionist.

Caygill has been in the manufacturing industry for 30 years. He’s the owner and CEO of Everlast, a hot water tank manufacturer based in Dandenong. But before long, he won’t be the boss anymore – just a worker-owner like everybody else.

He’s teamed up with Kerin and a group of volunteers, many of whom are environmental activists, to convert his business into “Eureka’s Future”, a not-for-profit workers’ co-operative factory.

“I used to negotiate hard against a lot of union initiatives in the earlier days, but as you get older you get wiser,” Caygill says. “And I realised that it doesn’t matter whether you’re way left, way right or somewhere in between, people can come together for a just cause.”

Their cause is the Earthworker Co-operative. The Dandenong factory, and a new facility at Morwell in the Latrobe Valley, will be part of a network of co-operatives aiming provide local jobs and stimulate a “just transition” from fossil fuels to renewable energy.

Caygill did not expect it to turn out this way, but he is adamant that his workers should own his business. Indeed, he believes it’s the only option. Imported tanks are sold in Australia for what it costs Everlast merely to make them. Unless something changes, the business won’t last much longer.

“With not-for-profit co-operatives, all of a sudden we can be competitive,” he says. “As long as we can comfortably cover our costs, we don’t need to make a profit.”

In a worker co-operative, all employees have a stake in the business and an equal vote in the way it runs. Typically, pay is much more even. Caygill anticipates that as a manager at Eureka’s Future he’ll earn no more than double the lowest paid worker. The co-operative’s other advantage is an innovative sales plan: it is using workplace agreements to offer solar hot water systems to workers in lieu of wage rises.

“To my mind, the country needs to be underpinned by a strong manufacturing base,” he says. “I think it’s critical. At the moment it’s underpinned by resources, but the resource boom isn’t going to last forever. And it isn’t only manufacturing we need to address, but also climate change, because our country is going to be one of the most vulnerable.”

Kerin is a life-long union and social justice activist. Currently a member of the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union, he’s been an organiser for several different unions. For the last 16 years, he has been toiling on the Earthworker plan as a volunteer, seeking the right time and place to begin. “It’s been a real learning experience for all of us. Now I know what they mean by the word ‘co-operation’. It’s hard work,” he says.

As a teenager in the late 1960s, Kerin joined the Builders’ Labourers Federation. He participated in the “green bans” of the early 1970s, when the builders labourers refused to work on projects they considered environmentally or socially damaging.

For him, the idea of the co-operatives grew from the roots of the green ban movement: he believes the responsibility to provide meaningful work is inseparable from the need to tackle climate change. Now, he says reaching beyond the ideological divide has become non-negotiable too, because governments are backing away from climate action.

“To me, apart from the climate emergency, the big story in all of this is that small Australian companies have been hit by neoliberalism just as hard as working people. The old Marxian expression for what has happened to small business is they’ve been ‘proletarianised’. They’ve been pushed into the working class. Everything they make, they’re pumping back into their business.

“The good ones, like Joe, feel great responsibility for the people they’ve employed over the years and they don’t know what to do about it. That’s the seedbed for a new approach for the common good.”

While Kerin spent his formative years organising with the Builders Labourers Federation, Caygill rose through the management ranks at the industrial multinational BTR Nylex. In the late 1980s, he started his own plastics manufacturing business.

“I’ve always believed that if somebody gets off their arse and achieves things, what they reap is their reward,” Caygill says. “Dave and I are really on opposite political sides: he’s fairly left wing and I’m fairly right wing. We’ve probably fought each other over picket lines.”

But what unites them has now become more important, he says: a belief in manufacturing, social justice and doing something about climate change.

Workers’ co-operatives are few in Australia. Historically, Australian workers chose to unionise to bargain wages up, rather than organise to own production themselves. Other kinds of collectivism prospered, however, especially agricultural co-operatives, such as Dairy Farmers, as well as small-town co-operative stores and credit unions.

“Not many people in Australia are very familiar with the idea of a worker-owner co-operative,” says Professor Katherine Gibson, an economic geographer from the University of Western Sydney. “Traditionally there has always been an antagonism between the union movement and the idea of worker co-ops.”

In recent months, however, this has changed: new worker co-operatives include a civil engineering services co-operative in Melbourne (which is affiliated with Earthworker), a café in Adelaide, a date farm near Alice Springs, and an aged care business in Sydney [see box].

Gibson’s most recent co-authored book is called ‘Take Back the Economy’. She sees the co-operatives as part of a broader social context in which old political categories and alliances are vanishing. Independents and minor parties are rising, and farmers and environmentalists campaign together against mining.

“The divisions of the past are breaking down given the challenges we’re facing today,” Gibson says. Earthworker shouldn’t be understood as a union or green scheme, but rather, “an initiative of a community saying we need a different way of organising our economy”.

“In co-ops and other experiments like social enterprises, we’re seeing that people crave a more ethical relationship with the economy, rather than the belief that we’re all looking out for ourselves,” she says. “As a society we need to care for each other, and there’s a thirst for asking how we might do that within an enterprise model.”

Melina Morrison, CEO of the newly formed Business Council of Co-operatives and Mutuals, says it is “to be expected” that people will turn to the worker co-operative model in response to the decline in manufacturing.

“Co-operatives thrive in times of economic downturn because they are a self-help solution. In a worker co-operative, labour hires capital, not the other way around. The reason for the enterprise is job creation: the profit is the job,” she says.

But people’s ambitions, however worthy, don’t always match reality: starting a business is hard going, and even harder if you’re doing something unusual, for which advice and finance are thin on the ground.

In mid-2012, when Heinz shut its tomato sauce factory at Girgarre, in the Goulburn Valley, the workers and the local community rallied. They formed the Goulburn Valley Food Co-operative and, initially, offers of funding rolled in. But Heinz refused to sell the factory to its old employees. Before long, the money dried up.

Les Cameron, the co-operative’s public officer, regrets not being able to capitalise on their time in the national spotlight. “If Heinz had been willing to sell to us, that would have given us breathing space. But even so, we would have been trying to compete with global capital in a shrinking market.”

Later that year, the group was considering an alternative plan – taking a lease on a smaller facility in Kyabram – when the Banksia Securities financial group collapsed. A lot of people in the region lost money, including ex-Heinz workers who had invested their redundancy payouts with Banksia.

So the food co-operative changed tactics again. “We felt putting money into a risky, undercapitalised venture would be like rubbing salt in the wound,” Cameron explains. It now uses its funds – raised from one-off contributions by more than 1000 members – to finance local growers and food businesses to increase production and sell into a wider network of stores and restaurants. These include makers of pasta and sauce, pear cider, strawberry jam and liqueur, with more on the way.

The Girgarre site remains all but idle. A small section of the plant is being used by a business that converts out-of-date food into animal feed, Cameron says. “There’s probably a metaphor in there for what happened. And all that infrastructure, a lot of which was paid for out of the public purse, is effectively rotting.”

Only a few ex-Heinz workers are still involved in the co-operative. It is volunteer-run, not worker-owned. No one is getting paid. Its gains, compared with its initial dreams, have been modest. But they are gains all the same. “In some ways we feel stronger than we ever have been – it feels like we’re doing something at the human scale that could be repeated,” Cameron says.

“It’s our attempt to replace the current distribution system, which is dominated by the supermarket oligopoly. Like a lot of big ideas, it isn’t going to deliver in five minutes.”

Both the Goulburn Valley Food Co-operative and the Earthworker Co-operative were inspired by the Mondragon co-operatives from the Basque country, in Spain.

Beginning with two-dozen workers making paraffin stoves in 1956, the Mondragon Co-operative Corporation now comprises a web of 289 businesses including a university and a bank, 110 of which are owned by their workers. The group employs over 80,000 people, and it has proved comparably resilient throughout the deep recession in Spain.

“It’s been a successful model of regional development and it has inspired a lot of people more recently, especially in areas where companies have moved on and left whole workforces abandoned,” Professor Gibson says.

For instance, the Evergreen Co-operatives in Cleveland, Ohio, which formed a cluster of laundry, urban farming and solar panel installation co-operatives beginning in 2009. So far, their growth has been far slower than anticipated, and few jobs have been created.

The journey for Earthworker has been protracted. But it has now negotiated clauses in a range of Enterprise Bargaining Agreements, including a university, a council, and a community sector agency, which allow employees to salary sacrifice for its hot water systems.

“We use the agreement as the means to distribute the goods – that’s never been done before,” Kerin explains. “It’s a world-first. We build the demand side and manufacture into it.”

As with the Mondragon model, Earthworker will be a central co-operative that provides finance, training and support for subsidiaries, such as Eureka’s Future and the engineering services co-operative.

Recently, the group raised nearly $80,000 in a fortnight-long crowdfunding campaign for Eureka’s Future. “That just shows that people aren’t waiting for governments because, crikey, we can’t wait any longer!” he says.

His ultimate vision is to offer childcare and housing, via co-operatives, as a part of their job. They’d be part of a growing “social sector” in the economy: “We would be manufacturing the things the country needs in terms of jobs and climate: the new green electricity, water and mass-transit grid. Three decades of that work will see this country prosper.”

As a businessman, Caygill is rather more circumspect. “We’ve got this transition period now where it can all fall down, or it can get stronger and bigger,” he says.

Until three years ago, Everlast was in operation 24 hours a day, 6 days a week. It employed 45 people. But that ended overnight when the then federal Labor government cut rebates for solar hot water units. “It’s been a real struggle ever since,” Caygill says. Now he employs only ten, but believes Eureka’s Future can re-create the old jobs within 12 months.

He says that while his views on politics haven’t changed, he’s been troubled by the decline of manufacturing, the growing influence of large, footloose corporations, and the casualisation of the workforce.

“One of the only ways people can make money [in manufacturing] now is to exploit the workers and drag down the costs. That’s the reality of it,” he says.

“I think everybody deserves to make a decent living. That should be a God-given right in this country, and it isn’t. We need to try to change that. And when you address both manufacturing and climate change, the beauty of it is that there can’t be any opposition. It’s unique because it brings everybody together.”

Caring for the carers

WHEN Robyn Kaczmarek began working on a casual contract for a community care agency, visiting elderly people in their homes, she didn’t like the way she was treated. “It’s a poor quality, low-paying job. It’s really, really hard work and you’re usually alone,” she says. “The people at the bottom don’t have any say and that was really disheartening.”

She also observed that it was bad for the clients too – high staff turnover and poor communication undermined the continuity and quality of care.

Home support workers are “already economically marginalised”, says Melina Morrison, from the Business Council of Co-operatives and Mutuals. They’re often women from non-English speaking backgrounds, or older women returning to work part-time.

“Aged care workers are a forgotten bunch,” Kaczmarek says. “Nobody is looking after them.”

Rather than put up with it, she founded a worker-owned business. Co-operative Home Care is based on successful models in the USA and UK. After two years planning, it began operating last October. The workers are based in Sydney’s inner-west and south-west, employing 20 people and growing quickly, with plans to expand into a network of linked home-care and day-care centres.

For now, management, administrative staff and carers all receive the same rate of pay. Each worker gets one vote and the books are open so everyone knows how the money comes and goes.

Kaczmarek says the upside is clear for co-op workers: comparatively higher wages, more training, and the opportunity to take on different roles in the business. “The other benefit is that they’re supported,” she says. “They’re not alone in the job, which otherwise doesn’t happen in this industry.”

Read this article at The Age online.

Read ‘The Co-operation’, a related article about the Goulburn Valley Food Cooperative.