The Age – Page 2

Reviving the race on a cleaner Yarra

In Environment, The Age on February 22, 2015

LAST year, Matt Stewart rode along the Yarra every morning, from his home in South Yarra to his work at Melbourne University. As he pedalled, he wondered about the condition of our river. Could it be improved?

He began researching the Yarra’s urban history. “I found a story from 1932 which spoke about an iconic race where 100,000 people lined the banks,” he says. “It was the biggest open water swimming event in the world.”

With a group of friends, Stewart resolved to revive the “Race to Prince’s Bridge”.

Their organisation, Yarra Swim Co, is aiming for the race to begin again next year. “It’s ambitious,” he says. “We want to inspire people to see the river as a place for recreation, where we can swim permanently in the future.”

The 3-mile swim was first held in 1913, from the Twickenham Ferry – now the site of the MacRobertson Bridge, in Burnley – to (the then) Prince’s Bridge, near Flinders Street Station.

Coburg swimming club members who took part in the 3-mile swim, c1937. Coburg Historical Society.

In 1929, it set a world record for the number of competitors and 100,000 people lined the banks to watch.

Footage of the 1932 race is on YouTube: a reporter asks the female winner of the race – “Miss Gill, of Hawthorn” – how she found the Yarra. “Pretty dirty!” she laughed.

The Race to Prince’s Bridge ran annually until 1963, when it was cancelled because of concerns about water quality. The race was revived, and then canned again, in the late 80s.

During summer, the EPA and Melbourne Water monitor water quality in the river and display the results on the Yarra Watch website. This week the water was suitable for swimming at Kew, Warrandyte and Launching Place in the Upper Yarra. It is illegal to swim in the Yarra downstream of Gipps Street, in Abbotsford.

For the last three years, Dr David McCarthy, from Monash University, has been studying the microbes in the river that could affect human health. His research won’t be complete for another year, but he says water quality deteriorates after rain, when stormwater flows into the river, bringing contaminants from our streets. In very heavy rains, the sewer system overflows into the waterways.

Dr McCarthy says one long-term solution to poor water quality is better stormwater treatment – to capture and treat rainfall where it lands, before it is released into the environment.

The Labor government has proposed new legislation, the Yarra River Protection Act, to guard against overdevelopment along the river’s banks.

Yarra Riverkeeper Andrew Kelly says the new approach must be broader than planning alone. “The river falls on the edge of many people’s responsibilities but not right in the centre for anyone.”

He is hopeful that the new wave of interest in the river will help the Yarra’s cause. On Facebook, 13,000 people have promised to take part in an “inflatable regatta” on the last Saturday of March. The blow-up boats will launch at Abbotsford and land at Bridge Road in Richmond.

Read this article at The Age online

Decisions by the people

In Community development, The Age on December 3, 2014

It was a bold experiment in democracy: asking 43 citizens to help shape the Melbourne City Council’s $5 billion, 10-year financial plan. How did it go?

WHEN Shuwen Ling received the letter from the City of Melbourne, she thought it was spam. Or maybe it was a fine? “It was on good quality paper,” she explains. “But when I read it carefully, I thought: ‘This is pretty cool’.”

Ling is nearly 20 years old and it’s three years since she left her hometown, a few hours from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. She studies finance and civil engineering at the University of Melbourne and lives in an apartment near the Vic Market.

She was one of 6,500 people who received the letter, 600 who responded, and finally, 43 who were randomly selected to reflect the city’s demographics. Their task? To make recommendations on the council’s budget for its first ever 10-year financial plan – spending that is worth, in sum, up to $5 billion.

It’s an experiment in “participatory budgeting”, a subset of the political theory known as “deliberative democracy”.

Citizens’ juries, such as this one, are being used increasingly often around the world. They’re another kind of representative democracy, one that steers policy making away from the entrenched positions of political parties, lobbyists and squeaky wheels, and towards the considered voices of ordinary, well-informed citizens.

In Melbourne, the “People’s Panel” was coordinated by the newDemocracy Foundation, a not-for-profit research organisation that says it’s aiming to move our democracy out of “the continuous campaign cycle”.

The panellists were posed this question: “How can we remain one of the most liveable cities in the world while addressing our future financial challenges?”

I spoke with five of them, including Ling, from the panel’s inception to its aftermath. The process began in August, and in the following weeks, they spent six Saturdays hearing evidence from councillors, staff and experts of their own choosing. They read reports, did sums, asked questions, and wrangled over the answers. It was a bigger commitment than they’d expected, but most poured themselves into the challenge. Would the council act on their recommendations?

Councillor Stephen Mayne is the chair of the city’s finance and governance committee. He says there’s a “genuine malaise” in our democracy, one we suffer in our municipalities just as much as in the state and federal arenas. “People are jaundiced about politics. There is quite a bit of disengagement and a lot of negativity. This is a model that potentially rebuilds trust and engagement.

“As long as I’m on council I’ll be pushing to implement a credible amount of the recommendations,” Mayne said, before the panel had finished its deliberations. “I think that if you give 50 people a lot of information, just like with juries, they’ll usually get it pretty right.”

When Maria Petricevic entered the first session, she felt a little intimated. Dr Petricevic is a Collins Street dentist – her practice overlooks the town hall. “I was scanning the room and thinking: ‘Are other people better informed than I am?’”

She is enthusiastic about Melbourne – throughout university, for seven years commuting on the V/Line train from Geelong, she dreamed of one-day moving north. “I just love this city,” she says.

By the second session, she felt more confident about her ability to contribute, but slightly overwhelmed by all the information. “It’s been an eye-opening experience,” Petricevic said in the lunch break. “I just have so much more insight into how much goes into operating a city”.

It was a bright Saturday in September and the panellists were gathered in a grand room on the lower level of the Melbourne Town Hall. Through the windows, you could see the legs of pedestrians and the bodies of trams passing by on Swanston Street.

The City of Melbourne’s chief finance officer, Phu Nguyen, gave the group a rundown on the current budget, and its longer-term projections. “We’ve reached a level of what I call ‘Peak Parking Revenue’,” he said. “People are complying more than they used to.”

He laid out the broad challenges for the city over the coming decade, all with implications for the bottom line: rapid population growth, climate change, technological transformation and economic uncertainty.

The renewal of the Queen Victoria Market site could cost up to $250 million, and serious upgrades to infrastructure and facilities will be required. On current estimates, he said, the council will fall short of cash.

The panellists split into small groups for a “speed dating” session with councillors and senior staff. With the weight of town hall above them, and established voices in their ears, it was hard to imagine the panel’s advice straying too far from the status quo.

But one of the panellists, Hani Akaoui, an architect with a thin moustache, a considered manner and an office at the top end of Bourke Street, noted that his fellow citizens weren’t shy about asking critical questions. “We want to be informed,” he said.

Cr Mayne used the speed dating to pitch his agenda, including rate rises, more efficient staffing practices, and selling Citywide, the council’s wholly-owned waste service company. “I can see the potential political power of the recommendations, so I was very keen to push them to focus on the big material issues,” he said later. Some were swayed, others irked; all noted his forceful approach. (The panel recommended against selling Citywide.)

For the third session, the panellists were able to request any experts they wanted – among those chosen were demographer Bernard Salt and climate scientist Graeme Pearman.

In the break, Bruce Shaw, a barrister who lives in Southbank, expressed his scepticism about the ubiquitous cheerleading for the city: “If I hear one more person say Melbourne is the world’s most liveable city, I’m going to scream.” (Later, he did – quietly.)

While they aren’t hemmed in by party politics, the panellists do bring their own concerns. Shaw thinks our public transport is poor, especially the sluggish trams, and must be made more reliable. Ling was interested in high-rise developments – her dad is a property developer in Malaysia. In Melbourne, she thinks, there are too many new towers, too tall and too small inside.

Renee Hill recently moved to Kensington with her partner. She works in marketing in the finance industry, and her primary worry is about how the city is promoting sustainability and preparing for climate change. “If we don’t start planning now, we won’t be in a position to deal with it,” she says. “That’s really top of mind for me.”

This represented one of the main struggles for the panel. The council’s powers are constrained. Decision-making on critical issues such as public transport, planning for big buildings and systemic responses to climate change all rest elsewhere.

“We always have to remember that the purpose of the exercise is to improve the budget of the city,” Akaoui says. “It’s not theoretical, and it’s not master planning; it’s literally financial.”

An annual budget of $400 million takes some reckoning. Can the hoi polloi analyse it? And can they do it on Saturdays?

Professor John Dryzek, from University of Canberra, is one of the world’s experts on deliberative democracy. He says there’s been an “explosion” of citizens’ forums in the last decade, and experience has proven lay people worthy of the task.

“All you need to do is give people time,” Dryzek says. “Give them access to information, enable them to ask questions of the experts and people really can get their head around incredibly complex issues.”

The Danish Board of Technology has been running these juries for 20 years, seeking citizen’s views on controversial issues such as genetically modified food and electronic surveillance. Recently, South Australian premier Jay Weatherill has convened deliberative panels on questions of how to reduce alcohol-related violence and how motorists and cyclists can share roads.

Participatory budgeting, too, has a rich recent tradition. It began in 1989 in Porto Alegre, in Brazil, where thousands of citizens participate in directing an average of about US$70 million from the city’s budget.

Earlier this year, the Darebin City Council in Melbourne’s north convened a citizen’s jury to direct $2 million in spending on community infrastructure. The residents returned with eight recommendations, including a new neighbourhood house, exercise equipment and sports courts.

Dryzek says citizen’s juries are a way of refreshing our political realm and injecting qualities otherwise in short supply, such as listening and reflection. “Australian parliament in particular is unremittingly adversarial,” he says. “People are interested in scoring points rather than really seriously reflecting upon the issues.”

Each jury requires careful planning and hard decisions about demographics. The task of making the panel demographically representative is not straightforward. Age and gender splits are obligatory, but what about wealth, ethnicity or sexuality?

In Melbourne, there are over 116,000 residents and nearly 18,000 businesses, but two-thirds of rates revenue comes from the latter. The facilitators, newDemocracy Foundation, recommended that the People’s Panel should comprise an even split of residents and non-residents (both business owners and workers). As a consequence, 60 per cent of the panellists were male – a proportion said to reflect the over-representation of men in CBD businesses.

Professor Dryzek describes the high proportion of non-resident panellists as “very unusual”. Iain Walker, the foundation’s CEO, says representation among the 40-odd panellists is descriptive rather than statistically exact. “The test for the community is: ‘Do I see people like me involved?’”

On the fifth Saturday, the citizens deliberated. But they didn’t finish, so they had to return for an unscheduled sixth day. To pass a recommendation, the panel required 80 per cent agreement. Each person was given an electronic voting paddle and five options from “Love it” to “Loathe it”. The results flashed on the projector screen immediately.

This process – the jury’s deliberation – is the system’s promise, its claim to legitimacy. For outsiders, however, its merits were impossible to judge. The panellists had resolved that in order for everyone to feel comfortable venturing their opinions, they would close some sessions to observers. And so, whenever they were debating or voting, they excluded their fellow citizens.

Shaw maintains that when the room was closed, no one dominated. “The word ‘democracy’ describes it well,” he says. “Whether or not the council will regret it is another thing.”

Ling observed that some people who came with strong opinions softened them, or compromised significantly. The facilitators instructed voters to apply the following test before spiking a proposal: “Can you live with it?”

For the most part, agreement came easily. “There’s been a lot more consensus than I expected,” Hill reflected.

On the final day, as the clock ticked, the pressure rose. “The people who were pushing wacky ideas saw that the game was up,” Shaw says. “We finished up with a good report, with a realistic number of ideas presented fairly.”

Their 11 recommendations, released in mid-November, include proposing rate rises each year of up to 2.5 per cent above inflation, more spending on mitigating and adapting to climate change, extra bike paths, selling “non-core” properties, reducing new capital works and pressing the state government for a higher tax on developers.

There’s a pitfall common to many of the citizen’s juries, however: their recommendations are often ignored. In this case, the council promised the People’s Panel a formal response at its meeting on November 25. At the council meeting, Mayne was effusive as he presented the official reply: “I think they’re excellent recommendations,” he said.

The councillors postponed their response, however, and instead, referred the proposals to staff for analysis and modelling. When the council’s draft 10-year financial plan is released in April, the panel’s report will be included in its entirety, along with an explanation about whether or not each recommendation has been adopted.

Hani Akaoui was in the gallery – he’d returned early, especially, from a business trip to Sydney. He was pleased with the outcome. On the question of rates, he believes increases are reasonable. “The overall mood of the panel was that the council is doing a good job. We’re happy with the city and we want to keep it at the forefront.”

Among the panellists, the process engendered loyalty and pride – and, also, not a little chagrin that they weren’t given more time. But they had an opportunity to participate, deeply and meaningfully, in civic debate.

“You really should know that people have been so passionate and committed to participating,” Maria Petricevic says, citing evidence: one man sent his views by text message from hospital, where his wife was in labour; another woman was undergoing chemotherapy, but continued to attend.

Petricevic feels like she has made a contribution to the city she loves. She’s also gained trust in the council for its commitment to community engagement. “Other levels of government could take a leaf out of that book,” she says.

Ling will – “probably, hopefully” – still be here in a decade, but if not, perhaps her younger brother will instead. She, too, feels she’s made a contribution to the community, and it has kindled her interest in the affairs of her adopted city.

Now this panel is over, Akaoui believes others should begin. “I think this shouldn’t be done once in a blue moon,” he says. “It should be done every year.”

Read a version of this article at The Age online

Renewable energy: power to the people

In Community development, Environment, The Age on November 3, 2014

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 October 8, 2014

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 September 14, 2014

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