20/09/2019
As thousands of people across Australia walk off work and school today to demand climate action, Adani will be in Brisbane Magistrates Court for allegedly providing false and misleading information to the Queensland government covering up land clearing at the Carmichael mine.
Rallies for the Global Climate Strike will take place in more than 100 Australian cities and towns, with participants demanding stronger climate action from the Australian government. The events are timed to coincide wit the United Nations Climate Action Summit in three days, an event Scott Morrison has declined to attend.
The rallies also take place one day after Anastacia Palaszczuk introduced a bill to the Queensland parliament outlawing the use of lock-on devices of the type often used in environmental protests.
Frontline Action on Coal spokesperson Andy Paine said “the Queensland government is trying to claim environmental activists are causing a threat to safety by locking themselves to machinery, even though they haven’t cited a single recorded injury from these devices. But Australians know the real threat to our safety is a government that refuses to take meaningful climate action, even in the face of extreme weather events predicted by scientists as part of climate breakdown.
“If the Queensland government is concerned with ‘a small cohort of individuals putting the safety of others at risk’, they would do well to pop in to court tomorrow where Adani is being charged for failing to report their illegal land clearing. The government could actually prosecute them for conducting that work, or if they are really serious about community safety they could reject Adani’s Carmichael mine for being the climate crime that it is.”
Adani has previously been fined twice in the last two years for exceeding the limit of contaminated water released into the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park from their Abbot Point coal terminal.
Mr Paine said “the court should find today that Adani has breached its own lax reporting requirements. But in the court of public opinion, the thousands of people on the streets will be the evidence that this company has no social licence and this mine should not be built.
“The Queensland government should listen to the voice of the climate strikers today, or they may find that in the court of history they will be remembered as the ones who not only gave our planet over as something to be destroyed for private profit, but also demonised those who tried to protect our climate with oppressive laws and hysterical accusations.”
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