Wanted - Governments with a solar vision

Vanguard November 2012 p. 12
by Ned K.

“Wanted – Governments With A Solar Vision” was one of the many placards held by 70 inspiring people as they met about 1,000 supporters in Rundle Park Adelaide, the finish line for their 320 kilometre walk from Port Augusta to Adelaide.

 

The idea for their walk came from Gandhi’s famous salt march in India during the Indian people’s struggle for independence against British colonialism.

The walk was to raise awareness of the Port Augusta community’s campaign for a solar thermal power station to replace the brown coal fired power stations at Port Augusta. The 70 people began their walk on16 September and reached Adelaide on Sunday 30 September, where their numbers were swelled by about 1000 supporters who then marched through the streets of Adelaide. The mood of the people was one of optimism and determination.

Speakers at the march included the Mayor of Port Augusta who highlighted the human cost of the coal fired power stations (Port Augusta has a very high incidence of respiratory illness and lung cancer), a power station worker and a young person who had quit their job in WA to participate in the walk for solar thermal.

 

A symbolic struggle

Although a small town in the scheme of things, the Port Augusta community’s struggle for a solar thermal symbolises the stark choice facing the Australian people and indeed humanity.

That choice is between a sustainable future based on renewable energy, or submission to the interests of the still dominant fossil fuel economy developed by the economic system of capitalism in its moribund imperialist stage.

The moribund nature of the system can be seen in microcosm in this small community’s struggle for renewable energy. The current owner of the power stations, Alinta, is trapped by its own profit motive and will only build a solar thermal plant if it receives financial support from both state and federal governments.

The governments, at both levels, are paralysed by their economic rationalist imperative to make a surplus, and economic neo-liberalism ideology to allow the ‘free market’ to determine Australia’s energy future. The federal government has withdrawn financial support to close down the coal fired power stations, while the state government is supporting a gas fired (carbon pollution) power station on the basis of cost in preference to solar thermal.

So in both cases, both governments put the long term needs of the people and planet in second place to short term electoral driven solutions.

The people involved in the renewable power for Port Augusta walk and the thousands supporting them in ‘sympathy rallies’ across Australia on 30 September are showing the way forward, which is for the people to organise and take collective action to win a better future.