IT happens on TV often enough.
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Like in the BBC thriller Spooks, there had to be a bad guy hunkered down over a keyboard in Nowherestan threatening to press the delete button to trigger a bomb in a London shopping centre. That sort of thing. Then it happens in real life. An idealistic activist with big liquid eyes and a scrawny beard sits in his tent in the Leard State Forest outside of Narrabri and triggers an explosion, only it’s a financial and environmental one in the form of a fake email that temporarily wipes $300million from the value of one of the nation’s most watched companies, Whitehaven Coal.
And suddenly the boy from Newcastle is a hero to the greenies and an irresponsible devil incarnate to the pinstriped set, who want him hung drawn and quartered for daring to interfere with their state-approved right to rape, pillage and profit.
Or something like that, anyway.
Whichever way you carve it up, the story of Jonathan Moylan and his fake ANZ statement, claiming the bank had withdrawn $1.2billion in funding from the Maules Creek open-cut mine, is very much a tale for the age.
As ingenious as the idea was, it’s hard to imagine things taking the path they did in the pre-digital era. In earlier times, a newspaper would have had all day to check the legitimacy of such a crude – in hindsight – attempt to gain attention.
Even the radio stations would have rung the bank to check.
But since his stunt was exposed, how much rigour has been applied to the $300million figure? Yes, that’s the difference in the company’s value between the pre-hoax price of $3.52 and their lowest level – $3.21 – when Whitehaven ordered its trading halt. But stock exchange figures reveal that only 8million shares were traded all day, so the maximum loss is 8million multiplied by 31cents, or about $2.4million.
The real amount will be less than that, because that’s the full day’s trading. While it’s not exactly nothing, it’s not $300million either.
Moylan has been up at the forest for more than 150 days, a long stay in adverse conditions that speaks volumes for his determination. From where he sits among the trees of the very threatened Leard State Forest, I am sure he believes the ends will justify the means.
Because no matter how many layers of environmental examination the state and federal governments add to the approvals process, virtually every project the industry puts up gets a tick in the box, and the juggernaut that is Big Coal rolls on regardless.
Me? I know how many wind turbines it takes to make a power station and while I fervently hope that renewables fulfil their promise, I’m not holding my breath.
But people like Moylan are at that stage in life when nothing matters more than the Big Picture, and the desire to save the world from itself can be a gripping attraction.
Moylan’s Frontline Action on Coal and similar groups such as Rising Tide have become influential players in the tug of war between business and the green movement.
The state government acknowledged as much when it issued new Legal Aid guidelines last month, insisting government money not be used for ‘‘providing legal advice to activists and lobby groups’’.
The change was reported at the time as meaning that various groups, including the Environmental Defender’s Office of NSW, would find it tough.
Now we find, thanks to the release of previously unseen correspondence, that the industry had been lobbying the government to cut funding to the EDO.
The EDO receives about two-thirds of its funding from the state.
NSW Minerals Council said it was ‘‘absurd’’ to allow this money to be used to support ‘‘a deliberate campaign of economic sabotage against an industry providing our most valuable export commodity’’, its 50,000 direct jobs and its significant capital investment. That letter was dated October 9. The government clicked the purse shut three days before Christmas. What a coincidence.