The powerful mining lobby is considering whether to join the push by resource industries to ban environmental boycott campaigns as it battles an escalating grassroots movement calling for banks, superannuation funds and institutions to ditch fossil fuel investments.
The Minerals Council of Australia, which this week began its own
Australians for Coal social media and lobbying campaign to argue the benefits of continued coalmining, has previously attacked green extremists who have moved
from genuine protest to dangerous and unlawful civil disobedience, saying the "extremists" would be facing the full force of the law if they were not exempted from the ban on so-called secondary boycotts under competition laws.
The mining industry has also begun lobbying investor and superannuation funds to provide information to counter the push by organisations including
350.org for them to divest from fossil fuel companies. The higher education superfund
Unisuper which has $40bn in funds under management has announced it will exclude fossil fuel from its socially responsible investment options.
A spokesman for the Minerals Council said the organisation was examining an issues paper from the governments review of competition law to decide whether it would make a submission, and whether it would argue the divestment campaign could also be considered a secondary boycott.
Other resource industries, including the forestry and resource groups, are arguing that environmental groups should no longer be exempt from Australias competition law ban on so-called secondary boycotts actions that try to stop a third person buying goods from another. And it also supports the argument that more safeguards are needed to ensure the truthfulness of information supplied during activist campaigns.
In
an article for the Guardian, the nobel laureate Desmond Tutu called for an apartheid-style boycott of fossil fuel investments. The 350.org group is leading a worldwide grassroots campaign to push public institutions, super funds, inidivudals and banks to move money away from fossil fuels.
It lists nine US colleges and universities, more than 20 US cities, 26 churches including the Uniting Church of New South Wales and the Australian Capital Territory and many foundations that have pledged to divest.
The issues paper released by the panel appointed by the Australian government to review competition law specifically includes the possibility of changes to the secondary boycott provisions.
The minister for small business, Bruce Billson, told Guardian Australia the government had expressly mentioned secondary boycotts in an issues paper for its review of competition laws because we want respondents to discuss both the exemptions from secondary boycotts and the broader concept of false and misleading representations.
But Billson said the issue raised complex legal questions, including jurisdictional reach and exactly what conduct constituted a secondary boycott because you can of course run a direct information scheme, but not a campaign that threatens a business with loss or harm, so it depends on the conduct itself.
Guardian Australia
has reported a push by the forestry industry and some Tasmanian MPs to remove the secondary boycott exemption for environment groups because of the impact of boycott campaigns demanding furniture retailers and overseas customers cease buying timber from unsustainably logged forests.
The parliamentary secretary for agriculture, Richard Colbeck, said the backbench rural committee and quite a number in the ministry wanted to use a review of competition laws to remove the exemption and that there was an appetite in the government for changing these laws.
Groups including the
Australian Forest Products Association and parts of the seafood industry are preparing submissions to the review.
The Guardian has reported Oxford University research that found the fossil fuel
divestment campaign that began 18 months ago in the US has
grown faster than campaigns that targeted apartheid, tobacco and arms manufacturers.
The research has shown that past divestment campaigns succeeded by stigmatising their targets and exerting financial pressure.
In Britain campaigners are
targeting the £5bn of fossil fuels stocks owned by universities. The UKs most senior
doctors have also called for urgent divestment.
The MCAs
Australians for Coal includes TV ads and a social media campaign, which has
attracted a backlash on Twitter.
The spokesman said the campaigns primary purpose was not Twitter, which was a well-established echo chamber.
The MCA said its campaign was designed to give a voice to the silent majority and stop a small number of noisy extremists from creating the false impression that the community does not support Australias second-largest export sector