The NSW premier has shown Trumpian disdain for the damage burning coal is causing – and it may backfire on him | Bob Brown

We know that El Niño climate patterns are supercharged by the burning of fossil fuels. In Europe, more than 50,000 people died of intolerable heat this year. And yet, in September the premier of New South Wales, Chris Minns, oversaw the largest coalmine expansion in the state’s history.

Coal from that operation in the Hunter Valley will inevitably increase global warming after it is exported through Newcastle and then burned overseas. Newcastle, the world’s biggest coal port, has become the target of a restless population, particularly of young Australians, alarmed by global warming.

The protest organisers, a group called Rising Tide, are impressive. Their colourful, peaceful and remarkably safe tactics have seen the flow of massive coal-laden ships slowed and sometimes halted as hundreds of kayaks and other craft have formed flotillas in Newcastle’s Hunter River port. As the climate emergency has grown, so have the thousands of people joining Rising Tide’s annual demonstrations.

This week, Minns wrote an endorsement for Newcastle’s lord mayor Gavin Morris’s move to ban protesters from council-owned land. The motion was to prevent any event or protest organised by Rising Tide or associated groups or individuals on council-owned land “now and into the future”. Minns’s letter was used to influence the Morris motion to pass 7-6. Three Greens councillors voted against the motion, while Labor councillors were split. A Liberal councillor said it was an opportunity to rid the city of the “scourge” of Rising Tide. Police were called to settle the ensuing uproar in the council chambers.

Morris fuddled his way through media questions next day, explaining that the ban extended beyond Rising Tide to other like-minded or supportive protesters, even including pro-Palestinian demonstrators. He also revealed that he has had calls from around the world condemning his action.

The coalmining industry bears most responsibility for both the mounting death toll and the soaring financial cost of dealing with global heating, which in Australia is now estimated at near $40bn per annum – that’s $2,000 each year for every adult. Burning coal has accelerated the rise of food and insurance costs here and around the world.

Minns must know this. Yet this week, with a Trumpian disdain for the damage burning coal is causing, he went out of his way to help ban peaceful action against the lethal coal exports trade.

The anti-coal protests have narked the profit-driven coal corporations. In this age of corporate capture of democracy, they are used to getting their way. The coal barons know they have lost the debate about the real and growing threat of global warming and their answer is to have politicians legislate environmentalists out of action. Minns has put NSW at the front of moves by most Australian states to legislate draconian penalties, including potential jail sentences, for environmental protesters. But that has had the perverse effect of increasing the campaigners’ public support.

Hence the new move to ban anti-coal protesters in Newcastle using council owned land, especially the foreshores of the Hunter River, which carries the coal ships. This too may increase rather than reduce public support for Rising Tide. It also raises legal questions about the right to political debate and peaceful protest.

In the 1960s, Martin Luther King popularised Victor Hugo’s dictum that nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come. A Rising Tide spokesperson, Zack Schofield, said that “we intend to exercise our right to protest because the world is burning, it is flooding, our climate is collapsing and time is running out.” He reasserted plans for Saturday: “paddle for the Planet will go ahead this Saturday at Horseshoe Beach, as will future protests.”

I am reminded of Hobart lord mayor Doone Kennedy’s ban on LGBTI campaigners for equal rights having a stall in that city’s Salamanca Place markets in 1988. The public rallied to the stallholders’ aid and, after more than 100 arrests, the ban was reversed. Kennedy’s clumsy municipal move provoked a furore that backfired and helped bring forward the decriminalising of same-sex relationships in Tasmania.

Morris’s high-handed action, backed by Minns, is likely to provoke a similar public reaction and bring forward the day of sanity when coal exports, rather than environmentalists, are banned.

The next major Rising Tide event will be its People’s Blockade against coal exports in February. It will attract thousands of people, myself included, who are alarmed by both the existential crisis posed by global warming and the political influence of the coal corporations.

It will come just before the NSW elections in March. Minns will be hoping that those thousands of people stay home – as if the coal ships leaving Newcastle aren’t a problem.

However, his own repressive action has guaranteed that coal and climate change will be a greater factor in the minds of voters as they head to the ballot box.