Green Sacrifice Zones in Australia, Regimes of Permission, and a Double-Movement

• In Event: The Crimes of Digital Capitalism

Abstract

Australia has vast reserves of critical minerals and its Critical Minerals Strategy 2023–2030 sets out the government’s vision to grow Australia’s critical minerals sector to “seize the opportunities of the clean energy transition”. Buoyed by an assumed social license, Australia is passing new pro-mining legislation aimed at reducing red and ‘green’ tape aimed at capitalising on this technological rush. This paper explores the regimes of permission and state-corporate symbiosis (Whyte 2014; Tombs 2012) to examine the nature of the a priori relationship between the state and mining capital in a wealthy mining region. As capital pivots to new green technology, and the establishment of new lucrative supply chains and markets, new frontiers of civil society resistance have emerged in Australia to challenge the corporate greenwashing and accusations of NIMBYism these challenges bring. I explore the resistance from land-owners, farmers and townsfolk to the spectre of new green sacrifice zones through the framing of the concept of the double-movement (Karl Polanyi). I ask how these movements might be understood differently to those that historically emerged to resist sacrifice zones in racialized and economically disadvantaged areas, and how these new localised resistance movements might hold mining and tech corporations to account.

Author

• Laura Bedford, University of Melbourne