Brown tackles Palmer on Bimblebox

Former Greens leader Dr Bob Brown says that the impending destruction of central Queensland’s Bimblebox Nature Refuge by Clive Palmer’s China First open-cut coal mine will be like smashing the Cistine Chapel into the Vatican basement.

Speaking at the State Library for the Brisbane Writers’ Festival tonight, Brown says that turning the Galilee Basin into one of the world’s biggest greenhouse gas generators is, in ecological terms, a criminal act. “Tony Abbott, Campbell Newman, Clive Palmer and Gina Rhinehart have a good claim to be the four horsemen of the global warming apocalypse”.

“Burning the Galilee Basin coal deposits, as part of the global fossil fuel store, also involves a tax of up to 20% on everything for Australia’s grandchildren as they pay dearly for global warming. That’s Tony Abbott’s great big inheritance tax on Australia and no one will avoid it”, he says.

“Clive Palmer, given the seal of approval by Tony Abbott and Campbell Newman, plans to have the Bimblebox Refuge, which is full of threatened creatures, fall into his open-cut coal mine. It’s like the Cistine Chapel being bulldozed into the Vatican basement and used for road rubble. It will be a needless national calamity.”

“Mining the Galilee Basin is also part of the growing threat to the Great Barrier Reef because thousands of mega coal ships will barge through the Great Barrier Reef each year carrying the fossil fuels to China and elsewhere to be burnt,” Brown says.

Brown will also talk about being co-leader of Sea Shepherd Australia’s ‘Operation Relentless’ in Antarctic waters this summer. The operation aims to block the Japanese whaling fleet’s harpoons from inflicting a cruel death on the whales, many of which are born in Australian waters.

Meanwhile Clive Palmer has gone silent on Brown’s agreement to debate him in the Hobart Town Hall on this and other issues affecting Tasmania’s future.
Former Greens leader Dr Bob Brown