Billionaires United Mining Services (BUMS) Internal Memo: Coal Diggers Infiltrate Anti-Coal CommBank Protests

0

A mischievous report appeared on the rabid pages of New Matilda written by one of its inhouse reporters. Not-so-Chalmers covered the occupation of CommBank a week ago, by lentil-hugging Greenies calling themselves #RaiseTheHeat.

Fortunately we Coal Diggers, Hazel Wood and Coral Bleach had in fact fully infiltrated their anti-anti Coalface frontline! It was an astro-turfing coup that would make the ‘experts’ and ‘specialists’ at the Institute of Public Affairs, Australian Environment Foundation, Australian Climate Science Coalition and Waubra Foundation deep green with envy (‘specially since Waubra was deprived of their Charity Status). Touche Bebes, we Billionaire Miners sure know how to drive taxpayers dollars further!

Normally we don’t get out of bed for less than 10 Mill a min in government subsidies. But on this occasion we Coal Diggers (CO2s of the Billionaire United Mining Services aka BUMS, aka Freedom-Market Fighters) were called upon to defend our Obscenely I mean Serenely Effluent Lifestyle choices. We even went without our daily CachéCoal Mineral/Beauty fusion facials to defend our innocent coal deposits at Thursday’s #RaiseTheHeat sit-in.

It was ‘Direct Action’ corporate raiding a la our cutiepie Minister for Climate Accelerants and Environmental Depletors, Greg Hunt. OK, he might’ve pinched that idea from the CIA-funded Trotter-Anarchists but hey, all’s fair in Love and TalkBack Government, right?

Thanks to our Billionaire Miner privileges — which includes default wiring to the Metadata Retention thingy — we already had the ‘deets’ on the ‘action’. True to form, we went incognito since we Billionaire Miners totes love to dress up as workers. But being dedicated Facistas, we mean Fashionistas, we just had to add a little carbon-sparkle to our hard hats.

Our mission was to save endangered profits from 27,750 million tonnes of Galilee Basin coal and stopping the Greenpeace pirate boats from obstructing us crunching through the reef, which after all is already half dead.

There might have been some sniggering but we’re sure the protester ‘peeps’ never picked our High-Vis Chic. Howevs, our disguises way out-glamoured their working poor ‘corporate drag’.

We have to admit those little Kale-Kittens scrub up surprisingly well once they’ve depilated their noses and ears. There wasn’t a Triple Bottom to be seen!

Some of these paid protesters pulled off the Corporate Raider look so well, we Ladies had to get a handle on our Coal Cougar urges. But we remembered ourselves. After all this was not the Diggers’ & Dealers’ Ball or some party particle bonanza for us Bad-Ass-Country twerkers of the Disco Queen era. No Double Dipping for us!

So we fell in step with the extremist alarmist elitists, strode into CommBank and occupied its upstairs consulting suites.

The Flaky Feral Eco-Terrorists Woohooed like they’d jammed the engine funding the Great Barrier Reef’s destruction. Erm, actually they did manage to shut down the central CBD branch all day long, which was really taking things too far.

When the heat was raised we repeated our Daily Mantra: ‘We are Alert and Alarmed by the endless attacks on our Way of Life by Brazilian Butterfly saving Gay Whale-Lovers and their deviant Fairies-at-the-bottom-of-the-garden.’

We Coal Diggers snuck out pretending to ‘reccy’ for nose-powdering facilities (there weren’t, so there wasn’t anywhere to discreetly top up our coal addiction with a little snort of coke–ing coal).

The troop of security and police didn’t believe we were fair dinkum Tax Reclaimers even when we rolled up our astro-turf and proudly unfurled our Billionaire Trade Union Banner.

We demanded to see the CEO, since we had a lunch appointment anyway and a lot of fracking to get through that afternoon. But our covert greenie personas were so convincing the guards led us back to the lentil-jugglers without even a smile.

The next crossed-kneed nine hours passed unexpectedly uneventfully. No-one self-immolated! No-one macramed wholefood hemp into beanies for baby queue-jumpers! There wasn’t even an orgy of same-species safe sex, which we’d rather looked forward to posting on the Fyshwick feed for Billionaire Boardroom Games.

We did make every effort to inform them of Adani’s mangrove preservation and conservation project in Mundra and its humanitarian record in construction labourers’ rights and their encouraging of children into vocational pathways at their Gujurat development, but they could not break the shackles of their evidence-based ideology, poor little Chickpeas.

I mean, surely they can see the 1,464 jobs promised by the Carmichael mine is a good exchange for the 69,000 full-time equivalent tourism jobs ($5 billion+ in economic terms) in the iconic, world heritage listed Great Barrier Reef. As for burning up the world’s carbon budget, Adani is quite correct to argue we’re already on track for a 3.1 degree rise in temperature, so what’s to lose?

Look it’s not as if we Billionaire Miners don’t have our environmental worries. We’re card-carrying members of the Coalition of the Drilling and contribute to its rescue fund for endangered Tiger economies. We’ve even got it trendy on twitters and made a complete hash of it.

Deluded as they are, these fervent clicktivists started to look like human beings after all these hours confined with them in glass rooms. When they started sounding sensible we Ladies knew our very Billionaire identities were under threat. We rushed out so relieved to find Ruppie’s TV crew. The ABC isn’t allowed to cover democratic engagement, yet lo and behold there was Four Corners. Wasn’t that good of them to still come out to work, when nobody pays them anymore.

For the sake of balance Four Corners was obliged to file a report that included our concerns about the closure of our gated communities and the censoring of our consensus centres by these Zombie-apocalyptians. They also aired our frustration at the gross discrimination faced by us Billionaires miners who miss out on tax deductions just because we don’t pay taxes, or royalties come to think of it. It’s like so unfair. Poor people just don’t have enough empathy for the industry demands made on 21st century think tanks and front groups. Not only has the Murray Darling Basin been reduced to a trickle, we’re nearly out of astro-turfing identities. Fortunately, thanks to #RaiseTheHeat’s cuddly compost cupids we’ve picked up a few more.

Thankfully the Four Corners report included BUMS demands for charity status like the Institute of Public Affairs, Australian Environment Foundation and Australian Climate Science Coalition.

But we made them edit out the bit where the reporter muttered Jesus wept.

Update: The Coal Diggers, Adani and CommBank have each been compensated 1.2 billion following the UNESCO World Heritage Centre deregistering their Abbott Point coal terminal. We s’pose, if you want to know more about these unAustralian radicals you can click on #RaiseTheHeat.

Liz Conor is a columnist at New Matilda and an ARC Future Fellow at La Trobe University. She is the author of Skin Deep: Settler Impressions of Aboriginal Women, [UWAP, 2016] and The Spectacular Modern Woman: Feminine Visibility in the 1920s [Indiana University Press, 2004]. She is editor of Aboriginal History and has published widely in academic and mainstream press on gender, race and representation.

[fbcomments]