Margo Kingston

Margo Kingston

Co-publisher and editor-in-chief at No Fibs
Margo Kingston is a retired Australian journalist and climate change activist. She is best known for her stint as Phillip Adams’ ‘Canberra Babylon’ contributor and her work at The Sydney Morning Herald and #Webdiary. Since 2012, Kingston has been a citizen journalist, reporting and commenting on Australian politics via Twitter and No Fibs.
Margo Kingston

WHISTLEBLOWERS AUSTRALIA IS an advocacy and support group for people who buck the system to tell the truth, scary.

WA’s Cynthia Kardell asked me to speak at its annual conference after reading my Saturday Paper piece last month on my arrest.

I met Peter Fox and Jeff Morris when I happened to sit at the same table for lunch after my speech. Two double diamond whistleblowers.

Peter Fox helped trigger the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.

And Jeff Morris the first whistleblower who helped trigger the Royal Commission into Misconduct in the Banking, Superannuation and Financial Services Industry. Honoured!

____________________________________

This is my speech to Whistleblowers Australia’s annual conference on November 16, 2024


BY ACCIDENT, REALLY, I was a mainstream media journalist from 1986 to 2005 after realising that being a commercial lawyer was not for me. I began at Brisbane’s Courier Mail, three years before the defeat of the Country Party-dominated coalition government that had ruled Queensland since 1957 and 18 years into the Premiership of Trump prototype Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen. Power was so entrenched that business, police, the public service, government ministers and even elements of the judiciary were corrupted and effectively unaccountable. His rural gerrymander meant he won big without the popular vote.

I moved to Fairfax after writing two stories taken from Queensland Law Society journal reports on shameless findings by our sham Police Complaints Tribunal. Those stories triggered a whistleblower from the Builders Registration Board giving me documents revealing horrific political intervention by government ministers to stop disciplinary action against dodgy home builders. It was my first real scoop, and all hell broke loose in State Parliament. Fairfax’s Brisbane bureau noticed, and I joined the now defunct Times on Sunday as its second Queensland reporter. 

In May 1987 an explosive 4 Corners report, empowered by whistleblowers, unambiguously exposed rampant police corruption enabling illegal brothels and gambling dens, which the Government had denied even existed. Acting Premier Bill Gunn while Sir Joh focused on a run for federal office, ordered a Royal Commission headed by former Federal Court judge Tony Fitzgerald, after the legal profession and journalists vociferously opposed his preferred pick, the PCT head Judge Pratt.

I reported the Fitzgerald Royal Commission, which began with evidence from a former brothel madam turned whistleblower and ensnared corrupt police right up to Sir Joh’s hand-picked Police Commissioner Terry Lewis. Along with Lewis, four former or current National Party ministers were jailed.

Queensland adopted Fitzgerald’s recommendations to clean up our democracy, including the establishment of a Crime and Misconduct Commission, and in 1989 voters elected a Labor Government.  My job was to write a feature on what happened each week and report a scoop, easy really, since many former police officers who’d tried to be clean cops and suffered for it were giddy with relief and happy to chat. 

The highlight of my career is an exclusive interview with Tony Fitzgerald, and he is my number one hero in public life. 

Susie Russell is a close friend who lives on the Bulga Plateau south of the Comboyne Plateau where I Iive. She’s fought with intelligence and passion for decades to protect NSW State Forests. Early last year I agreed to report her local Elands community campaign to stop logging in the Bulga State Forest. 

NSW Forestry Corporation (FC), a company wholly owned by the NSW Government, was determined to meet its native logging supply contracts despite the devastating loss of state forest habitat in the 2019 bushfires. So I tweeted peaceful direct actions, including lock-ons to timber mill gates and tree sits, and published campaign stories on my citizen journalist website No Fibs.

The dream was to encourage the Coalition Government or Labor to pledge to end native forest logging before the NSW election. An Ellenborough Falls camping grounds close to town became campaign headquarters and numbers swelled. Then a police inspector visited to say the camp could break up because FC had decided to suspend Bulga Forest logging. 

Instead citizens began direct action against logging in the nearby Yarratt State Forest, where FC was unused to organised protest. That’s when I saw that my naive belief that the Government’s regional forest agreement goal of sustainable logging in sustainable state native forests of was a myth. It was clear fell, a degradation of native forests that could never recover. 

The next shock: FC was lawless, save for way after the fact fines by the EPA for breaches of environmental laws largely exposed by citizens.

Why?

Unlike other states, NSW law bans anyone outside Government suing FC to enforce the law.

Here’s part of my No Fibs February 2023 piece reporting my housemate’s creative citizen’s whistleblower experiment.

My lesson in FC’s trashing of the rule of law and good governance began when Inspector Moodie from Taree police station announced to #SaveBulgaForest in the Yarratt State Forest protesters on Monday that FC had just closed the entire Yarratt State Forest until August 7, so it was now unlawful to cross its boundaries for six months. Someone asked if that included public roads. “Yes,” he replied.

I expected the forest closure to make local news and harm the campaign. But no local media reported the news and live Traffic NSW did not advise motorists of the public road closures.

I re-read the closure notice and looked again at the map: “To be clear, the closed area includes all roads and trails that physically occur within the legal boundary of Yarratt State Forest.”

My housemate had become a #SaveBulgaForest camp kitchen helper. She’d never been involved in anything like this before, and thought that as a resident she’d ring the local FC office for clarification. Could she have a picnic in the forest or drive through to visit someone?

He looked up the “Partial Closure” public advisory on the FC site. Yes, she could do both, just follow the logging operation signs. But what about the official closure notice? He read it, and said he’d get back to her.

He called back to say the office was having a meeting to discuss the matter, then rang again to say he’d updated the Public Advisory. “The whole of the forest is closed (and) all roads and trails within those boundaries are off limits,” he said, and she’d have to “find alternative routes” to visit people.

What about the residents who live within the forest boundary? They “should have been contacted and would have permission to enter certain areas,” he replied.

So she rang the Mid North Coast Council. Had it been notified of the closure of two public roads? They looked up their road alerts. Nothing. They’d get back to her. 

She then discovered that the Forestry Closure would deny people their only access to the Brimbin Nature Reserve for six months! She phoned the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service. Had FC informed them as required? No, so there was no traveller’s alert on its website. It would get back to her.

She rang the Council again to advise that FC had just told her it had closed the forest’s public roads. The officer looked up the closure notice and confirmed FC had not given it an alert as required. After being put on hold, the officer said her manager had just spoken to FC’s “liaison officer” and was told that public roads were open, but it was illegal to stop your vehicle in the forest. Huh? 

Meanwhile I called the NSW Environment and Heritage Department media office to ask if it was legal for FC to ban access to a Nature Reserve and would the Minister direct it to exempt travellers to the reserve. She’d get back to me.

A few hours later a different Wauchope FC officer rang my friend. He said “a team” was working on a new closure order to exempt through traffic on public roads but it would be illegal to pull over in the forest. 

At 9pm last night the Department emailed this quote from NSW National Parks and Wildlife: “Brimbin Nature Reserve is open, and the access road to it is also open, and has not been closed.”

Next morning FC published a new closure notice. It did not say it had changed the order, or what the differences were. Instead it retained the now false “Total Closure” Advisory, which now linked to the new, contradictory closure notice. The public roads were NOT OPEN, as FC told Council and NSW National Parks and Wildlife. “To be clear, the Closed Area includes various roads and trails that physically occur within the legal boundary of Yarratt State Forest, which are closed to all but through vehicle traffic. Vehicles must not stop or linger along these roads or trails…” 

FC did not issue a press release informing residents of changes to their legal rights in the forest and penalties for breach either when they closed the forest, or when they changed its terms. 

So I contacted the Environment Department media to ask whether it will issue an alert warning travellers not to stop their vehicle in the forest on the way to Brimbin, they’d get back to me.

In summary, FC issued a sham closure notice and made sure only protesters would face arrest and fines if they entered the PUBLIC’S forest and that other residents wouldn’t. It wanted unfettered power to eject, arrest and fine people it didn’t like the look of, while not inconveniencing other locals. The local FC office didn’t get the con, read the notice, and took it seriously. When Council and NSW National Parks asked why they weren’t informed FC lied, then changed the order, although contrary to what it told them, the roads remain closed with an exception for through traffic that didn’t stop.

FC either lied to police or police were in on the lie. No wonder FC bosses don’t give interviews and put out blather statements instead.  

Camp members decided to test FC and the police by organising a walk through the forest in defiance of the latest Forest Closure Notice .

There were no police present for our walk. Forestry Corp officers issued no direction to leave the ‘Closed Forest’, despite having ample legal powers to do so. It was only when we neared a REAL road closure just in front of actual logging operations that it told us to go no further or be arrested for a serious offence and face personal danger. 

Why no arrests today? Three possibilities I can think of. Have Taree police worked out that FC lied to them and that the Courts would throw out any charges? Has FC been told by the NSW Government to lie low before the election? Or does FC know it’s been caught red handed blatantly abusing its legal powers? 

The forest is not closed.  Never has been. It’s a lie to tell protesters they’d better leave or be arrested for being in a closed forest, as police did, while locals, TrafficNSW, councils for public roads, and the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service whose nature reserves would be off limits for six months are not told. After queries by the council and national parks about why they weren’t issued alerts about the first ‘Total Forest Closure’, Forestry Corp lied to them that the Yarratt was not closed! That’s a blatant abuse of power – I did law a long time ago, but surely a body given legal power to close the public’s forests cannot just pretend to exercise it to arbitrarily target people without any legal authority. 
I’d angsted for a week on whether to risk arrest by joining the walk-in to live-tweet it, and wrote a piece to explain to myself why I’d do it again:  

“I was 18 the first and only time I did something expecting to be arrested. On October 22, 1977, I joined other students at Queensland University to go to King George Square in Brisbane’s CBD – engineering students rained water balloons down on us as we left the campus. 5,000 protesters gathered, 700 police occupied the street facing us and a large crowd formed an amphitheatre around the protagonists. Like 417 others I stepped onto the road and was put in a chock-a-block cell.”

While my southern peers were on the streets marching for women’s and gay rights we were fighting to be allowed onto the streets after Premier Sir Joh Bjelke Petersen announced in September:

“The day of political street march is over. Anybody who holds a street march, spontaneous or otherwise, will know they’re acting illegally. Don’t bother applying for a march permit. You won’t get one. That’s government policy now.”

I was a loner from the country uninvolved in organised politics, although I bought the southern papers the National Times and the Nation Review for news on Queensland’s Police State. My father strongly supported Sir Joh, saying “He gets things done.” My mother didn’t talk about politics, but told me many years later she’d voted Labor.

In the cell women sang ‘Solidarity Forever’ – I’d never heard of the song – and I wondered what I’d got myself into. My mother picked me after a cocktail party in my battered old black Hillman (she’s a two glass sleeper, so limits herself to one glass of wine when she drinks at all). As we turned the corner from the jail police pulled us over and told Mum she was driving erratically, her speech was slurred, and here’s the RBT machine to blow into. She held me back from jumping out and blowing up, alighted, and faced the cop. “Excuse me, young man, you must be mistaken.”

He said she had a faulty taillight and should get it fixed.

I knew then I’d done the right thing and so did Mum. She said she was proud of me, and I felt proud of myself. Something had to be done and I had to do my bit.

But once was enough. 

Until now. 

Like Queensland’s police under Sir Joh, the rule of law has collapsed in NSW State Forests. FC routinely abuses its extraordinary legal powers. It was clear felling in native forests, breaking it down, annihilating habitat for koalas and other endangered native animals who’d lost their homes when the 2019-20 bushfires destroyed 700,00 hectares of the NSW native state forest. Elands was evacuated in those fires and Susie and some other locals fought for three weeks to save her home and others. Yet The Guardian, thanks to a whistleblower, reported in November 2021 that the NSW Government ignored and kept secret the post-fires Natural Resources Commission’s advice to suspend timber harvesting for a minimum of three years in three native forest zones at “extreme risk”, Narooma and Nowra on the south coast and Taree on the mid-north coast, because “there is a risk of serious and irreversible harm to environmental values from the cumulative impacts of fire and harvesting”. In six “high risk” forests 75 percent should not by logged. Government response – no comment. 

Pre-election the Government and Labor ignored the Commission’s December 2022 report warning in stark terms that native forests were degrading so fast they would become net emitters of carbon and threaten water quality without “major intervention”. It urged government to avoid “business as usual” approaches, saying this would result in “sub-optimal outcomes at best, or ecosystem and industry collapse under worst case scenarios”.

And get this: FC – NSW taxpayers – loses millions a year from native forest logging and taxpayers could earn millions in carbon credits by protecting them. And older forests are harder to burn, ffs!

And what’s the product of native forest ‘harvesting’? Hardwood timber flooring for the wealthy, and – most of it – wood chips and firewood. At the action at Pentarch Forestry’s Herons Creek native forest timber mill I saw a huge truck waiting to collect native forest wood chips, slogan ANL – Australian Native Landscapes. 

No!

Climate change abatement, water quality protection, saving endangered native animals, saving money after a just transition for the 1000 odd workers directly employed, tourism promotion of the regions – so many reasons to stop before it’s too late. There’s no reason to keep doing this except raw politics with closed eyes, big parties oblivious to their duty to be stewards of our nation and its people.

The National Party owns the seats affected, and is in bed with the loggers and will allow no change except to further strengthen anti-protest laws. The Labor Party will not buck the CFMEU. All the evidence says no, power and money politics says yes.

So yes, I’ll take a personal stand on this. I’ll overcome my fear for the second time. It has to be done, and I want to do my bit.
Although we’d postponed logging in the Bulga State Forest, we hadn’t had any success with either rival for government. Indeed, just before calling the election the Coalition signed new five year logging contracts with timber mills with the same supply requirements.

I got involved again in the #SaveBulgaForest campaign in August, when Forestry Corp published its plan to resume logging the Bulga State Forest from September 30. 

There’d already been yet another FC scandal. Greater gliders had been declared endangered by the NSW government, so a 50 metre radius circle around their den trees could not be logged. Wouldn’t ya know it, Forestry Corp, not the NSW Environment Protection Agency, had the job of finding greater glider dens. In NSW State Forests to be logged, forest activists learned that FC was searching for the nocturnal greater glider, which emerges after dusk, and found none. 

Later, in the Bulga, FC surveyed a fraction of the forest to be logged, reporting two den trees. Citizen scientists – whistleblowers – spent many evenings visiting the Forest from dusk for three hours, at dusk to spotlighting. They discovered that the Bulga was a refuge for greater gliders, documenting 23 den trees and counting until FC closed the logging compartment pre logging.  But the EPA sends no-one to ensure compliance, leaving, if the past is any guide, citizens to inspect the area after logging and report breaches to the EPA, bound by law not to enforce environment laws if to do so would endanger the wood supply.

I attended two spotlighting sessions, one with the community independent MP for the Sydney seat of Mackellar organised by Ken Henry, a fellow resident of the Comboyne plateau. Ken is a former head of Treasury who worked for Paul Keating and Peter Costello. He now chairs the Australian Climate and Biodiversity Foundation and helped secure the federal government’s recent decision to work up a system whereby protecting state forests would earn big money as carbon offsets for polluters.

The Elands community plan was to delay logging as long as possible in hope of a miracle. So each night someone would lock on to the massive harvester on site and await police rescue to arrive to cut off the lock. Each hour delayed was 50 trees saved.

As arrests mounted the first Global Nature Positive Summit began in Sydney, hosted by the Federal and NSW environment ministers. It was no surprise NSW minister Penny Sharpe was a no show. Ken informed me later in a podcast that NSW had an elaborate scheme of environmental offsets for developers, but had exempted FC.   

I attended a campaign meeting on Tuesday, October 8, when we’d just about run out of people to lock-on and delay logging. Susie asked if anyone could log on next day and I heard myself saying I could do it Thursday. As anyone who read my Saturday Paper piece on my arrest  knows I am not temperamentally suited to lock on to a harvester, and I thought someone would step in when the time came, but I saw next day that Susie had locked on, meaning the campaign leader would no longer be legally allowed to enter the forest until after her court case under standard bail conditions. But Taree police played hard ball to strangle the campaign – they refused bail and put her in jail for the night (The next day a magistrate released her on standard bail conditions). I got the call – it really was my turn. 

So I crossed the line from reporter of citizens engaging in civil disobedience to doing it myself. The experience was deeply distressing, and after 36 hours without sleep I was in shock. The Guardian reported Susie’s  and my arrest, our latest campaign’s first mention in mainstream media. I decided not to write about what happened for a long time.

Next day the editor of the Saturday Paper, for whom I’d written three articles on the community independents movement during the 2022 election, emailed a request for piece on my arrest. It had to be done, and I did it, although I’d only begun the process of working out why I’d been prepared to die after police rescue warned I was at significant risk of death or catastrophic injury if I didn’t tell them where the keys were to avoid the angle grinder. 

Then Cynthia Kardell from Whistleblowers Australia sent me an email saying she thought I was a whistleblower and could I speak to its annual conference on the matter. 

So here I am.

A postscript glimmer of hope

In May this year the NSW Court of Appeal found that the NSW legislative ban on third party law enforcement against FC had failed to ban “common law standing” for South East Forest Rescue to seek an injunction against FC.  That would cripple a lawless FC, so it sought leave to appeal to the High Court. On September 5 the High Court granted leave, on condition that FC pay the legal costs of SEFR. Let’s hope our highest court decides to restore the rule of law in the people’s native forests. 

Featured Image:

Susie Russell arrested after locking on to #SaveBulgaForest

Further reading:

Locking on to #SaveBulgaForest: Margo Kingston’s extended account of her arrest

No Fibs #SaveBulgaForest archive

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