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The Sustainable Hour no. 586 | Transcript | Podcast notes
In this 586th episode of The Sustainable Hour on 15 April 2026, the conversation turns to a deeper question beneath our action on the climate emergency: not just what we do, but how we organise ourselves to do it.
Together with union leader and writer Godfrey Moase we explore the role of cooperation, worker power, and collective understanding in shaping real change beyond ‘politics as usual’.
Mik Aidt opens the episode with a reflection on Denmark’s experience, where sustained public education through media has created broad agreement on climate action. The contrast with Australia sets the tone: without shared understanding, meaningful progress stalls.
Colin Mockett OAM’s global roundup highlights how geopolitics, fossil fuel dependency, and conflict are accelerating emissions – while also pointing to rapid shifts in energy, transport, and industry that suggest change is already underway.
. . .
At the heart of the episode is a powerful conversation about power itself. Godfrey Moase argues that the failure to solve the climate crisis is, at its core, a failure of cooperation. Not a lack of awareness, but a lack of collective capacity to act together.
Godfrey is Executive Director of United Workers Union, and he is the founder and a board member of Community Power (Co-Power). He has a strong history of leadership in not-for-profit organisations and co-operatives where he uses his skills in negotiation, government, media relations and community engagement.
Rather than seeing government as the primary driver of change, Godfrey reframes the issue. He says that:
• Government is authority – but power comes from how people work together
• Real change happens when collective action affects the economic system directly
• Workers, communities, and networks hold untapped leverage
The discussion connects the struggles of the climate movement and the union movement, suggesting they share a common limitation: too much focus on influencing politicians, and not enough on building power from the ground up.
From this perspective, the path forward becomes clearer:
• Build relationships and cooperation where people live and work
• Turn climate impacts into tangible economic realities for decision-makers
• Strengthen worker voice, safety, and collective agency in a warming world
A recurring theme is the “atomisation of suffering” – how climate impacts, stress, and insecurity are experienced individually, rather than collectively. This creates a false sense of normality, even as systems begin to break down.
Reversing this requires connection. Not just awareness, but shared understanding – and from that, shared action.
Build power through relationships
The episode also explores the importance of language and framing. Is “climate movement” too narrow? Would a broader focus on connection, cooperation, and everyday life resonate more deeply?
Godfrey’s answer points beyond labels to strategy: build power through relationships first, and let everything else follow.
This is a conversation about climate, but it is also a conversation about how decisions are made and societies change – and what it takes for people to move together.
The conversation closes with a shift in tone – from analysis to invitation. Not “be the difference” as an individual ideal, but something more grounded and collective: Be collective. And be connected.
→ Godfrey can be found on linkedin.com, and as he mentions, he also has a Substack presence called ‘The Solidarity Wedge’.
→ The Solidarity Wedge | Godfrey Moase – 4 April 2026:
On Mutual Aid
“Part VI: a case study on building power through meeting worker needs.”
. . .
MUSIC:
The episode is interwoven with music that reinforces this message – including Wayne Jury’s ‘Oil and Gasoline’, Michael Franti’s ‘Good to Be Alive Today’, Sanjay Nambek’s ‘Heal the Earth’, and ending with our new original song ‘Be Collective,’ featuring excerpts from the interview itself.
– A union of climate, democracy and human solidarity, reminding us that we either rise together, or not at all. Inspired by and containing excerpts from our interview with Godfrey Moase.
→ More songs from The Sustainable Hour’s Force of Life Collective on www.climatesafety.info/music
“The system as it currently exists is set up to serve points of privilege and broadly union workers and the environmental movement, we are not part of that, those points of privilege. That’s playing the boss’s game. We might still need to push those buttons, but that’s not the same as strategy. The underlying strategy we need to think through is how do we build and exercise power through connection, get that right first, and then have everything else flow through.”
~ Godfrey Moase, Executive Director of United Workers Union
→ Subscribe to The Sustainable Hour podcast via Apple Podcasts or Spotify
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We at The Sustainable Hour would like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land on which we are broadcasting, the Wadawurrung People. We pay our respects to their elders – past, present, and emerging, and extend that respect to all First Nations people.
The traditional custodians lived in harmony with the land for millennia, nurturing it and thriving in often harsh conditions. Their connection to the land was deeply spiritual and sustainable. This land was invaded and stolen from them. It was never ceded. Today, it is increasingly clear that if we are to survive the climate emergency we face, we must learn from their land management practices and cultural wisdom.
True climate justice cannot be achieved until Australia’s First Nations people receive the justice they deserve. When we speak about the future, we must include respect for those yet to be born, the generations to come. As the old saying reminds us: “We do not inherit the Earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children.” It is deeply unfair that decisions to ignore the climate emergency are being made by those who won’t live to face the worst impacts, leaving future generations to bear the burden of their inaction.
“The Indigenous worldview has been marginalised for generations because it was seen as antiquated and unscientific and its ethics of respect for Mother Earth were in conflict with the industrial worldview. But now, in this time of climate change and massive loss of biodiversity, we understand that the Indigenous worldview is neither unscientific nor antiquated, but is, in fact, a source of wisdom that we urgently need.”
~ Robin Wall Kimmerer, weallcanada.org
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What has become of the democratic promise?
Australia’s democracy didn’t build itself and its future won’t either.
On the 125th anniversary of the opening of the Parliament of the Commonwealth of Australia, it is time to take stock, assess our current predicament, place it in a deeply troubling global context, and reimagine a more promising future.
Join leading thinkers, public voices, and citizens from across the country for the national launch of Reclaiming Democracy Together — a bold seven-year initiative to renew democratic life in Australia.
Hear from distinguished speakers — Gillian Triggs, Marcia Langton AO, Yanis Varoufakis, and John Keane — experience performances by the Tarab Ensemble and the Victorian Trade Union Choir, engage with big ideas, and be part of a national conversation about where our democracy goes next.
Seats are filling quickly, secure your place now.
In years to come, people will be able to say with pride: “I was there.”
📍 Melbourne Town Hall
📅 Saturday 9 May 2026
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Earth Month Climate Action Bingo
Climate action isn’t just one thing, it’s many. And those small actions add up to big change.
Project Drawdown is at the heart of climate action turning climate science into real-world action by identifying and sharing science-based solutions. Tools like Drawdown Explorer help make these solutions accessible and actionable to people everywhere.
In celebration of Earth Day, we invite you to download your Climate Action BINGO card and start completing squares today.
Each square provides practical steps you can take at home, in your community, and beyond. Choose a few, or aim to complete the full card throughout the month.
At the end of April, share your completed BINGO card on social media. Post a photo along with a short reflection of your experience, tag @projectdrawdown, and you could be featured in our newsletter or on our social channels.
Every action matters. And together, those actions can spark lasting change.
With gratitude,
Jonathan Foley
Executive Director, Project Drawdown
PS. If you know others looking for ways to take climate action, please share the Climate Action BINGO card and invite them to join you in this Earth Day challenge.
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TRANSCRIPT
of The Sustainable Hour no. 586 on 15 April 2026
António Guterres, United Nations Secretary-General: (00:00)
Cooperation over chaos. We are all in this together.
Jingle: (00:02)
The Sustainable Hour. For a green, clean, sustainable Geelong: The Sustainable Hour.
Tony Gleeson: (00:26)
Welcome to the Sustainable Hour. We’d like to acknowledge that we’re broadcasting from the land of the Wadawurrung people. We pay tribute to the elders – past, present and those that will achieve that great honour in the future. We’re broadcasting from stolen land, land that was never ceded. This is in complete ignorance of the accumulated ancient wisdom that happened over millennia as they nurtured both their land and their communities. This sort of wisdom is what we’re going to need to survive the climate crisis that is confronting us daily.
Mik: (01:13)
In Denmark over the past five-six years or so, the public broadcasters seriously have played a very important role in educating the Danes about climate change. And they don’t do that, you know, with so-called alarmism, scaring anyone, but with very consistent and sustained explanations about the science. Having experts in the studio, explaining systems, explaining and exploring solutions, and making all this complexity understandable to people watching mainstream news.
These are the two public broadcasters in Denmark. That’s TV2 and DR, they’re called. The equivalent to ABC and SBS. And as a result, in the Danish parliament today, there is a broad agreement across the political spectrum that the green transition, as they call it, is a necessary, inevitable thing that must be pursued. It cannot be avoided.
So the debate in Denmark is not about whether or not we should act, whether or not we should have net zero, but about how fast we should have it. Should we decarbonise within the next five years or should we spend 10 or even 20 years? That’s what they’re discussing – not if it should happen.
And the point I’m trying to make here is that that shift did not happen by accident. That’s a reflection of what becomes possible when a population develops a shared understanding of what the problem is and the pathway forward, how we solve that problem.
We’re going to be talking about that today in The Sustainable Hour. We’re going to be exploring solutions and how to take power. But first let’s hear Colin Mockett OAM, what he has been compiling for us or gathering from around the world, Colin Mockett with his global news bulletin. It’s over to you, Colin.
. . .
COLIN MOCKETT’S GLOBAL OUTLOOK: (03:24)
Thank you, Mik, and there’s power all around in this roundup. Our roundup begins in the UK where The Guardian newspaper published a new report on the environmental impact of the US and Israel’s war on Iran. It ranks as a disaster for the climate, draining the global carbon budget faster than the combined effect of 84 nearby related countries.
This, first analysis of the climate cost, found that the bombs, the drones and the missiles did more than kill thousands of people, levelling infrastructure and turning the Middle East into a gigantic environmental sacrifice zone. It led to five million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions in its first 14 days. Every missile strike is another move towards a hotter, more unstable planet and none of it makes anyone safer,” said Patrick Bigger, who is a research director at the Climate and Community Institute and the co-author of the analysis.
“Every refinery fire and tanker strike is a reminder that fossil fuel geopolitics is incompatible with the liveable planet. The war shows yet again that the fastest way to supercharge the climate crisis is to let fossil fuel interests dictate foreign policy”.
Now to news back home and Fatih Birol, who is the executive director of the International Energy Agency.He addressed the National Press Club in Canberra last week. His subject was “The Future of the Planet in Light of the Current Oil Crisis”
It was in the wake of newly released figures showing that Australia’s world-beating addiction to diesel. Our consumption per head of population outstrips every other nation by a vast amount. It’s nearly double the US and so far ahead of China, we’re not even on the same page. Yet such is our media’s lack of concern that Fatih Birol’s speech was hardly reported.
Instead, our news broadcast showed acres of footage about Donald Trump or the price of petrol at the Bowser. But Birol’s speech contained some good news for the future.”I expect one of the responses to the crisis will be an acceleration of renewables”, he said, “not only because they’re helping to reduce the emissions, but also they’re homegrown domestic energy sources.”
The demand for grid-level batteries is sending the demand for lithium soaring. And it’s matched by consumer demand for EVs, with China’s giant BYD exporting 1 million vehicles last year. He said that in January, BYD had a target of 1.3 million overseas sales for 2026. Last week, it lifted that target to 1.5 million, largely thanks to the Iranian crisis.
Birol forecast that Iran was likely to be exacting a toll on any shipping through the Straits of Hormuz to fund its war efforts and to use it as leverage against anyone it chooses. In his words, “if your country is dependent on fossil fuels, Iran has you over a barrel. “This latest argument as to why we all need to kick the fossil fuel habit”, he said.
It’s just the latest argument. And that argument is well backed by local statistics. Our whole economy depends on diesel. Macquarie University Finance lecturer Lurian de Mello wrote in a column in “The Conversation” this week. ‘Trucks that move our goods and food around, machinery used in farming and mining, and even backup generators, they’re all run on diesel’, he said.
But the idea that Australia has to be reliant on fossil fuels for our transport and vital industries because clean fuels aren’t advanced enough simply doesn’t hold up anymore. The week before Easter, an electric truck made the 300-kilometre Sydney to Canberra trip on a single charge. And that was no novelty. China announced that its road freight sector will soon be dominated by battery-powered e-trucks with British research firm BMI forecasting they will account for 60 per cent of new sales next year.
In February, China overtook Japan as Australia’s largest source of new cars, mainly because of three EV models led by BYD. They’re now in the top 10 for car sales here. Secondhand EV dealers are reporting what they call a “hockey stick” graph growth that they have recorded over the past six weeks.
As for our mining sector, Fortescue founder Andrew Forrest is not just on the right side of history with his renewable energy fervour, he’s weaning the miners massive operations off diesel with a solar powered plan that’s expected to cut around a billion dollars in costs annually. Even market analysts are recognising that in a diesel constrained world, Fortescue’s green crusade is no longer looking like an indulgent folly. “Fortescue is potentially the big winner in this world with its more advanced approach to diesel substitutions with clean energy,” Macquarie’s mining team said.
And I can’t finish this round up without news of the world’s greenest sports club, Forest Green Rovers, which played Brackley Town over the Easter break. The Rovers won 4-0, leaving it sixth on the ladder and that’s unlikely to change with only a couple of weeks of the season left. But that little bit of good news ends our roundup for the week.
. . .
Jingle: (09:57)
Listen to our Sustainable Hour – for the future
. . .
Tony: (10:05)
Our guest today is Godfrey Moase. Godfrey is a union leader and he’s a candidate in the United Workers Union election, and he’s a writer. Godfrey, welcome to The Sustainable Hour. Thanks for coming on. Tell us your story! Why have you decided to be a guest on The Sustainable Hour – apart from us asking you to come on?
Godfrey: (10:31)
Well, I’ve been working at the intersection of unionism and combatting climate change for quite a while now, Tony. And I genuinely believe that the exploitation of people and planet are two sides of the same coin. People are not divorced from the world. We’re part of the world. We’re part of the planet. And if you have a system that sucks people dry and chews them out, you have a system that also sucks the planet dry and leaves it a husk.
Tony: (11:02)
How’s that reflected in your work?
Godfrey: (11:05)
Well, I’ve had a general thesis that at heart, the failure to solve an existential crisis like climate change is really a failure of cooperation amongst people. Not saying that we could just automatically solve it. There are real power differentials, but we haven’t had the ability as a human society to resolve the climate crisis, even though we’ve known about it for generations now.
And our failure to resolve it is a failure to work together to resolve it. And trade unionism at heart, worker power is about cooperation on the job, working together on the job to have each other’s backs and look after each other. And the degradation of worker power is at heart a degradation of cooperation. So the two are related in that sense, not only that we’re people and we’re part of the world and not separate from it, but if we had a world in which workers exercised more cooperation on the job and more power on the job, we would have a better ability to resolve the climate crisis as well. There would be more cooperation generally in the world.
And so I’ve been working away on the basis that you can’t solve one issue without solving another.
Mik: (12:25)
This is so interesting because I speak now as a climate activist – I’ve been in that space for more than a decade – and I think you’ll probably agree that a lot of people in the climate movement at the moment are in a kind of, if not despair, then in a feeling of failure – that the climate movement didn’t achieve what it was hoping to do 10 years ago when it set out.
Maybe our biggest failure is that we thought we could change politics by putting pressure on politics. What we didn’t do was think about the importance of collective understanding, which begins with a journey of education in the broader population. It appears to me that the biggest problem we have, and the reason we are not seeing the kind of change we had hoped for, is that we don’t have the population with us.
So that collaboration you were talking about, I would frame it with the exact word ‘collective understanding’. That’s what’s missing. What do you think about that?
Godfrey: (13:30)
Yeah, I think that genuinely there is a deep understanding out in the world that things are not right. The climate is an issue. The way that we organise production and making a living and production for profit is driving the climate crisis. But I think it’s incredibly unclear to people about what do we do next? How do we deal with this issue? I’m one person working in Lara, how do I take on ExxonMobil? How do I deal with the US military or Iranian oil or whatever else is like large scale issues?
And your comment about the climate movement and the failure over the last 10 years, it’s also echoed in the trade union movement. No one is alone with regards to that. The trade union movement has generally in Australia had a theory that we elect the right parliamentarians and then the right parliamentarians deliver outcomes. And that’s gone for the climate movement and that’s gone for the labor movement as well.
The problem is government is not power. Government is authority. Power comes from the way that we work together. And when you, when the working together is about putting someone different in authority, that can make a difference, but it doesn’t make a difference on a systemic level. And it’s no good having a 5 per cent minimum wage increase or some better industrial relations changes if that’s just going to be taken away by the Australian government uncritically supporting war in Iran and petrol tripling in retail cost and things like that.
So the two – the failure of the climate movement and the failure of the trade union movement – are shared, and they’re shared around this understanding of power. And this is part of the reason why I’m running with Members First for the United Workers Union election, where the contest, some people think the contest is about “just the Labor Party” or the contest is about, well,” Members First want to go on strike all the time and the other mob”.
I think you’ve got to use some other tools – or there are some workers who can’t strike. What the contest is at heart, at its foundation is, the union movement a thing that is the office where a group of officials do things for workers? Or is the union movement workers doing things together where the office is a resource and we build that up over time because if we build that up, we have an ability for a union movement that can take on not only corporate power, but big social questions and big environmental questions.
That is the way forward, I genuinely believe. Because then when you’re dealing with an issue like the climate crisis, for instance, if you are connected with people at work, if you exercise power in your workplace where you turn up, every single day or you’re a retired unionist and you have a network or a community of people. It’s much clearer about what you do next with an issue of the climate crisis. It doesn’t resolve it, but it gives you a way to exercise effective leverage to resolve it.
And if you stand up and go, well, this is an extreme heat day. We’re not just going to like let the boss endanger our safety. We’re going to stop work for 15 minutes on the hour every hour. And the boss has to pay that price. When the boss pays that price, the climate crisis turns up in that corporation’s specific balance sheet. And when it turns up in its specific balance sheet, in those immediate quarterly reports, and they see it and it’s not only a cost, but a threat to their control, then you have a political coalition that is more committed to dealing with it rather than pushing the costs of the climate crisis onto the working class and ignoring it as much as possible. That’s a really important point to bear in mind there that the workers as a collective subject opens up possibilities to deal with these big questions.
Colin: (17:59.758)
That for me, Godfrey, opens up so many questions. I’d like if I can to, first of all, I should say that I speak as an ex-Shop Steward in the union movement a long time ago now. I was disillusioned because everything has changed. The union movement began with big factories and large groups of workers and the employers were a capitalist and they were obvious who they were. Nowadays the union movement is much more likely to be fragmented. The people will be fragmented over several workplaces and their employers will be faceless. A very different outlook.
But I’d like to take you back to the way of thinking in the environmental movement, which used to be act locally and think globally. And if we as individuals, not as a unit, or as a unit together, did that, we would not be in the situation that we are now. Because if we’d have been doing that 20 years ago, we would have weaned ourselves off of the petrol and diesel dependency that we have now and we wouldn’t be going through this oil crisis now because we will be driving electric cars and we would have standalone power in our homes. The fact is that we have been hoodwinked by big oil and big government into keeping multinational companies incredibly rich and not doing anything about the climate.
Godfrey: (19:45)
We have, we’ve let them exercise authority and power and everything else. And to the extent that there have been gains on climate, it’s about incredibly complex mechanisms of reverse engineering, some corporations doing their thing in a way that may or may not have some material outcome for the Earth’s climate. So I think the idea that we start where we are as flesh and blood human beings in the places where we live, in the places where we work,
And we build relationships out from there. The idea of act locally is really important. It has got two components to it. It’s action and action is at heart about cooperation. It’s about relationships between people and locally, which is where I am as a living, breathing human being and where others are as a living, breathing human being. One of the issues that we face today is that as the organisation of work has atomised workers, which you touched on there, Colin.
The other issue that we have is it atomises suffering. Oftentimes when you suffer from extreme heat at work, you just go home and you act like a zombie. You’re to, like, stare at the wall for 10 minutes and just try and recover your humanity as best as you can. And I’m quoting from what workers have told me as a union leader directly there.
What that means is people are going and suffering in their own homes. And there are other issues in terms of the atomisation of suffering, whether it’s the mental health crisis or so many other things where the loneliness epidemic played out where suffering itself is atomised. then what you have where suffering is atomised is a world in which there is a veneer of normality still that you can go down to the shops, that you can go and watch the football.
You can go and eat out in a restaurant or whatever if you’ve got sufficient funds. It all kind of still looks and feels a little bit of normal, but everyone knows you can have the same parliamentarian saying the same sort of thing that they had for the last 30 or 40 years, but everyone knows that their life is a bit off from what they’re seeing out in the world. And I think that the veneer of normality is the social experience when it’s not.
The social experience is what they feel is cut off and atomised as to why they are different. And that is part of the reason why connection is so important. The thinking through how we connect and build power with each other in order to radically reshape the world that we’re on. Because we don’t have enough time. There is, you are not going to get security just trying to scrabble for your own corporate or political job or your own little bit of economic security for here or there. That is a mirage. It’s just not going to happen. Billionaires in bunkers aren’t going to get security. A 10 per cent wage rise because you increased the, you went through the corporate ladder is not going to buy your family security. We either rise together or we fall apart.
Mik: (23:04)
Looking into what to do next, do we need to look at the way we speak about these problems, the words we use? And I’m specifically, of course, thinking about this word climate. Was it a big mistake in a way that the climate movement called itself a climate movement? What if we had been a connection movement or something else that was, for instance, as you talk about power and also education, talking about bringing everyone with us mentally in the understanding of what the problem is and where the solutions are?
Godfrey: (23:37)
Yeah, I think there’s something in being a separate, characterises a separate climate group as opposed to like environmental group. The environment is all around us and we are part of the environment and there are so many issues that flow within and through that. But language is social, reasoning is social. I think the part is thinking through how do we build connection rather than just trying to find the points of intersection in the system as it currently exists and then seeing what we can achieve through that, that’s not good strategy.
The system as it currently exists is set up to serve points of privilege and broadly union workers and the environmental movement, we are not part of that, those points of privilege. That’s playing the boss’s game. We might still need to push those buttons, but that’s not the same as strategy. The underlying strategy we need to think through is how do we build and exercise power through connection, get that right first, and then have everything else flow through.
And for me, that’s why I have my newsletter, “The Solidarity Wedge”, where it was trying to think through radical labor movement strategy and revitalising the labor movement. And a key part of that is how you can have workers active around climate and taking action together around climate too, because a revitalised Labor movement without grappling with the climate crisis is not a thing. As the reverse is also true, we won’t resolve the climate crisis without revitalised Labor movement or revitalised social connections in general.
Tony: (25:18)
I’m just wondering how you see that? You’re talking about connections within the union movement or with the climate movement? Do you see any possibility of those two coming together?
Godfrey: (25:33)
Yes, but it’s got to really stick, it’s got to come through the ground up because if it’s just at a top layer, CEO, secretary, executive director kind of level, it’s thin, it’s weak. It’s got to come from workers building up from the ground up, people in community building up from the ground up and having those layers of connections and relationships.
That’s why I think it’s really important that the union movement reinvesting in worker education is critical. Reinvesting in worker safety, because you don’t have a safe workplace if you’re in the middle of a climate crisis. Reinvesting in radical mutual aid to look after each other through, between and within disasters. Reinvesting in a way that we do bargaining as well, so that we’re taking on claims and issues that matter to workers, but can also make a difference to the world in which we live in, whether it’s workers pushing for subsidised collective transport, workers pushing for wages or economic outcomes that allow them to allow their households and communities to transition away in terms of energy systems. We build that from the ground up and that is much better.
Not to say that the relationships at a leadership level are unimportant, it’s to say that it’s insufficient and a group of leaders coming together to do some lobbying is not a strategy, it’s a tactic that can work within a strategy that needs to be effective.
Jingle: (27:08)
94.7 The Pulse
Mik: (27:09)
We are your independent community radio station run entirely by volunteers, right here from the centre of Geelong. And this Sunday you can meet many of us in person. We’ll be gathering at the Geelong Cement Balls Club in Fyansford for a relaxed afternoon of live local music headlined by Wayne Jury along with other talented local Geelong artists.
It all starts at 2:30pm in the afternoon. Entry is $10 – or just $5 if you are a Pulse subscriber. And if you’re not, you can become a subscriber on the day. There’ll be a sausage sizzle and you’re welcome to bring your own snacks. Families are very welcome and drinks are available at bar prices. A friendly afternoon in good company, good live music and a chance to connect with the community behind the Pulse.
We’ve had Wayne Jury on here in The Sustainable Hour before – with his guitar and his powerful voice, and some years ago he wrote the song ‘Oil and Gasoline’ which, if anything, feels even more relevant today.
. . .
SONG (28:23)
‘Oil and Gasoline’ by Wayne Jury:
Strive to be righteous, strive to be heard,
strive to be holy, just say the word,
say the word America does what America can
Not pleadin’ guilty to what is done
Call it reckless, well maybe some, maybe some
And some call it collateral damage
Looking for the heart of adventure
Who’s living the American dream
Rough riding on freight trains and highways
Men living on oil and gasoline
Black gold Texas tea
What’s in the future? Forget the past
It doesn’t matter, it never lasts,
never lasts, baby, let the good times roll
Burn baby burn, charcoal and ash
We’re making history, we’re talking trash,
talking trash. The spin doctor says take your medicine
Looking for the heart of adventure
Who’s living the American dream
And who’s dancing on the edge of forgiveness
Men putting out fire with gasoline, oil and gasoline
Wounded beast it’s a dangerous thing
I hear the bells
Who’s calling? Girl, I hate
Who sell your drugs? Who sell your guns?
Who sell your money? Or sell your sons, sell your sons?
Maybe even your daughters
Lock up your daughters
Who’s surfing on the edge of the rainbow?
Who’s treated the utopian dream?
Who’s saving all their coupons and flybys?
Who’s driving a corporate machine?
Who’s buying up the rights to the one
Who’s catching all the fish in the ocean?
Who’s drilling for gas? Down in the cold seam.
Beneath the Earth, down in the dirt
Back in the cold seam. Like a bad dream.
. . .
SONG (32:03)
Michael Franti & Spearhead: ‘Good to Be Alive Today’ (Acoustic Remix)
Verse:
It’s a long road, oh
Everyday I wake up and turn my phone on
I read the news of the day, just as it’s coming down
I do my best not to let it get me down
I try to keep my head up, but this is Babylon
This world’s in crisis, we try to fight it, this changing climate
The scientists and politicians divided by it
So many ways we could solve it but they would never sign it
This mountains tumbling down, but still we try to climb it
It’s in the Torah, Quran and in the Bible
Love is the message for some how we turn to rivals
It’s come to people always picking up their rifles
Another school getting shot up; homicidal
[Pre-Chorus]
Some people tryna look fly, some people tryna get high
Some people losing their mind, some people tryna get by
And when you look in my eyes, you see the sign of the times
We all looking for the same thing
[Chorus]
But what if this song’s number one
Would it mean that love had won?
Would it mean that the world was saved?
And no guns are being drawn today?
What if everybody had a job?
And nobody had to break a law?
What if everyone could say
That it’s good to be alive today?
Oh, oh, oh, oh
Is it good to be alive today?
. . .
Mik: (33:26)
It’s Earth Day every year in April, and on this Saturday we’re organising an informal Earth Day radio show gathering, you could call it, with morning tea and coffee at The Pulse radio station in Little Ryrie Street, and that’s because it’s Earth Day and Earth Week next week. So we’re marking that on Saturday at 10am. The address is 68 Little Ryrie Street in Geelong CBD.
And it’d be great to see you there if you can come. Everyone’s welcome.
. . .
SONG (34:06)
Sanjay Nambek: ‘Heal the Earth’
Together we can heal
Together we can grow
In every breath we take
In every seed we sow
So join us in this journey
on this path we walk as one
For the Earth and all its beauty
our new day has begun
Together we can heal
Together we can grow
In every breath we take
In every seed we sow
So join us in this journey
On this path we walk as one
For the Earth and all its beauty
Our new day has begun
So join us in this journey
On this path we walk as one
For the Earth and all its beauty
Our new day
In the silence of the morning
When the Earth begins to wake
Feel the whispers of the forest
See the light on every lake
Together we can heal
Together we can grow
In every breath we take
In every seed we sow
So join us in this journey
On this path we walk as one
For the Earth and all its beauty
Our new day has begun
. . .
Mik: (35:52)
Now back to our guest in The Sustainable Hour today, who is Godfrey Moase, who is an independent writer on Substack – among a number of hats he’s got on – he writes “The Solidarity Wedge”, where he recently published a case study on building power through meeting worker needs.
Colin: (36:14)
It’s my understanding that the political wing of the trade union movement is where the Labor Party started. The Labor Party became the spokespeople, if you like, the shop window of the union movement. But over the course of the last century, it’s gained political clout by moving to the right and taking on supporters of what were traditionally the conservative opposition to the point where now we have the Labor Party in control of not only our federal but also our state government here in Victoria, and they are acting in a way which is further to the right than the conservative parties were 20 years ago. They’re not acting in the way of trade unions thinking. So if you get elected onto the trade unions committee, are you going to try and change it and bring it back to the radical left again, or are you going to become another pale pink or bluish spokesperson that is no longer a radical union person?
Godfrey: (37:40)
Well, I think the key to that, Colin, is I’m going to make myself irrelevant as an individual. Because if I make myself irrelevant as an individual and give everything that I can give to have systems and processes where workers can get together and collectively work through their situations and resolve to do things together, that is the way forward. That is what will open up radical possibilities for change. Far better people than me have gone into Parliament to think that they could be the solution and it’s failed.
There’s no way that I think that I’m better than Peter Garrett, for instance, and maybe elect me and it’ll be better. No. We’ve had enough of that. We’ve tried that for 40 years. The way that we go through this, the way that we build it up is drawing in regular people, workers, union members to actually exercise decisions that matter and not make the decisions for them.
And that’s what I mean by making myself irrelevant because where I see labor governments failing over time is the Labor Party itself has become about the parliamentarians, about the politicians. Normal people don’t join political parties anymore. Normal workers don’t join the Labor Party. That didn’t used to be the case. That wasn’t always the case. If we had a system where we had mass political membership, mass membership in political parties, the whole party system and structure would look a lot different. It would go back to a time where the liberal party were actually liberals rather than just conservatives. So I think it’s about getting those social relationships right and having the humility to know that you are not the solution, but you can be part of the weave that brings things together.
Colin: (39:36)
How, if you were inside, if you were in Peter Garrett’s position, how would you talk your fellow Labor Party members into refusing the money that’s handed to the Labor Party by fossil fuel companies?
Godfrey: (39:51)
Well, the first thing is I probably wouldn’t put myself into that position. I would not seek preselection or want to go into parliament because I don’t think that is, there’s enough people trying to do that. I personally don’t think that that is the mechanism that needs changing right now. I think trying to step up and be a leader in a trade union that has 150,000 members, and changing the systems and processes and logics as to how it determines political spending, how it determines relative prioritisation and making that radically democratic is where I think we need to make that difference.
I am currently one of the members of the National Executive of the Union. I sit in a functional minority. Let me tell you now, I have zero insight into how we preselect people. I have zero insight into how we’ve been pre-selecting parliamentarians for the last four or five years. Our decisions have been made behind closed doors with zero room for members to exercise their due and regarded sovereignty over how we prioritise and who we back in and why. And the thing that I want to be part of is making sure members get that transparency, get their rightful ownership over the decisions of their union.
And if I can focus on getting that right, then that opens up the possibilities to ensure that politics has a structure in place where ordinary people can exercise power again. And just because they can’t pay $25,000 to go to a fundraiser or just because their dad or granddad didn’t steal a whole bunch of land off First Nations workers that they can’t exercise influence. No, I get that bit right. That’s the part I can play. Ain’t nothing going to change if I’m just another parliamentarian.
Mik: (41:47)
Godfrey, did you follow Mamdani’s – the New York Mayor’s – journey to victory? And what’s your comment to his journey?
Godfrey: (41:55)
Yeah, I think that the campaign was incredibly effective and it spoke to what workers were actually experiencing in New York City and points to a different way forward in terms of electoral politics. What limits it is the fact that you need that plus more. You need more effective electoral politics and more effective social power.
So personally, I don’t think his election would have happened without the early endorsement of the United Auto Workers, who in the US, under their system, don’t just represent auto workers, but also a whole bunch of academic staff in New York City and other workplaces. They were one of the few early backers. One of the reasons why they were one of the few early backers from Mamdani was that they had just gone through a radically democratic process themselves that took them from a union dealing with outright corruption issues who are in the pockets of the bosses to carrying out the big three auto workers strike in the states in 2023. And there is a direct line between the transformation of that union and what you saw out of New York City. And so we need to get our ecosystem right in the left in this country so that we can open up a whole vista of possibilities.
Tony: (43:17)
Godfrey, you mentioned before, or, in your introduction, that you were writing as well. What led you, what influenced you to go down that pathway? That adds another string to your bow. Can we just talk about how that all happened?
Godfrey: (43:36)
Well, it’s this simple really, Tony. Oftentimes a lot of writing comes out of a sense of futility, a sense of failure of not being able to actually get it done. And I’ve been trying to fulfill my obligation as the National Executive Director of the United Workers Union for quite a while about what direction do we take? What work can we take on? How should we actually build power? And consistently it was sidelined, ignored, or just not adopted.
And so, The Solidarity Wedge as a work, as a manuscript, was essentially me thinking through, reflecting back on it and collecting that experience of my personal failure to push a better agenda in the union and set out for the world a positive strategy to go and build power that is bread and roses, that is about the very practical, but how that you can set up a situation where workers could knock the door down for a new economic system. And that’s where that emerged from. Most of the big headline ideas that I have in my newsletter in The Solidarity Wedge that I’ve collected out and sent out in the About page, I’ve tried to ventilate them internally into the union. And for the most part, they haven’t gone anywhere.
Tony: (45:03)
They’re “breathing” online. You’re getting your messages out there.
Godfrey: (45:09)
There’s lot of feedback out in the world. If you just do it online, you get a bit, it’s a bit out of my eyes. It’s hard to tell, but yeah, it’s building an audience, a subscriber base. People are messaging me, emailing me, asking questions or how they might want to adopt things as well.
Colin: (45:30)
Godfrey, what’s the employment of the majority of the members of the United Workers’ Union?
Godfrey: (45:38)
It’s a diverse generalist union. have a lot of public sector members, people in hospitals and technicians in hospitals, cleaners, cooks, educational assistants, logistics workers, food manufacturing workers, property services workers, so people in security and cleaning.
Colin: (45:59)
How many members are there at the United Workers’ Union?
Godfrey: (46:03)
There’s about 150,000 members, yeah. We should be, we should be two million.
Colin: (46:10)
Yeah, yeah, if you look at all of the people who are employed in those organisations. What is your experience?
Godfrey: (46:17)
Many and varied, but I’ve seen workers achieve incredible things together. so what I would say really is it’s not for individual people, union leaders like myself, to tell workers what they can’t do. It’s for us to provide the system, supports and structures for workers to work out what they can and want to do together.
Mik: (46:40)
Godfrey, what’s your advice to anyone who’s listened to our chat here the last half hour and want to dig deeper, want to understand more?
Godfrey: (46:49)
Well, yeah, check out my newsletter and sign up for it. It’s out in the world. I had the privilege of being able to think a lot of these thoughts, exercising my responsibility as a union leader. So I feel like it’s my responsibility to have that open and free to the world as an act of solidarity. So check that out. And if you want to get involved in the struggle for the future of the Australian trade union movement, go to membersfirst.org and volunteer in the United Workers Union election. And yeah, let’s take it on and rebuild power.
Colin: (47:25)
And where would we find your newsletter, Godfrey?
Godfrey: (47:30)
It’s just on Substack. If you Google ‘The Solidarity Wedge’ or search on an alternative platform, ‘The Solidarity Wedge’, it should come up. You put my name in as well. It’ll come up. It’ll be pretty easy to find.
Mik: (47:44)
I opened a Substack account just recently and have been ranting a bit there. The latest post I put up is called ‘Climate action begins with collective understanding’. So, we’ll put links to everything in our shownotes on climatesafety.info.
Jingle
. . .
Mik: (48:07)
That’s all we could fit in one politicised and power seeking podcast, The Sustainable Hour going into union politics, but also broader than that into climate politics, you could call it.
We’ve reached the B-section, Godfrey. We usually say ‘Be the difference’, but you might have another suggestion to what do you think we should be?
Godfrey: (48:34)
Be collective.
Tony: (48:36)
Yeah, be connected.
Colin:
Yeah, be solid brothers.
Godfrey: (48:41)
Yes, that’s it. Be solid, be together. Don’t feel like you have to be the difference, but that you are part of making a difference.
Tony: (48:51)
Be less busy within the walls and connect outside them.
Godfrey: (48:58)
Be collective.
. . .
SONG (49:04)
‘Be Collective’ – mp3 audio
[Godfrey Moase: “The failure to solve climate change is really a failure of cooperation.”]
We were told that power lives in parliament halls
in promises spoken, in speeches and calls
so we waited for change to come from above
but the ground began to shift, and we lost what we love
We marched and we rallied, we knocked on their doors
the gap between us grew – grew too wide to ignore
We were asking for action. They protected themselves
and the system only served points of privilege and wealth
Be collective
… (we rise together!)
Be connected
… (or we fall apart!)
The collective
[Godfrey Moase: “The problem is: Government is not power. Government is authority. Power comes from the way that we work together.”]
Be collective
[Godfrey Moase: “Be collective!”]
There’s a heat in the factory, a strain in the street
people going home, just too tired to speak
every struggle carried in silence alone
every burden divided, never made known
There’s a world that looks normal when seen from afar
shops full of plenty, a drink at the bar
but behind every surface, a quiet unease
pretending its working, though its falling apart
Be collective
… (we rise together!)
Be connected
… (or we fall apart!)
The collective
… (power isn’t given!)
understanding
… (it grows in our hearts!)
Be collective
[Godfrey Moase: “Be collective!”]
Not one voice louder
not one hand alone
no waiting for our turn
no leaders of power
that comes when we learn
together
to be collective
… (we rise together!)
be connected
… (or we fall apart!)
the collective
… (power isn’t given!)
understanding
… (it grows in our hearts!)
Godfrey: “We either rise together or we fall apart.”
It begins with understanding
but it lives in what we do
when we learn to see each other
what was broken starts to move
In the space between our voices
in the strength of common ground
Godfrey: “Be together. Don’t feel like you have to be the difference…”
There’s a quiet, growing knowing
we are many, we have found
Be collective
Godfrey: “…but that you’re part of making a difference.”
Be collective
Be collective
…and be connected
Godfrey: “We either rise together or we fall apart.”
. . .
António Guterres, UN Chief: (52:10)
We have a choice, collective action or collective suicide. It is in our hands. It’s a time for transformation. Now more than ever, we must just transition to renewable energy. Renewables deliver climate security, energy security and national security.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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