'My career is pretty much destroyed'

The last few months have shown the extent of the tension between Australian journalists wanting to report accurately and honestly on Israel and Gaza and the media organisations that would rather silence them than attract what they perceive to be controversy.

A similar dynamic has been building for a long time within the climate movement. Activists who see support for Palestine as part of their broader work for climate justice have been banned from speaking publicly on the issue by the non-profits they work for, often to avoid negative media attention or a fear that donors will pull funding. Alex Kelly wrote about this in broad terms for Overland in December.

This has attracted very little public comment, as climate organisations have been largely successful at stopping their employees from speaking out. But in January, Kavita Naidu publicly resigned from her position as Senior Pacific Strategist at the Climate Action Network Australia, claiming she and other employees were pressured by CANA upper management into avoiding discussion of Palestine.

Kavita has a background in international human rights law but decided to move into climate work after seeing the scale of climate disasters in Fiji. Before starting at CANA in May 2023, Kavita worked for the United Nations Human Rights Office and led the Asia Pacific Forum on Women, Law and Development’s climate justice program in Thailand. I spoke with Kavita earlier this week about her time at CANA, why she left and the problems plaguing Australia’s climate movement.

‘Stop making commentary on this issue’

CANA has more than 150 member organisations, including Greenpeace, the Climate Council, the Australian Conservation Foundation, 350 Australia, GetUp, WWF, the United Workers Union and the Environmental Defenders Office. One of the services CANA provides to these organisations is CANAchat, a chat group allowing employees of CANA member organisations to share information and work together.

In October, Climate Action Network International released a statement calling for a ceasefire in Gaza and an end to Israel’s occupation of Palestine. When an employee of a CANA member organisation shared the statement in CANAchat, Kavita claims then-acting CANA CEO Barry Traill intervened.

“The member rang me to say they had received a call from [Traill] basically reprimanding them for sharing something ‘sensitive’,” Naidu says. “They were quite confused — we’re a node of CAN International and CAN Australia hadn’t yet disclosed what their position was going to be. CAN Australia was asked to sign onto the CAN International statement but abstained. I also got pulled up for responding to the member and was told ‘until we discuss the issue further … you do not comment on Palestine-Israel issues in any forum in any way that indicates or implies that you are speaking as a CANA representative’.”

On October 25, Traill sent an email to CANA employees outlining the organisation’s position and warning staff from discussing Palestine or Gaza in CANAchat or on social media.

“There was only a few days offered by CANI to provide sign-on, and we judged that there was no way we could obtain any consensus or a majority view from members in that time on signing on to that statement,” Traill wrote.

“I would respectfully ask people to now *stop* making commentary on the issue on this forum- CANAchat, and to consider carefully how they discuss this in any public forum in our movement. I know from one-on-one conversations over the last week with many people that discussion of this issue, in these sort of online forums is now causing significant hurt and pain to many good-hearted people in our movement … I am not trying to censor discussion, but we do not think this is a good forum for these discussions.”

“Within CANA, a couple of staff decided that they did not want to be complicit in this ‘moderation’ and silencing,” Naidu says. “Five of us drafted a letter to the board and the CEO saying we could not be complicit in this and asking for transparency in how the decision to abstain was made. Some board members organised a meeting with us, in which the CEO said something to the effect of ‘this is too controversial, I can’t get the majority of members on board’.”

Naidu claims that since that meeting, messages in CANAchat “that even say ‘Israel’ or ‘Palestine’” have been deleted. In November, an employee of youth climate justice group the Tomorrow Movement posted a link in CANAchat to an upcoming Tomorrow Movement webinar on Palestine and climate justice. Naidu claims subsequent CANAchat messages from members expressing interest in the webinar were deleted.

I reached out to CANA yesterday, and CEO Glen Klatovsky replied that “CANA is not going to make any comment”.

‘The white supremacy in this movement’

Naidu says the actions of CANA’s executive leadership regarding the Gaza conflict are symptomatic of a deeper problem within many of Australia’s largest climate organisations.

“There’s a huge fracture between the youth, the people of colour, the Indigenous and the queer members of CANA and who I call the stiff-necks — usually just privileged older white cishet men and women,” Naidu says. “The mainstream climate movement in Australia is a very polite, corporatised space. It doesn’t feel like a movement — 95% of the focus is on mitigation, electoral power and replacing fossil fuels with renewable electricity. The only people who talk about justice, human rights and land are the Indigenous activists, those of colour and some of the younger and more progressive people.”

Naidu says the imposed silence on Gaza has exposed the exploitative and extractive relationship many climate organisations have with their First Nations staff and their staff of colour. She describes a culture of “tokenisation” where Black and Brown staff are held up as evidence of an organisation’s diversity while their voices are suppressed.

“For the last three years I’ve been very vocal about the white supremacy in this movement,” she says. “First Nations people and people of colour make up a fraction of the climate movement. Organisations look for us to talk about the same thing over and over while everyone claps and nothing changes. Ultimately, redistributing power or actually giving us agency is too radical.”

Having worked extensively overseas, Naidu has seen how far out of step the Australian climate movement’s conservatism on Palestine and broader issues of racial justice is with the wider movement around the world.

“At COP28 in Dubai, all the climate activists were wearing keffiyehs. It was a sea of keffiyehs,. But the only Australians wearing them and showing solidarity with Palestine were the First Nations activists, the Pasifika leaders, two of us from CANA and another CANA member,” she says. “That said, activists are being targeted in places like the UK and Germany as well.”

‘My career is pretty much destroyed’

Naidu says her experience is similar to that of many climate campaigners who become disillusioned with the state of the Australian movement and end up leaving.

“People just quietly quit — and again I’m talking about First Nations campaigners and people of colour,” she says. “Young people come into the movement all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, quickly find out that this movement is hugely problematic and either are forced to resign or just leave the movement altogether.”

Having quit CANA, Naidu is philosophical about the likely impact speaking out will have on her career in Australia.

“My career within the mainstream climate movement is pretty much destroyed, but my values mean far more than finding a job in a movement that doesn’t support what is, right now, the biggest injustice in the world.

“There is no climate justice on occupied land. If we understood that as a movement backing the Voice referendum, then choosing to silence solidarity for Palestine is hypocrisy.”

Except it will, assuming you can afford to buy a house which you almost definitely can’t.

I know that this op ed is an example of the quasi-tongue-in-cheek style that the Herald loves but a guy moaning about how hard it is to move up the property ladder while people get priced out of housing full stop feels extremely off. It’s this weird reminder that Sydney’s paper of record has an incredibly warped view of the city it’s supposed to represent and the people who live there. I need to stop reading op eds about Sydney property for a few weeks at least or I’ll go insane.

What I’m looking at

• Jewish settlers stole my house. It’s not my fault they’re Jewish.

• How war destroyed Gaza’s neighbourhoods – visual investigation

• Excerpts from the leaked Zionist arts and academic Whatsapp groupchat