Thirty Years of Creative Resistance - Friends of the Earth Australia

From 1985 until 1992, undercover officers
with the Victorian Police Intelligence Unit
(at that point called the OIU – Operations
Intelligence Unit) carried out covert
operations which involved monitoring
and infiltrating key community groups in
Melbourne.
In hindsight, it all reads like a slightly
strange Keystone Cops-type operation,
with a specially adapted Holden panel
van with darkened windows that would
be parked near demonstrations and
outside the offices of non-government
organisations. Many files on individuals,
subsequently leaked to The Age
newspaper in 1997, were appallingly
sloppy, with names, affiliations and actions
incorrectly recorded. Often people who
attended a single meeting of a group were
identified as “group leaders” because they
spoke at that meeting. Sometimes there
were separate files for the same person
simply because no-one bothered to cross
reference shortened names with full
names. But, of course, there was a more
sinister undercurrent to this work.
According to The Age, the OIU went “far
beyond its official role of openly liaising
with community groups”. It monitored
groups as diverse as the Wilderness
Society, 3CR community radio, the
Rainforest Action Group, the Victorian
Council for Civil Liberties and FoE.
It carried out electronic bugging and
searches without warrants, as well as
placing undercover police officers who,
“using fake identities, ... penetrated
conservation groups by posing as
volunteers worried about the environment”
(The Age, 1997).
FoE was one of those groups that
received a lot of attention: the Age noted
that the officers “were so successful at
infiltration... that they helped staff their
offices, maintained files and updated
membership lists. One undercover officer
even spent two days of police time helping
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Police Infiltration of FoE
build shelves at the Collingwood offices of
FoE. The group was so grateful it paid for
a new blade for the electric saw the officer
borrowed from a colleague in the covert
OIU”.
Information gained by the OIU was shared
with the national intelligence agency, ASIO
and also Australian Army intelligence. The
OIU later became the Protective Security
Intelligence Group – PSIG – who were
meant to destroy the hundreds of files on
individuals. However, they were simply
(and illegally) moved out of a police office
and into a house in order to avoid them
being destroyed.
This was not the first or last time FoE
came under attention from security
services. As early as the 1970s, the
Victorian Special Branch was asked to
“keep an eye on FoE” by steel and mining
company BHP. An Inspector Norton
reported on FoE activities to the company.
And various companies, have placed
people in the organisation. For instance,
after a high profile campaign on beverage
packaging, a company employee was told
by the PR and advertising manager of
Coca Cola in Adelaide to “attend F.O.E.
planning committee meetings at the
(Adelaide) university; to go dressed in
dirty jeans, T-shirt and sandals, and not to
shave” (The Australian, 6/11/1973).
What is perhaps saddest about all this
is the fact that, as an open, grassroots
organisation, FoE has nothing to hide.
FoE 30 Years 66