An energy company seeks to develop an impoverished region.

When ecologists raise concerns about the effects on a natural wonder, state politicians call them middle-class interlopers who care nothing for the rural economy. As environmentalists rally in the big cities, local workers march for their jobs. The conservatives insist the project must go ahead while deep divisions wrack the Labor party.

That might be a description of the politics of Adani’s Carmichael coalmine, but it’s not.

It’s a summary of the struggle over the Franklin Dam in the early 1980s – perhaps the most significant environmental protest in Australian history.

Looking back at the Franklin controversy from 2019, one cannot help but be struck by how many of the arguments said to make the Carmichael mine uniquely problematic for environmentalists applied with equal or greater force to the Tasmanian Hydro Electric Commission’s scheme to dam the Gordon River.

Australia isn't doing its part for the global climate. Sooner or later we’ll have to pay our share | John Quiggin Read more

“If there’s one thing Queenslanders don’t like, it’s being told what to do,” wrote the ABC’s Allyson Horn after the election. “When Bob Brown’s anti-Adani convoy rolled through the sunshine state, demanding voters shun coal, he hammered a nail in Bill Shorten’s electoral coffin. Jobs are key in Queensland and Adani’s Carmichael coalmine will guarantee work.”

Now compare Kelvin McCoy, a trade union leader heading up the pro-dam Tasmanian development committee in 1983: “They go around the mainland saying that the dam should not be built. They don’t tell people that we have the highest unemployment rate in the commonwealth, and that the dam will be the best commercial venture for Tasmania … Some of them have never been to Tasmania in their lives and I question how on earth can they be so sentimentally stupid about an issue so far from them. [L]et me ask all those on the mainland who are constantly making an issue about our dam to kindly leave us alone.”

Everyone knows that Bob Hawke stepped in to override the Tasmanian government and save the river. But few remember that, all through the early 1980s, the ALP was as split on the Franklin as it’s now divided on Adani.

Its previous leader Bill Hayden had backed the dam, as did the New South Wales right, the Tasmanian party and much of the union movement. As a journalist noted in late 1982 (in words with an uncannily contemporary ring), “The ALP’s federal candidates in Tasmania have been struck dumb by the issue. They fervently hope that the matter will be resolved one way or another before the election.”

What changed the situation was the blockade that disrupted construction in the Tasmanian rainforest. Infinitely more confronting than Brown’s Adani convoy, the protest brought 6,000 people into the wilderness, determined to stop work going ahead.

The Tasmanian premier Robin Gray denounced the protesters as outsiders, dirty and unemployed mainlanders intent merely on trouble. A local politician in Queenstown declared that bloodshed was likely, and blamed conservationists in advance.

The Tasmanian parliament had amended the Police Offences Act so that trespass became an arrestable matter carrying a maximum penalty of six months imprisonment.

More than 1,200 people were arrested, with almost 500 going to jail.

With an election looming, the Franklin dominated national headlines. Hawke toppled Hayden and took a “no dams” policy to the polls. He won handsomely, but Labor didn’t take a single Tasmanian seat.

Even after the poll, the Tasmanian government pledged to continue with the dam and the project was only stopped by the high court validating an intervention by Canberra that pushed federalism to the absolute limits.

In other words, when saving the Franklin, Hawke paid no attention to states’ rights or local autonomy.

In 2008, when he spoke at an anniversary dinner commemorating the high court decision, Hawke made the obvious comparison with the politics of climate.

“You see a complete replication of what we experienced back there in 1983,” he said. “The conservatives: they never change, they never learn. What was their argument back then? You can’t do this, it will cost jobs. It will cost economic growth. You can’t do it, you mustn’t do it.”

Today, with Tasmania’s world heritage area so central to the state’s identity, it’s easy to forget the economic arguments made by dam advocates.

Yet the concern for jobs in Tasmania back then was so strong that McCoy – who was also the president of the Federated Engine Drivers’ and Firemen’s Association – warned that workers might resort to violence to defend the dam.

“There could be pitched battles involving … the full workforce of about 2,000 on all the west-coast projects,” he said.

Climate change poses unique problems and campaigners need, as a matter of urgency, to popularise a program of economic transition that creates sustainable work for people in the energy sector.

Bob Brown: Hawke was our environmental prime minister Read more

But the Franklin story reminds us that corporations and politicians always pit jobs against the environment and there’s nothing new in conservationists needing to win over working people.

When the blockade convinced Hawke that national sentiment had turned against the dam, he put together a substantial package to compensate Tasmanians for the loss of the project.

Today, something similar’s happening, albeit in reverse.

After its surprise victory, the Coalition considers the Carmichael mine a magic weapon against Labor (a perspective that many in the ALP clearly share). Coal might be of declining economic viability but conservative politicians will provide to Adani whatever subsidies necessary to make the project happen, confident they’ve found the perfect political wedge.

We’ve seen, since the return of the Morrison government, a rash of articles suggesting that protests don’t work and that environmental activism merely hands elections to conservatives.

That’s why it’s so important to remember the lessons from the Franklin blockade.

In 2018, the IPCC warned we had 12 years to prevent climate catastrophe. We’re now seven months into that deadline and the clock’s ticking down. Climate action can’t wait another three years for a change of government.

Play Video 4:38 Our wide brown land: 'We've hit rock bottom' – video