Greenwash

A veil of secrecy was wrapped around the setting of strategies for the Sydney bid by establishing a private company, called Sydney Olympics 2000 Bid Ltd (SOBL), to oversee the bidding process. As a private company, SOBL was exempt from Freedom of Information requests, thus protecting it from having to disclose its internal reports and documents. SOBL's articles of association ensured that information was tightly controlled so that very few people had access to documents, and photocopies were prohibited (Evans 1999).

Secrecy was further enhanced through various arrangements with the media. A Communications Commission was formed to take charge of public relations strategies, chaired by the managing director of the Clemengers advertising agency. Other members of the commission included the national director of advertising for Australian Consolidated Press, the media director of the state premier’s office, and the general manager of marketing for the Ampol oil company (Bacon 1993).

A remarkable admission of the media’s complicity in the bidding process came in February 1999 from Bruce Baird, a former government minister for New South Wales who was responsible for the bidding process. Baird claimed that he had obtained the agreement of three major media executives not to run stories about the wining, dining and other blandishments offered to IOC officials (Moore 1999).

The three executives named by Baird were Kerry Packer (owner of Consolidated Press Holdings), Ken Cowley (chief executive of Murdoch’s News Ltd), and John Alexander (then editor-in-chief of the Sydney Morning Herald). All three have vehemently denied Baird’s claims, describing them as "absolute bullshit" and "rubbish," and Baird has subsequently recanted (Moore 1999).

What is known, however, is that Packer, Cowley and Alexander all accepted invitations to sit on the SOBL committee. All of the Australian commercial television channels, the three main media companies, and a number of radio stations were involved in supporting the bid, either through being on bid committees or through direct sponsorship of the bid (Bacon 1993, pp. 3-5). At the time that the bidding was underway, Herald journalist Mark Coultan stated: "Journalists who write stories which might be seen as critical are reminded of their bosses’ support and told that their stories would be used against Sydney by other cities." (Quoted in Bacon 1993, p. 4)

The Sydney Morning Herald also editorialized in support of the Sydney bid, and SOBL financed the fare of a Herald journalist to Monaco to report on the bid deliberations (Bacon 1993, p. 5). Another Herald journalist, Sam North, was assigned to report on the Olympics, and wrote a succession of favourable stories, several of which appeared in advertising supplements funded by Olympic sponsors. News Ltd’s Telegraph Mirror also gave unwavering good PR to the bid.

As the bidding and selection process for the 2000 Olympics got underway, the IOC made it clear that it wanted to have a "green" Olympics. IOC President Juan Antonio Samaranch said the IOC’s primary concern would be to ensure that the environment was respected and that this would be taken into account in the final vote on site selection. For Australia, therefore, it was critical to present its bid as "green" despite the toxic waste buried at Homebush Bay.

The co-option of Greenpeace was a key factor in the success of this campaign. The organization had campaigned against hazardous landfill dumps for many years, so its support for the Homebush Bay Olympic site helped reassure a public that might otherwise have been concerned about the site’s toxic history.

To win over Greenpeace, SOBL invited it to draw up environmental guidelines for the construction and operation of the Olympic facilities (SOBL 1993). The proposed design of the Olympic athletes’ village was developed by a consortium of architects, including a firm commissioned by Greenpeace. On paper, the design looked impressive. It provided for the use of solar technology and solar designs, state-of-the-art energy generation, and waste water recycling systems (Greenpeace 1993).

For Greenpeace, participation in developing a showcase Olympic village offered another benefit: the opportunity to transform its own image. Instead of simply sounding the alarm on environmental problems as it had done for the previous twenty years, the "new Greenpeace" would be seen as promoting solutions.

Greenpeace involvement in the Sydney bid soon went beyond simply offering ideas: it became a vocal supporter. Karla Bell, cities and coasts campaigner for Greenpeace, made a statement supporting the environmental merits of the full bid when the IOC visited Sydney early in 1993. Her statement did not mention the problem of land contamination. She made an obvious impression on the IOC, whose report in July of that year "noted with much satisfaction the great emphasis being placed on environmental protection in all aspects of the bidding process and the attention being paid to working closely with environmental protection groups such as Greenpeace".

Support also came from Paul Gilding, the head at the time of Greenpeace International who previously had headed Greenpeace Australia. "The Olympic village provides a prototype of future environmentally friendly development not only for Australia, but for cities all around the world," Gilding stated in a March 1993 news release.

SOBL hired Karla Bell and Kate Short (now Kate Hughes) of the Sydney Total Environment Centre (TEC) to draw up environmental guidelines for the Games. Short was a prominent Sydney environmentalist who had a long history of campaigning on toxic issues, particularly pesticides. The guidelines drawn up by Bell and Short advocated the use of recyclable and recycled building materials, the use of plantation timber as opposed to forest timber, and tickets printed on "recycled post consumer waste paper." (SOBL 1993) Short and other environmentalists and consultants were also appointed to a special environmental task force advising SOBL.

Some environmentalists, however, remained sceptical. The TEC distanced itself from Short’s involvement, and TEC director Jeff Angel argued that the Sydney Olympic bid was ignoring significant environmental problems. "The state of Sydney’s environment has been misrepresented to a serious degree," he said. "For example, the [New South Wales] Premier in his Introduction to the Bid’s Fact Sheets describes the Games as occurring in a pollution-free environment. The bid document asserts Sydney’s waste system can cope, when in fact we have a waste crisis." (Angel 1993) Environmentalists were also concerned about the diversion of revenue into extravagant sports facilities and the loss of valued local ecosystems.

Environmentalists were particularly angry when they discovered that the official bid document to the IOC claimed support from various environmental groups, including the Australian Conservation Foundation, the New South Wales Nature Conservation Council and the TEC. Although individuals affiliated with those organizations had joined the bid committee’s environmental task force, the groups themselves emphatically denied their support. The statement had to be retracted. (Cook 1993)

Notwithstanding these misgivings, the issue of toxic contamination of the site was not openly discussed prior to the Olympic decision. This was clearly because of the inaccessibility of relevant information and the successful co-option of key environmentalists who reassured others that the site was being cleaned up properly.

In private communications at the time of the bidding process, Greenpeace’s toxics campaigner Robert Cartmel told me that "there is every likelihood that the remediation measures being undertaken at Homebush Bay won’t measure up". He said that this was "an area that would be considered to be a Superfund site [for an explanation of this term, see page 229]" in the US. He warned that "when it comes to leakage of toxic materials, it is not a question of if, it is a question of when. There is no such thing as a safe landfill." Yet Cartmel was unwilling to publicly criticize Greenpeace’s involvement in the Olympics bidding process.

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Angel, Jeff, (1993) 'Sydney's Green Olympics Bid: Issues of concern', 24 June.

Bacon, Wendy, (1993) 'Watchdog's Bark Muffled', Reportage, September, p. 4.

Bell, Karla, (1993) 'Australia's environmenal record and the Olympic village' in SOBL, Significant Speeches, Issue No 1039-5695.

Cook, Danielle, (1993) 'Green groups attack Games bid claims', Sydney Morning Herald, 29 May.

Evans, Michael, (1999) 'How they hid the secrets of 2000 Inc', Sydney Morning Herald, 8 February.

Greenpeace Australia, (1993) 'Greenpeace calls on International Olympic Committee to adopt environmental criteria for games', Media Release, 23 March.

Moore, Matthew, (1999) 'Media's 'pact of silence'', Sydney Morning Herald, 19 February, p. 9.

SOBL, (1993) Sydney 2000 Environment Guidelines, March.

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