The international environment organisation has rejuvenated its Australian branch and warns that it will make business awkward for many companies.

Greenpeace is on the warpath against Australian companies. Already BHP, Caltex, Pasminco Metals and EZ have been targets of environmentalist raiders and Greenpeace is believed to be looking closely at the operations of another big company in Adelaide. The Federal Government, three state governments and their environmental protection agencies and two small Victorian chemicals manufacturers have also been put on the spot by environmental commandos wearing space suits and clutching portable telephones.

To fall foul of Greenpeace these days is to suffer, at best, a serious setback in public relations. At worst, as in the case of the most recent Greenpeace action in Melbourne, there can be a full-scale investigation of a company, a partial suspension of its operations and a lot of unanswered questions about the legal ramifications for both the company and its directors if all of Greenpeace's allegations are proved correct. Quite simply, Greenpeace has become a management issue: a raid will cost companies executive time and potentially a lot of money in fines, in the cost of improved pollution controls or even in lost cashflow from having the business closed down.

Greenpeace started its series of headline-grabbing direct actions against companies as part of its 'Clean waters, clean seas' campaign. But they are part of a wider new activism that will shape Greenpeace's increasingly hard-line, interventionist approach during the 1990s. Whether or not it was the aim, new activism has thrust Greenpeace back to the forefront of the environmental movement in Australia.

Greenpeace is not subtle, but that does not mean it is clumsy or unsophisticated. Greenpeace sees itself as the enforcer of environment protection and no organisation in Australia is better prepared or has more resources. Greenpeace is going to play tough and it has all the equipment and skills necessary.

Greenpeace is an international organisation based in Amsterdam and in the 20 years since it was formed it has built a membership of four million that provides it with an annual budget of $US100 million. Greenpeace Australia has an expanding, professional workforce and an annual budget of almost $3 million although others within the environmentai movement suggest it adds up to about $20 million when you account for all the international assistance given to the Australian group. It also has about 50,000 members who support the group financially. In fact, Greenpeace in Australia, like the multinationals in this country, is an exporter of capital. Like the 18 other national Greenpeace organisations, it contributes up to 25% of the money it raises in Australia to an international working fund. In return, the local groups can call on two Greenpeace ships, Rainbow Warrior and Redbill and their crews, laboratories in London, a worldwide information and electronic-mail network and the expertise of the international members.

Only 12 months ago Greenpeace Australia began restructuring its management. It was a difficult time for the movement and, although Greenpeace Australia's executive says that the changes acknowledged that public opinion was moving faster than Greenpeace, few outside the group would doubt that it was also the result of the growing competition for pre-eminence in the Australian environmental movement.

It was after the highly successful restructuring of the Australian Conservation Foundation that Greenpeace Australia decided that it was time for change. After having tried unsuccessfully to find an Australian to fill the position of executive director, it brought in Steve McAIlister from the United States and gave him the task of reactivating the organisation. The latest campaigns are the direct result of McAllister's influence. His experience in the US has made him a believer in carefully selected direct action and he has spent time training his members not only to take over the helm at the right time, but to become much more proficient at taking direct action.

Since December, activists from Greenpeace Australia have risked life and limb, and, according to the companies they have chosen, the safety of others. They have blocked outflow drains at Caltex's Kurnell refinery, at BHP's Port Kembla steel works and most recently at Nufarm's chemicals plant at North Laverton, just outside Melbourne. They have been arrested trying to stop the ocean dumping of waste from Pasminco Metals' and EZ's Risdon zinc refinery in Hobart, they have hung a huge banner bearing the message "A poison curse" on a tower at the Altona petrochemicals complex near Melbourne and have attempted to stop the South Australian Government from draining what it said was poisonous waste water from timber-pulping operations at Lake Bonney into the Southern Ocean.

The leader of most of those actions was Paul Gilding, who this week became the executive director of Greenpeace Australia. The former air-force instrument fitter, who has worked full-time with Greenpeace for about 12 months, is seen as McAllister's protege and his message to Australian business is straightforward: clean up your act or Greenpeace will come after you.

Gilding believes firmly that Greenpeace has a mandate for action. For companies in Australia involved in potentially dirty businesses, that is a warning worth heeding, because these days it is Greenpeace and its brethren of the green movement that bring the environment debate before the public. "We get criticism for being self-appointed watchdogs and that we are unelected. But the ultimate constraint on us is public opinion. If we alienate the public, we lose public support. If we do that, we lose the fight. And so far we have had nothing but support from the public for our program," Gilding says.

Direct action has always been one of the main weapons of the environmental movement: it has been the most effective way to drag issues before the public. It can embarrass victims into contrite compliance with the green line and attract that most tangible of display of public support, working capital.

Now, direct action can almost pay for itself through increased membership. Greenpeace needed to attract fewer than 750 new members to cover the $25,000 spent on the action against Nufarm. Over the six months of the campaign, Greenpeace has attracted almost 5000 members and that amounts to a healthy $175,000 in fees.

"But the direct action will only be the start of everyone's problems," Gilding warns. Greenpeace has been criticised consistently by others in the environmental movement, as in a recent issue of the Friends of the Earth magazine Chain Reaction, for its apparent lack of interest in following up its "spectacular media stunts". That has changed, Gilding says. The organisation is going to push everyone to the limit and beyond, using more than just direct action.

Gilding has put everyone on notice; companies that pollute will be challenged by the sort of intensive research that only an international organisation such as Greenpeace can afford; environmental authorities and, potentially, the courts will be forced to test their powers and desire to punish the transgressors. Governments can expect Greenpeace to damn them in the increasingly green perceptions of voters if they fail to dance to the tune of the environmental lobby.

"The aim of what we are doing is to make corporate Australia realise that having a good relationship with govemment, or at least with govemment instruments, is no longer going to save them. Having the ability to baffle and delay the bureaucracy, as happened in Melboume with Nufarm, is not going to be enough. There is someone who will catch them at it&emdash;Greenpeace," Gilding says. "The impression we have is that there are certain companies in Australia that are not going to change their ways. They will go out the door with pollution in the 1990s. Companies have to clean up. If they do not do it we will threaten their survival. We are talking here about phasing out certain products, we are also talking about certain companies that do not deserve to exist in the 1990s," Gilding says. Compromise is clearly not on his mind.

Just what is on Greenpeace's mind is difficult to know, say the companies that have fallen foul of Greenpeace this year. Almost universally the companies praise the efficiency and effectiveness of Greenpeace's operations, although they say that ultimately, direct action will have little impact on the way they dispose of waste. But they suggest that waste-disposal breaches are not the point: Greenpeace, they say, is not trying to stop pollution, but to win the support of the media and the public.

A constant criticism of Greenpeace and others in the environment lobby is that they accept the responsibility of finding and highlighting the problems companies have with pollution but do nothing to help find solutions. "We get that one constantly," Gilding says. "We are not allowed to criticise unless we can solve the problem. But we don't make the mess and we think it is not up to us necessarily to find the solution to it."

Stewart Murrihy, a spokesman for the Risdon operations of Pasminco Metals and EZ, says: "It is easy to be cynical about Greenpeace. I mean, a fund-raising campaign in the Hobart area followed soon after their action. But they have the credibility; when they mount an attack you find yourself on the defensive because they have the credibility and companies have none. But we are still not really sure what Greenpeace's objective was."

Gilding says the companies fail to understand Greenpeace's objectives because they do not take pollution seriously. He says they have very little idea just how much damage they are doing to the environment and even less about how much public opinion has swung against the companies. "That is why the companies focus on the loss of public-relations points rather than get overly concerned about changing the way they work," he says.

Greenpeace says that industry fails to understand that the public will no longer put up with promises and that the only response to being caught out is to take visible action. Pollution control, Gilding says, is no longer just a matter of good corporate PR and painting factories green. "People want to see fundamental changes in the way the corporate sector deals with the environment," Gilding says. "They really should stop thinking about us as the new corporate raiders, watching out the back door hoping they do not have to deal with the mess we are going to make of things for them. They should start thinking about why we are here, why is it that the environmental movement membership is going through the roof. Joe Bloggs can't go down and block BHP's outflow. We can. The public are with us and they want the companies to stop polluting," Gilding says.

"The companies still do not understand how far public opinion has moved. It even took us a while to realise how fast it moved. The public wants to stop pollution, we don't have to convince anyone. But business and government have not produced the goods, they haven't yet forced the structural changes and the mentality changes that are necessary to bring them into line with public expectations," Gilding says.

Greenpeace's ability to sell its message to the media and exclude other opinions is cause for concern for all the companies that have been criticised so far. The companies complain that Greenpeace does not have to justify its claims, only report them, and that once Greenpeace acts, its victims are given very little opportunity to put their case.

The companies complain that it is Greenpeace, not them, that has made pollution a public-relations matter. Every company raided by Greenpeace commented either that they were not breaching their waste dumping agreements or, if they were, they were only slightly over their limits. Every company believed it was an easy and an obvious target, all said that they were in the process of improving their waste-dumping procedures before they were "Greenpeaced" and that they supported the environmental cause.

After the Greenpeace experience, both Caltex and BHP concluded that there is little point in fighting the Greenpeace media strategy once it gets rolling. They remain convinced that the actions against them were motivated by the size of the media coverage they would attract and that the best solution, in the long run, is to sit tight. They say the campaign against the companies is based on disinformation and exaggeration and is more motivated by Greenpeace's membership drive than anything else.

Unquestionably, Greenpeace's tactics, and its ability to find a receptive audience, leave companies feeling impotent. Gilding says companies do not know how to deal with Greenpeace. "They really are hopeless. We could teach them all an awful lot about how to deal with us. BHP was the classic as far as that end of it is concerned. They had us arrested when we were taking samples. We were on television at the time. It could not have been worse for them."

Greenpeace's media liason officer, Michelle Grosvenor, is similiarly dismissive of the companies' attempts to take the public-relations initiative. She says that BHP's reaction at Port Kembla really "took the cake" for incompetence. "No one puts their hand over a television lens any more, no one," she says, referring to BHP's spokesman at the Port Kembla raid, John Bown, who attempted to stop filming of Greenpeace's attempts to take a sample of the outflows at the steel works.

Another concern for the Greenpeace targets was the group's ability to collect information about them. Caltex, in particular, was suspicious and held an internal investigation after the outflow pipes were plugged at the Kurnell refinery in Sydney in January. Caltex management was surprised that Greenpeace knew so much about the layout of the place.

Caltex says that Greenpeace apparently had a lot of "luck" in catching the company in breach of its waste-dumping agreements with the NSW Pollution Control Commission. The company's filtration system was not working efficiently at the time Greenpeace tested the outflow. The problem, Caltex believes, was caused by the heavy rains that hit Sydney over Christmas. Had the filters been working properly, Caltex says, it would not have been in breach. As it was, Caltex was pumping 29 parts per million litres of phenol compounds into the ocean instead of the five parts per million it was licensed to.

"They certainly were well very informed about us," says Phil Gross, head of public affairs at Caltex. "They knew when to take their samples and that we were having trouble with the filtration. We didn't know we had a problem, not at management level anyway. We have conducted an investigation into just how Greenpeace knew. They told us themselves that the information about the plant had come from an employee. Now that raised a number of unpleasant issues, particularly that we had been set up," Gross says.

Caltex's inquiries concluded that there was no sabotage and supported instead the theory of rain damage to the filtration system. But the company remains very concerned that someone at the plant may have become aware of the problem and, instead of telling management, went to Greenpeace.

For its part, Greenpeace says that the company's own testing program should have picked up the problem and that Greenpeace's action at Kurnell was a success because it drove home the problem inherent in companies' self-regulation of the dumping of toxic wastes. Gilding says there is rarely any problem finding out about the plants Greenpeace raids. "There is always someone who knows about these things, always a former employee or something," he says.

Caltex is now facing 15 separate actions by the NSW Pollution Control Commission that carry maximum fines of almost $3.5 million and the potential for further action against individual directors. It has since changed its testing procedure and says it analyses samples at least once a day, rather than once a week as it did at the time of the Greenpeace raid. Gross says: "We just wish they had come straight to us with the results of their tests and told us we had a problem. It seems they actually waited for two weeks before releasing the information and when they did they did it with as much publicity as they could muster." He notes that the action against the Kurnell refinery, which dumps into the bay offshore of Captain Cook's Landing Park, was planned for the day before Australia Day.

The action against EZ's Risdon zinc works in Hobart was a classic of its kind, not because it produced the now familiar scenes of Greenpeace boats darting around a harbor in perilous fashion in an attempt to stop a ship sailing, but because it emphasises just how difficult it is to come to any conclusions about facts when the pollution debate begins to heat up.

There are amazing differences between the ways Greenpeace and EZ tell the story of the action itself and the dangers posed by the dumping the activists are trying to stop. And, because of the way elements of the episode appear to have been exaggerated at the time by the protagonists, the authorities and the press, there is a minefield of disinformation to negotiate as the story unfolds.

Greenpeace decided on direct action against EZ's Risdon zinc refinery because the company, after paying $5000 a year for a federal licence, dumps the waste produced at Risdon in the ocean beyond the mouth of the Derwent. The waste elements, which include some heavy metals, are called jarosite. Greenpeace believes that companies will not search for cleaner altemative technologies until they become economic. It called for the Government to, among other things, immediately lift the cost of the licence to $2 million a year and to double that fee every year until the dumping stops.

The fundamental difference is that Greenpeace argues that jarosite is a potentially dangerous toxic waste and EZ says its research shows it is not. Both claim that scientific evidence supports their positions. Greenpeace says the waste does not disperse, but hangs in a suspended layer above the ocean floor and contaminates the food chain. EZ says the ocean's currents and tides disperse and dilute any material added. Greenpeace describes EZ as one of the worst polluters in Australia. EZ says it has spent $150 million modernising its operations and that 14 separate elements of the scheme were funded solely for environmental reasons and offer the company no economic benefit.

But the disagreements don't end there. There are more fierce disparities about Greenpeace's attempt to stop the EZ dumping vessel, Anson, sailing out of the Derwent to the dump zone, 60 nautical miles south-east of Hobart. Greenpeace says one of its team was badly cut on the arm by a crew member of the Anson who was trying to cut down a banner and another was injured more seriously when a police boat ran into one of the Greenpeace boats. EZ says it knows nothing about claims by Greenpeace of injuries, but says it is certain that the skipper of the Anson was punched by an over-keen Greenpeace member.

One of the stories drifting around the environment lobby was that Greenpeace had contacted EZ and told the company that some vital valves of the Anson had been tampered with and that the ship should return to harbor because it was sinking. Both sides agree the story is an exaggeration, probably started after a police announcement at the time that Greenpeace had placed lives in danger through its action against the ship.

But EZ says that the ship was "in some danger" and that if an accident had resulted in the ballast tanks filling, the ship would not have been able to plump out the water and would have sunk. Greenpeace, after first saying that it had not attempted to sabotage the ship, said that it did tamper with the valves that controlled the dumping of the jarosite, but that it contacted EZ "in plenty of time for them to turn around and get back". Gilding stresses that there was never any intention to threaten the ship or the crew and still believes there was no danger involved: "All we did was try to stop them dumping the water which fills the dumping tanks after the jarosite has been dumped. We do not believe there was any danger."

EZ also claims~that Greenpeace had done its utmost to promote a confrontation with the police and that the main clashes between the police and Greenpeace occurred when the protesters attempted to board the dumping ship.

Who alerted the police about the boarding I do not know. Maybe it was Greenpeace itself, to promote its push," EZ spokesman Murrihy says. BHP also says that Greenpeace's action at Port Kembla placed its workers in a dangerous situation.

"They could have been responsible for some serious problems if they had done all they had planned to," BHP's Bown says. "They wanted to cut off the central drain and it took a good 30 minutes to convince them that what they planned was highly dangerous and could have resulted in an explosion in the No. 5 blast fumance. It was not until we got the superintendent of the furnace down to talk to them, to explain what would happen, that they changed their tack. Until then they just did not believe what we were telling them."

Greenpeace explains that it felt the information that was being provided by BHP was incorrect and little more than bluff. Gilding says that until Greenpeace spoke to someone who "knew what they were talking about" it felt little need to change tactics. "In the end our people thought the guy they brought down was speaking good sense and knew his stuff, so we pulled out," he says.

Greenpeace blocked the Port Kembla outflows after samples it had taken showed the company was dumping too much cyanide in the inner harbor at Port Kembla. Greenpeace said BHP was dumping 125 kilograms of cyanide into the harbor a day, above its licence limit, and called on the Greiner Government to declare the area a toxic crisis zone.

BHP says that it was dumping more cyanide that it was licensed to, but it was doing so with the agreement of the NSW Pollution Control Commission. Bown says no charges were laid because of the technical nature of the infringement and that he did not expect any: "In reality, the company was only slightly outside the regulations," he says.

The Port Kembla plant had been releasing one millilitre per litre rather than the 0.5 millilitres it was licensed to. "We had been doing this with the knowledge of the State Pollution Control Commission," Bown says, "which until now had been prepared to accept the situation because we are busy trying to reduce the outflow. We are about to spend $14 million on a plant to reduce the cyanide content of the water and have just placed a tender for construction. But it takes time. Nothing is done overnight. This will take 14 months at least."

BHP was angered by the way Greenpeace, in its campaign against the Port Kembla works, made much of the fact that there was a ban on all fishing in the Port Kembla inner harbor. "It appears that the State Government is treating Port Kembla as a sacrifice zone, written off for the sake of company profits," Greenpeace said in its announcement of the action. The company says that mention of the ban has done nothing but confuse the issue, that it has nothing to do with the steel plant and that the company is attempting to have the ban lifted.

"The fact is people fish out there and bring in good fish at that," Bown says. "Apparently the ban is there&emdash;and it is very difficult to get anyone who knows exactly&emdash;because of concern over the levels of domestic sewage being pumped into the harbor. We have looked at it before and will be paying for an independent survey of the harbor with the aim of getting the ban lifted early. The report should be ready in about three or four months," Bown says.

But Gilding says: "Every time we do an action, everyone from the Government down says things were just about to change and that it was not our fault anyway. We went in there because they were acting outside of the rules. They got caught. Now they have to clean up.

"Capitalism is enormously and brilliantly adaptable," Gilding says. "But there is a limit to its capacity to cope. There is this blind faith in the corporate sector that says answers can be found, there will be alternative energies, we can reduce pollution to nothing. But in the end you can't fix it. Some time the system will have to accept that the only solution is to stop causing the problem, to stop madly rushing forward and just step back for once and say 'no more'," Gilding says.

Some companies are listening to the environmentalists and have started to rethink their strategies towards pollution and progress. Although Gilding does not want to single out companies, he says ICI, "a company with an atrocious record and reputation around the world", has changed what it had been saying about the environment. Others have impressed the Greenpeace leader not only with promises, but with the management philosophy those commitments represent.

"We will withhold any judgment on them until we see the results," Gilding says, "and if we don't get change, then there is going to be trouble, a lot more trouble. But we are starting to hear the right noises from companies, especially the big ones, about what is coming out of their stacks and what comes off their production lines. They are realising that the environment is not just a swing in interest rates or a movement in the balance of payments, but that the goal posts for corporate Australia have moved, the old rules have changed.

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