Chair’s address to AGM 2022
As National Chair I’d like to share and celebrate some of the events and achievements of the past year. Three things stand out for me, the successful completion of NZE2050 campaign by Maree and her team, the appointment of Will Dayble as Chief Exec, and the emergence of a new, simpler, more focussed, better organised CCL.
1. The net zero campaign took us through to the COP and added to the many voices demanding that Australia made its commitment at the COP. We grew a lot of campaigning experience. Now that the new government has legislated targets much more is possible. But we still have plenty to do to secure a safe climate and to restore carbon pricing to the position it deserves as a premium climate policy.
2. In October we looked in our piggybank and decided we could afford to employ a staff member to support our work - a Chief Executive to get us started towards being an org with staff after years of all-volunteer operation. We advertised, had some great applicants and chose Will Dayble for the role. He took to the job with alacrity.
He met with many members of CCL, inquired deeply into CCL’s culture and DNA, listened closely, learned all about us and reflected it back to us so we could reset, focus and simplify in order to be more effective. He designed and implemented a digital strategy that has modernised our communication and data systems and given us a crisp new website that better reflects who and what we are.
3. He enabled us to evolve into the grassroots thinktank that we are now becoming – a think tank focussed on developing and advocating policies for a price on carbon at the grassroots level; much simpler than the org we were trying to be a year ago.
We have a vital niche-role to fill – the rehabilitation of carbon pricing as a viable policy in the Australian political system. We are doing this by developing Playbooks on our shiny new website. We have a Policy Playbook and a Lobbying Playbook. We are writing down the many vital things we have learned in the 15 years since CCL started in the US and the 8 years since we started in Australia - we’ll keep adding as we learn more.
The Playbooks will inform and train our volunteers, and anyone outside of CCL who wants to learn from us and benefit from our experience. They will enable our new members to learn what they need to know to become effective volunteers, at their own pace and mostly in their own time. They will then be able to self-organise or join existing groups and teams with some knowledge already, and will know where and how to access more information and training as they go.
At last year’s AGM I spoke about 4 things
A carbon price able to rise high enough to fully internalise the social and environmental costs of fossil fuels – thus ending the hidden subsidies that are driving our still-growing emissions
A dividend to households to enable them to manage the rising costs due to the carbon price
A comprehensive policy – covering most of the economy and able to replace the piecemeal polices that will struggle to do the job
And fourthly, a policy that is national and able to go global
The climate dividend is all of these and the Policy Playbook is providing the understandings that are needed to advocate for all of these and more. The Lobbying Playbook is providing the principles and processes to support our advocacy.
The playbooks are the pillars of our grassroots thinktank. Our new digital systems will support our activities and enable us to record, measure and learn from what we do. We have 4 organising teams to keep us moving forward – a policy team, a lobbying team, a digital team and a training team. A regular coordination meeting will hold it all together. We also have a co-counselling group – a growing group of members who are keen to use this simple but profound mutual-listening process to build our listening skills, sharpen our thinking and maintain our energy levels.
A big thank you to Will for supporting and guiding us towards a simpler, focussed and more effective organisation.
