Tonsley needs trees, not Teslas

“People before profits”; “Trees not Teslas”; “Elon Musk can get [Redacted]”; these were some of the placards at a recent protest outside the City of Marion Council chambers in Adelaide, where a proposal to build a Tesla battery servicing centre and showroom in Tonsley have been met with widespread community opposition.

The council reported that 95 percent of the nearly 1,000 responses to its community consultation opposed the proposal. Submissions cited opposition to Elon Musk’s far-right politics, Tesla’s terrible environmental record, and support for alternative uses for the site, such as public green spaces and public housing.

Despite this widespread opposition, the council is ploughing ahead with the proposal. It engaged in community consultation only because it is legislatively required to do so if it is to sell a local park that is part of the proposed site. But adhering to or even acknowledging the community opposition was not mandatory. Balancing its farcical consultation with recommendations from private developers, the council’s business unit decided that the will of the latter should come before the overwhelming disapproval of residents. The council agreed and voted to go ahead with the proposal.

This is nothing new for people in Tonsley. The proposed site sits next to the old Chrysler-Mitsubishi Automotive plant, which closed in 2008. The land once contained a publicly accessible park and public housing lots. In 2016, it was discovered that the groundwater had been contaminated by industrial pollution from the plant—the land was no longer safe for residential or recreational use.

One would think that the company responsible for the pollution should be made to pay the cost of cleaning it all up. Instead, the housing trust residents were forced to move, and the park was closed. The land has remained unused since then.

The council says the Tesla plant is an excellent opportunity to put the land to use for industrial purposes. They say that the developer will be responsible for the cleanup, but locals are understandably sceptical. Given Tesla’s record of environmental mismanagement at some of its other industrial sites, it is not hard to see why.

According to a report last year in the Wall Street Journal, former employees have spoken out about a culture of regulatory avoidance at the company. Tesla’s Gigafactory in Austin, Texas, has been accused of illegally dumping toxic run-off into the city sewerage system. After the door on the casting furnace broke, management reportedly continued production, releasing toxic fumes, so as not to fall behind on Model Y production quotas. In Freemont, California Tesla’s factory has repeatedly breached air pollution regulations. And at the company’s main factory in Europe, in the German state of Brandenburg, a years-long protest campaign over the company’s theft of water is ongoing.

Speaking to Red Flag at the Marion protest, Rebecca, a local resident, said that she was “tired of business and elected councils, supposedly bodies that are meant to represent the people, just running roughshod over community and over humanity. I’m really tired of profits being put above the people at all costs”.

The proposal still requires state government approval. The activists behind the Trees Not Teslas campaign have vowed to keep fighting.