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The healthy, natural parts of Australia — like the magnificent Kimberley region where Midnight Oil have just performed — beloved by film, TV and advertisers, essential to our economic strength, employing large numbers of people, and central to our sense of identity, remain that way due to one core fact.
Other than the steadfast refusal of Aboriginal people to see their country run down in remote areas, these special environments are now protected because of the efforts of generations of selfless community activists, environmentalists, Landcare groups and everyday people who mobilised to protect nature.
I cannot think of any World Heritage-listed natural and cultural treasure under threat from resource development that was initially recognised and immediately saved by government. Not Kakadu, the Great Barrier Reef, Ningaloo Reef, Queensland’s Wet Tropics, the Tasmanian Wilderness, or the Antarctic.
Yes, the culmination of campaigns involved Federal and State governments under pressure eventually changing their views, and then laws and policy followed suit. But rarely in the opening stages of any environmental campaign is political leadership found.
Which brings us to today’s news; an escalating climate crisis, where increasing fossil fuel emissions literally threaten life on earth, with out-of-control climate consequences like raging floods, monster droughts, and the prospects of 50 degree unliveable days in many parts of WA.
Repeatedly climate scientists and international organisations like the UN and the International Energy Agency identify the urgent need to rapidly phase out fossil fuel extraction and use, warning we are on a road to hell if we don’t change direction now.
Yet in the parallel world of Harvest Terrace, Perth, a government avowedly in favour of addressing climate change is simultaneously accelerating it by backing in continued gas expansion. These clear messages from experts, and the visible signs of the climate crisis are being ignored.
Albert Einstein’s observation that insanity is “doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results” applies in the West it seems, as much as anywhere in Australia. On the one hand, the Government is committed to a 2030 reduction target of 80 per cent below 2020 levels for all State Government agencies, a $1.25 billion Climate Action Fund, and net zero greenhouse gas emissions statewide by 2050.
On the other, it is enabling a massive increase in greenhouse gas emissions that will blow not only the State, but the whole country’s carbon budget out of the water, and make a mockery of those very goals to reduce emissions.
Gas giant Woodside wants to build the most climate-polluting project currently proposed in Australia, the Burrup Hub, off WA’s beautiful coastline. This includes opening up the Scarborough and Browse massive offshore gas fields, and operating the North West Shelf gas processing facility until 2070. The climate impacts are terrible — but the impacts on nature are too. For Browse, over 50 wells will be drilled including beneath the Scott Reef.
The dirty gas that Woodside wants to drill for is a dangerous fossil fuel that is one of the biggest drivers of the climate crisis. Woodside’s Burrup Hub will, over its lifetime, spew out enough climate pollution to top Australia’s annual emissions 12 times over, turbocharging the droughts, bushfires, and floods that WA is already enduring. Independent analysis has the total greenhouse gas emissions from the Burrup Hub at over 6 billion tonnes.
West Australians should be alarmed about this. The natural treasures we all love and cherish are being sold out and put at unacceptable risk, for a project that will risk people’s future by accelerating dangerous climate change right when we need our leaders to be focusing on real solutions in the form of renewable energy, of which there is no shortage.
No amount of generously purchased social license is worth this risk — not sponsorship of local footy clubs, arts festivals, our school programs. We need to be clear about what is happening here.
One of the world’s biggest oil and gas companies is charging ahead to produce massive greenhouse gas emissions right in West Australians’ backyard, pushing the planet over the brink. Local environments and species from tiny corals to mighty whales, simply roadkill in the rush to exploit a dangerous fossil fuel.
Yet like those who came before to protect Walmadany/James Price Point, people have the power to say “not on our watch”. As communities, scientists, traditional owners, business groups, farmers and young people, all can say “enough is enough”.
Having witnessed first hand the beauty of this state we urge people to come together and demand that politicians stand up to companies like Woodside and say no more fossil fuel projects for WA, no more fracking in the Kimberley.
Let’s transition to safe, renewable energy as fast as possible. If politics won’t deliver a safe future, it’s high time for people power.
Peter Garrett is Midnight Oil frontman and former environment minister in the Rudd and Gillard governments.
