Raising Hell: Issue 85: "Incentives for Exploration"
"Propaganda is of no use to the politician unless he has something to say which the public, consciously or unconsciously, wants to hear" - Edward Bernays, "Propaganda" 1928
It was an odd coincidence that a week after the release of Slick, as I was beginning the process of promoting the book, the Western Australian Environmental Protection dropped a bombshell.
As the excellent Peter Milne reported last week, documents obtained under Freedom of Information showed how the agency had told the country’s biggest domestic oil and gas company, Woodside, that it’s $30bn Browse development should not go ahead. Apparently all that industrial activity around the pristine Scott Reef amounted represented an insurmountable risk to a natural environment that had developed over millions of years.
It was a significant story for several reasons. Woodside had long been promoting Browse as a major new development that would help secure its future. Then there was the EPA itself. Back in 2019, the agency was gearing up to propose a strategy to help deal with the carbon emissions being produced in Western Australia, owing in part to the presence of large scale fossil fuel extraction in the state. But before the announcement could be made, the agency’s then chief, Dr Tim Hatton, received a call from then premier Mark McGowan telling him to back off. Though he initially told the ABC he had not been pressured into scrapping his agency’s plan, at the end of his term as the agency’s head, Dr Hatton admitted that was not entirely accurate:
It wasn't a very long phone call. It was a very direct, very straightforward request that he did not want us to continue with those guidelines and wanted us to withdraw them.
He made it very clear that he didn't feel that consultation was sufficient within industry, and he asked us to withdraw the guidelines.
I tried to have a conversation to say … we are happy to do further consultation if that's what's required. He said, 'no, I want you to withdraw the guidelines.
As a post-script to all this, Mark McGowan, following his tenure as premier, went on to take a senior role in the consulting firm run by former federal Treasurer Joe Hockey — the man who dared General Motors to pull out of Australia on the floor of parliament. Their client list includes large resource companies like BHP.
But that is not the end of the story. What was remarkable about the willingness of the agency to look Woodside in the eye and say no was the context in which it occurred. Western Australian, for what it’s worth, is the spiritual home of the Australian oil and gas industry; the first oil was found at Rough Range-1 in 1953 — I have shared some documents that I relied upon to retrace these origins in Slick, on the website. It is also a place where the association between industry and government has been intimate, to say the least. At one point the APEA CEO claimed to have penned this speech delivered by the Deputy Premier of Western Australia at an industry conference in 1983.
For its part, the industry says this development will help meet domestic gas shortages — although this is debatable. The bulk of Australian gas is exported overseas to major trading partners like Japan and South Korea. According to an analysis by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA), Japan has in turn been on-selling Australian gas to its own trading partners across South East Asia in an exercise of geopolitical manoeuvring.
All of this makes the decision to hold up a $30bn gas project a brave one, particularly in a state where industry tends to have friends in high places. Though he has been a personal supporter of Browse, the current WA Premier Roger Cook has said the project “certainly shouldn’t go ahead”. What happens next is anyone’s guess. Still, Australia is so committed to this major export it has shown it is willing to approve pretty much anything despite promising in Dubai at COP28 to plan for the phase out of coal, oil and gas.
It helps, however, to imagine the world as it might be. If the EPA holds its ground, it would be nice to think this a watershed moment in a state where there has already been resistance to these sorts of projects. There’s been skirmishes between groups like Disrupt Burrup Hub and the State Security Investigations Group, and campaigns to push arts and sports bodies to cut time with fossil fuel sponsorship. There is a certain poetry to the notion that the place where the oil and gas industry started may eventually become the place where it ends — one day, maybe.
Events
Now the book’s live, there will be events — I hear you love events, so I got ‘em in droves. Below are a list of those which are confirmed. Check the website as I’ll be putting up the details of new events as they’re locked in.
I gotta say, it’s been fun getting pictures of the book out in the wild. This one from Adelaide, South Australia.
FREE: State Capture: How Big Oil came to dominate Australian politics
What: In conversation with Lyndal Rowlands.
When: 6.30pm, Wednesday, 14 August,
Where: Online
Registration: https://events.humanitix.com/byron-writers-festival-passes-2024/tickets
FREE: Australia’s Biggest Book Club with The Australia Institute
What: Join Royce Kurmelovs as he talks about his new book, Slick, with Australia’s Biggest Bookclub.
When: 11am (AEST), Friday, 30 August
Where: Online
Register: https://events.humanitix.com/byron-writers-festival-passes-2024/ticketsADELAIDE LAUNCH: Slick: Australia’s Toxic Relationship with Big Oil
What: Join Royce Kurmelovs for the launch of Slick, in conversation with Walter Marsh, author of Young Rupert.
When: starts 6pm (sharp), Thursday, 5 September
Where: The Wheatsheaf Hotel
Tickets: FREE — but registrations essential. Register here.
We’ve also got things cooking in Darwin, Canberra and Adelaide. If you’re in Sydney and Melbourne and want to organise something, let me know and we can sort something out.
Before You Go (Go)…
Are you a public sector bureaucrat whose tyrannical boss is behaving badly? Have you recently come into possession of documents showing some rich guy is trying to move their ill-gotten-gains to Curacao? Did you take a low-paying job with an evil corporation registered in Delaware that is burying toxic waste under playgrounds? If your conscience is keeping you up at night, or you’d just plain like to see some wrong-doers cast into the sea, we here at Raising Hell can suggest a course of action: leak! You can securely make contact through Signal — contact me first for how. Alternatively you can send us your hard copies to: PO Box 134, Welland SA 5007
And if you’ve come this far, consider supporting me further by picking up one of my books, leaving a review or by just telling a friend about Raising Hell!