constanttrek

Gas Hub at James Price Point

December 19th, 2010

This is the beach at James Price Point, 60 km North of Broome.  Some of you may recall that I used to live in the Kimberley.  Part of me still calls it home, and always will; I have never ruled out moving back there.

For some years now, Woodside has been campaigning to make James Price Point the location of a $30 billion dollar liquefied natural gas plant.  The multinational has been wading its way through the usual obstacles – environmental objections (see the Wilderness Society’s excellent page for details), the concerns of the local indigenous population, led by the magnificent Joseph Roe, and the easily dismissed concerns of various interest groups.  Put simply, the company just throws more money at it – and more, and more – and gradually, it is wearing down opposition.

It is easy to see the gas hub as a foregone conclusion.

And I find myself furious.

I wonder how the British people would react if a multinational proposed tearing down Stonehenge to build a gas hub?  Imagine the outrage in Italy  if someone decided that the Vatican should be dug up to lay a new electricity cable? When the Taliban blasted the buddhist statues in their country to smithereens, it made world wide news.

Why on earth do we not treasure our own country’s riches as much as the wonders of Europe or Asia?  I have seen more debate in this country about the degradation of Ankor Wat than is given to the gas hub.  These natural resources are OUR treasures.

This week, the Western Australian State Department of State Development released a report recommending that this development goes ahead.  Their conclusion barely made a headline.  Ask your average Melbourne resident if they have ever heard of either James Price Point, or the planned gas hub, and they will shrug in incomprehension.  And yet if you asked the same person what they dream of doing one day – in the top ten will inevitably be a round Australia road trip, where they go to the Kimberley coast line, to bathe in crystal waters, sit on bright white sands, and get lost in nothingness.

Australia has always been politically apathetic.  But if we continue to take such encroachments on our natural environment with a dismissive shrug, open another beer, and have a laugh, we are running the very real risk that the beach we like to drink that beer on will be submerged by yet another development.  We do not live in a land of infinite resources.  We have only few, and they are rapidly being dug up, drilled out, and sold off at a rate that is as frightening as it is horrifying.

I am not going to linger here on the various arguments for and against.  They are well documented on various websites, two of which are listed above.  Nor am I going to embark on a passionate description of the environmental and cultural impact the gas hub would have, no matter how strongly I may feel about them.

Rather, I am throwing my hat in the ring on a personal level.  I am 37 years old, and I have lived the best part of my life in Australia.  I love it with a passion  that is hard to describe.  I love it’s quirky eccentricity, the pubs in the middle of nowhere with weird things hanging from the ceiling and even weirder things drinking at the bar.  The way the sun flings out final orange flames across the pearlescent pink and grey of a northern sky at dusk; watching a storm roll in over the mountains I grew up beneath. I love the wildness of the landscape, and the diversity of the populous.

But I am both angry and indignant that the inherent goodness and trust of the Australian people are being taken for granted by both the governments we entrust to safeguard our country and natural resources, and what can only be described as big business interested only in profit at any cost.  Brought back to its most fundamental point – at a time when the global community is confronting the very real environmental impact resulting from generations of ‘dig it up and burn it’ philosophy, and mourning the loss of pristine environments worldwide, how can anyone seriously contemplate the wanton destruction of one of the most exceptional coastlines in the world?

There is no possible argument to defend what is nothing more than a blatant disregard for the extraordinary natural gift we are caretakers of.  After two centuries of deliberate destruction of the indigenous culture, Australia is openly supporting yet another development that purports to ‘integrate’ whilst doing no more than handing out yet another, ever increasing, ‘sit down’ payment.

I think enough, this time, really is enough.

There are more ways to skin a multinational than simply protesting.  I intend to start finding ways to actually fight this gas hub – not, take note, from being built at all, but rather from being built at James Price Point.

Have a look at even the most rudimentary of websites on this issue and the bit that sticks out with glaring horror is the fact that once this hub is built (there are numerous locations on the Pilbara coast further south that are already developed and ready to take the gas hub), it opens the way for a variety of mineral activity in the region.  Iron ore, zinc, and bauxite mining are just a few of the resources the area is rich in – and which are dependent on onshore gas processing.

Of particular contempt, therefore, is the spurious claim that locating the hub at James Price point will in some way be more benfecial environmentally than transporting the gas through longer pipelines to a Pilbara location.

All of this might sound like just another environmental rant by a left wing, anti development greenie.  I don’t particularly care.  What I care about now is galvanising anyone and everyone who is interested in actually making sure this outrage does not go ahead, and coming up with a strategy to fight it.

I remember once years ago, my father telling me that at some point, he had to stop reading about Tibet, because he just found it too distressing.  I asked him if he had done anything to protest the issue, and he rolled his eyes and told me he just felt overwhelmed, and that protest was useless.  I was only a teenager.  I thought at the time how sad it was that someone as smart and sensitive as my father couldn’t do more; I felt sad that he felt so helpless.

I found myself this morning feeling similarly impotent, and wondered what on earth I can possibly do – after all, Missy Higgins, the James Butler trio, and Geoffrey Rush have all been banging the drum on this issue for years.

But I don’t want to just shake my head and feel sad.  I think as Australians that we often find it a bit embarassing to really stand up on principle.  There is a very British part of us that says, “oh dear, leave that kind of thing to those people in dreadlocks and piercings who are unemployed and have nothing better to do than wave placards.”  We seem to consider ourselves a little above protesting.

But I doubt that any European nation would stand by and watch as their national treasures were ripped up and destroyed in the wake of ‘progress’.  It is long past time that here in Australia, we recognise that our culture is tied inextricably to the country we live and walk upon.  We may not have great architectural icons, or centuries of history built into neat villages.  But we have millennia etched upon our natural landscape.  We have something that has been desecrated in every other country in the world in the name of progress.  We have something that, once lost, can never be replaced.

Our greatest treasure is the very one that is being spent to produce what everybody else already has.  We must find a way to stop it continuing, or risk losing what makes Australia unique in the first place.

I plan to do whatever I can.

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