Even the sky knows the sins of the earth

While, watching some Oyster Catches fishing and enjoying their surroundings, this morning in the proposed location for the LNG Gas Precinct, near Broome, Redhand was thinking where will these birds go if the proposal goes ahead. It was then, that it really hit home to redhand.

Everything, all the birds, plants, insects’, reptiles, whales, turtles, the reefs and their corals, everything will be totally destroyed, the freshest of air polluted, the peace and quiet shattered, everything will go. They will: chain huge sways of country, they will burn, cut, blowup and eradicate country and execute the reefs of all living things. They will annihilate country and then it will be all consumed.

So what is the real point of an Environmental Assessment? Is it to record what was here? Is it to understand what they (our State government) intends to exterminate off the face of the earth? In the end, it will be the environment, the planet and the atmosphere that has to absorb the full brunt of these factual impacts.

It’s very similar to Social Impact Assessments. I was under the delusion that social impacts were something we try to identify and then try to avoid, but apparently they are about identifying and then managing them. Managed by whom? Well, just like the Oyster Catches, we will have to manage it. It will be the community, we have to deal with it, like it or lump it that’s what social impacts mean to the current state government. They implement and impose and we, as the Broome community have no other alternative than to deal with the social, economic and environmental fall outs. This is on top of the impacts we as a community are currently struggling to manage, at the best of times!.

Even if Woodside does not go ahead with their proposed LNG gas precinct, at Quondong, on the Kimberley coast, the current State Government are fully adamant on making the area site ready, free of all obstructions and impediment s. So, if in the future another company comes along, all the necessary assessments and approvals are already obtained or cleared and Broome, as a community will continue to have no say in it, at all.

“We, (the State Government) are going ahead with this site” “We have banked it!” quote Gary Simmons, from the Department of State Development, Broome Chamber of Commerce Meeting, Mangrove, Broome, Wednesday 17th June.

Apparently, the State Government is not only looking at the proposed LNG Gas Precinct on the Kimberley coast to process the Browse Basin gas, but according to Gary “There is a lot of gas out in the Canning Basin, we will need to process it.”

At the same meeting, we were informed by Andrea Jardine Orr, the social impact assessor, at the very same meeting “that the workforce will be fenced within the precinct and that there will be no leakages.” She went on to say that compiling all the necessary assessments is like “Putting all the ducks in a row.” Unfortunately, they are not proposing to build a duck pond.