Serious social and psychological ramifications are currently being experienced within our small community of Broome

“Conditions will help make sure the Gas Precinct does not have any bad effects on land, sea country, on the lives of people or on their cultural heritage. They will also make sure that Traditional Owners and other affected Indigenous people can obtain benefits from the development of the Precinct”. KLC Newsletter Jan-Feb 2010

Who is advising the Kimberley Land Council? Are they are just: outright lazy in their research, lack life experience or world exposure, or totally ignorant to the real world in which we all live or are they just fraudulent in the quality of information they translate to their membership. After all, sustainability (good business sense) means running with the global environment - Earth Inc. - like a corporation: with depreciation, amortization and maintenance accounts. In other words, keeping the asset whole, rather than undermining the natural capital.
Does KLC’s membership really appreciate the horrendous social and environmental ramifications of the LNG industries if the proposed precinct is built at James Price Point?

We are in a period of time, in human history, when communities are in search of new and sustaining relationships with the planet because the world’s environmental problems are currently threatening the very existence of all life-forms. This is the ideology that Indigenous people all over the world have been trying to inform Non-indigenous people since their first contacts. Now, just when Non-indigenous people are starting to fully appreciate what the first (original) people were warning us all about and the fact that their calamitous predictions are now coming to fruition. It seems so incongruous that their social and cultural values have been so corrupted and infiltrated with imposed values that they now accept that everything that is happening as unavoidable.

Serious social and psychological ramifications are currently being experienced within our small community of Broome even as the final decision on the proposal is months away.


The magnitude of destruction within the LNG industrial processes is so great that we must initiate a radical rethinking of the myth of progress and of humanity's role in the evolutionary process. Indeed, we should ask ourselves: Is community and its very essence of human participation and collectiveness also a vulnerable species on our endangered planet?

It’s not just about Country anymore, it’s about the planet and everyone’s human rights to live and work in a healthy environment and keep it that way for the future generations. We are lucky enough to live in a democracy; we all need to exercise our rights to speak for our home, community and the planet. In less democratic societies, people don’t get the right to object to multinational corporations bullying and if you do question, they just kill you, this is fact. So, we have the globalizational obligations to ensure that when we can question and speak for the countless of millions of people who suffer and live in the aftermaths and dregs of multinational corporation greed, all over the world. We have to challenge this mentality of profit before people, here and now because we can.

Corporations have to prove to us that they are good corporate citizens and the communities on the Dampier peninsular and the Broome Community have the legal and ethical entitlements to issue the Social Licence to Operate. It should not be up to the Broome community to convince the State government, Woodside or the joint ventures that our community is really worth saving from the socially destroying heavy industrialisation impacts. Broome does not have the capacity or the social will to service an industrial conglomerate for the next 99 years. The corporations should be convincing us as a community that they are and have been good corporate citizens and clearly illustrate to us how they achieved this. What really is their track record in mitigating their management plans, who, where, how and when have these plans been monitored or reported on?

The ecological and social crisis of the late 20th century displays a profound alienation from Country / nature and indeed from matter itself. Country had become largely identified as matter which can be manipulated and is seen as a resource to be exploited used rather than the source of life itself.

Maybe, it’s because we live on a island or are so spoiled because we live in one of three least human impacted places in world or maybe its because Kimberley people are almost completely alienated from the rest of the world that we really do not comprehend the facts that our planet is struggling against: unprecedented assaults that include environmental pollution, destruction of entire ecosystems, the aesthetic degradation of nature, human overpopulation, resource depletion, industrial growth, technological manipulation, and, now emerging as the most pressing and desperate of all problems, abrupt massive species extinction - and in cases of recently discovered ones.

Two thirds of the planet’s environments are totally compromised. We are killing country, community, culture and our world. Our feelings of alienation in the modern period have extended beyond the human community and its patterns of material exchanges to our interaction with country itself. Especially in technologically sophisticated urban societies, we have become removed from that recognition of our dependence on nature – when we no longer see the earth as sacred or understand our connection to it, we are really lost!