Woodside Has All The Rights Of People And No Responsibilities At James Price Point

What Broome is facing is the emergence of a new organizational form; the transnational corporation, larger and more powerful than most national governments, controlled by autocratic central authorities, and able to function largely beyond the reach of legal and public accountability. These corporations have all the human rights of people but no responsibilities. They do not answer to the people or can be held accountable by the law because justice is served according to what you can afford. 

So with much personal angst, I have begun to believe that the innocent and concerned residents of Broome are currently being herded down the path to a Police State, being transformed from someone who is concerned for their children’s future into wanted criminals overnight. I no longer wonder whether if there is some grand plan, I know that their master puppeteers are poised and positioning to start to pull our strings again.  

In the past few decades the extent of transnational corporations’ vast financial power has eclipsed that of our elected leaders at an alarming rate. What Broome is currently bearing witness to is the rise of corporate power, regardless of people’s wishes because all governments are susceptible to bribery, manipulation and corruption? With the current WA state government the distinction between incompetence and dishonesty is blurred.

Regardless of their political persuasion our local, state and federal governments are becoming increasingly impotent, unwilling, or unable to intervene on behalf of people or the environment and seemingly have lost any sense of moral purpose. It is hardly surprising that the electorate is no longer hoodwinked into believing that process will deliver a fair,   just or considered outcomes, that mitigation and management are not possible because extermination is forever.

In a country, like Australia that proclaims democracy as one of our greatest achievements why then does it feel like our democracy is actually owned by corporate interests. We live in the era of the ascendancy of the corporation. Endowed with the rights of man and none of the responsibilities, they have proved corrosive to human values, health and community spirit. Only when we have the courage to look at the truth about these defective manufactures, can we try to bring ethics back into this sphere of life, back into this debate.

Unlike governments that are bound by borders, corporations can operate in almost any country, and can therefore choose how they want to divide the our shared earth’s resources and allocate locations for all the production facilities. This in turn gives them all the power to toy with one government over another the same way as Woodside has toyed with our community as a means of achieving favorable economic conditions, all on their terms, and all for themselves.

Over the last four years Broome community has observed how all three tiers of government have allowed corporate interests to take precedence over our community, the environment and our iconic multicultural and tolerant town and over real fair balanced economic and common sense. 

The reality is that Woodside like all other simpler corporations are not inherently moral, and therefore profit is the main goal of their business furthering diminishing the focus on doing the right thing. 

The global economy has become like a malignant cancer, advancing the colonisation of the planet's living spaces for the benefit of powerful corporations and financial institutions, turning them into  instruments of tyranny that are focused on totalitarianism. 

Broome will continue to retain its resistance to Woodside and their government puppet bullying and has reclaimed its power to localise its own economies while globalizing its community consciousness.