The Kimberley: The Right Thing Or Ka-Ching? | The Global Mail

The Kimberley: The Right Thing Or Ka-Ching? | The Global Mail




If someone tells me to stop imagining that we are having an impact, than I will refer them to WOODSIDE Petroleum chairman Michael Chaney’s words“protesters are really a handful of people who I think are anarchistic in their approach -- that is, they don't accept the decision of the umpire and they go their own way and try to stop projects,"

So what is Mr Chaney really saying? That 79% of the Broome community are only a handful of people who are anarchistic because they seek to ensure that their environment, lifestyle, and that a healthy future is left intact for their children; that we don't accept the decision of the umpire because we have all come to realize that the game has been match fixed.  He has been drawn out of his safe assured cocoon of corporate illusion and is starting to feel that maybe, just maybe the Broome community with its unbridled commitment will stop this idiocy.

What Mr Chaney needs to understand is the fact that this community has been watching this so called process unfold over several years now. During that time they have witnessed how corruption seems to be the blue print that has been written into the process itself. Outrages acts of intimidation, devaluing  of cultural heritage and connection to Country, manipulation of the science, the hiding of facts, the buying of silence and changing of the science, disempowerment of our elected local government, the sidestepping of  legal consequences, the criminalisation of a small community and a complete arrogant indifference  shown to our community.
This community has realized that the umpire (the WA state government) is actually the proponent, that the rules are changed throughout the game and the fact that not only are the goal posts being constantly moved but so are all the boundaries lines of decency and integrity.
Many Broome residents, who were originally sucked into Woodside propaganda and really thought that being gassed would be good for them and their children, are starting to change their mind.  Even if they supported the project itself, its all the erosion of social justice that are turning their heads. The division it has created in the community, the imposition of having our town turn into a police state overnight, the manipulation of the courts and the diminishing of a community’s strongly hold their values of mutual respect for cultural differences. People like to see justice serviced because it is just, not something that is based on what you can afford.
The delays, blockades and court challenges have created time, which has enabled us to snap the community out of the hypnotic corporatism coma, into the light of rationality and truth;  a space in which the community has been able to educate themselves about the ramifications and the impacts of being gassed.
They have also witness firsthand what Woodside have already brought to this community, hundreds of police to intimidate us from objecting to their evil plans to destroy community, country and culture.  A new power order that has more influence and control over us than our elected local government or dare I say police force.
Chaney’s elites drinking mates would hate to acknowledge it, but when large numbers of ordinary people are moved to action, it is a major concern but when a whole community starts to turn against you, you are forced to come out and start calling them names. Who is this man to speak of respecting legal process?  Like someone noted on the blog recently “This is what the Nazis did prior to WW2, they observed legal process in Germany at the time. The Nuremberg laws were simply a means to an end for them to feign legality for their real intentions.” I have seen so many similarities and over the last five years imposed on this community, by Woodside as they try to bully us into being a community that is subservient to them, their wants and needs regardless of everyone or anything.
It is the biodiversity of this Campaign’s approaches and all-encompassing angles of defense, research, education and protection on local, nation and more and more international levels and it is this environment that has finally drawn Cheney out of his illustrations of grandeur.
The goal of this man and the corporate state that supports his Woodside’s baby is like that of any totalitarian entity, they seek to create a society where no one has the capacity to resist and if communities do, they resort to using a police force to carry out their will, fine people out of the debate or serve move-ons notices or strict bail conditions to keep them out of Country.
This Campaign has proved through vigorous community science and research that Woodside are not being honest when they speak about the whales, billies, Monsoonal Vine Thickets, water use, dinosaur track sites, turtles, social impacts and the economics of this proposed project.
Every one of those issues has its own nail for this proposed project’s coffin. This Campaign has a whole series of tech-screws holding down the lid of this proposal, but still it refuses to lie down and die.
Why? because corporations do not actually live, therefore they cannot die. Everyone reading this is going to die.  You are, I assure you and so will I because it is this gift of death is what defines us. That gift is what makes us human, the arc of our days ensures that we would live a life that is measured. Corporations do not die and they have no conception of death. They just go and on and on, and on because there is no arc to them. There is nothing human in them but the only thing that can stop them is the human in all of us.

What has taken placed just to get Woodside and the state government this far along this so called process has been degrading and fraudulent. This process which our community has been dragged through can only have one predetermined and managed outcome, that Woodside get everything they want and the state government get their massive port installation on the Kimberley coast.

We have been subjected to the whittling down of local planning regulations, Illegal works, destruction of Culture heritage sites, retrospective changes to laws and planning approvals, manipulation of scientific reports, conflicted members of a so called independent EPA board, debatable report & unethical process, two compulsory acquisition, an Improvement Plan,  political influence and interference in the courts, criminalization and surveillance of a whole community,  manipulation of media that goes on and on and on.

It is pretty obvious really! People do not support or like this type of corporate behavior or the antics of a state government acting as a dictatorship. The Broome community is living in the era of the ascendancy of the corporation who are endowed with the rights of people and none of the responsibilities. Woodside has proven they have no actual concern for community or human values and are highly corrosive to all issues associated with social justice. Why do they not have the courage to look at the truth about their proposed flawed proposal, say “we have made a silly mistake” and leave?

This Campaign is just about to really find it’s feet, why because many more people are understanding that this campaign is now much more than just the Browse gas this is now a campaign that also seeks to bring ethics back into this sphere of debate. It’s not about name calling it is about not leaving this world more shittier, damaged or polluted. Hands Off Country