Hands off Country

NOTE - because the comments below are taken from Hansard "Uncorrected Proof — Not to be Quoted", please do not take the quotes below as final quotes...coz Hansard may be altered]

As you may have noticed Parliament has been 'debating' the Premier's JPP Land Agreement Bill this week. In today's West Carole Martin's latest attack on 'greenies' is given prominent coverage. Interestingly, while reporting her strong criticism of gas hub opponents for allegedly using terms like "kaffir", there is no mention of her saying:

Nobody has the right to assault anybody in their workplace. Then, what happens? We get 100 police to go up there to protect these people who need to go to work, and what happens? The police are criticised. Everybody is criticised. Think about this: who was protecting those workers? The police. They were not there just to kick a mung bean; it was not about that. They were there to protect workers on their way to work.

Of course Ms Martin's speech was heavily and repeatedly praised by Colin Barnett, who demanded the 'politically correct' media cover her comments instead of just those Sydney-based greenies only interested in "frollicking whales and dinosaurs".

But neither Barnett nor the West mentioned the great speech made by retiring ALP Member for Pilbara Tom Stephens! Its worth reading in full but here are some excerpts.

Tom Stephens (ALP Member for Pilbara [and first CEO of KLC - 1978])

I have by and large stayed out of the issue as it has played out, but my natural inclination is to say that the Kimberley will be the poorer for the advancement of this particular project; in my view, it will be adversely affected. The presence of the resource industry in the Pilbara region, with its 12-hour shifts, its fly in, fly out roster and its way of doing business, is not conducive to family and community life. It focuses on shunting people from all over the state, the country and the globe, as Woodside has done for the last 30 years, rather than focusing on the needs of securing communities that can work, live and play in a region. That is what I fear and predict will happen if this project is advanced north of Broome. I have seen the penetration of the fluoro vest in the Pilbara region as though it were the uniform that people put on when they get up in the morning and take off when they slump back into bed at night, with no clothes for sport or for working in the garden. In fact, there are no gardens left in any houses in the Pilbara. There is hardly a sports club left. There is hardly any community life left. The resource sector has constructed itself in a way that is destructive of human existence in regions such as the Pilbara and, I predict, also in the Kimberley. Aboriginal people are not easily attracted to surrender their close connection to their partners, their family and their communities in order to take up jobs in the resource sector, with its 12-hour shifts that are hell-bent on largely fly in, fly out operations rather than building up real work opportunities for people who value their wives, partners, kids, families and communities. 

...

We cannot pass this bill, which talks about the hope and promise of development in the Kimberley, without
thinking of the missed opportunities that have occurred in the Pilbara. I place on record that in the early 1980s
Woodside came to people like me and my party, in opposition and then in government, seeking and obtaining
our support for its developments in the Burrup, having given assurances and promises about Woodside’s
commitment to train and employ Indigenous people in that part of the world. Woodside said that it would
contribute to the protection of heritage sites and build cultural heritage facilities in places such as Roebourne. As
I look back over those 30 years, I see a trail of broken promises and a failure to deliver on commitments,
although recently Woodside has upped it a notch and focussed on the commitments that it made so many
decades ago now.

...

I look at the pressure for James Price Point to proceed that is being applied by the state
coalition government, the federal Labor government, the industry players that want it and the Kimberley Land
Council, which represents the majority decision of the title holders, in a context in which people may say that
they had a gun held to their head. There is a view that the James Price Point development will advance the
interests of the Indigenous peoples of that area. In my view, that is not a given; it is not guaranteed if the project
advances.

....

This bill will pass for all the reasons that have been described sensitively by members on this side of the house. I appreciate the sensitive way in which my colleagues have identified why the bill has their support. In another set of circumstances, I would love there to have been additional options on the table.

For me, this project should be delivering a pipeline into the Pilbara. The current conservation values and regional values of the Pilbara could not be any further adversely affected by this project than they have been to this point. The Kimberley region is a very special region. The future of the Kimberley would be better protected, in my view, by capturing all of the advantages that come from attracting people into that region to enjoy the natural environment and the wilderness environment of the Kimberley, without heavy industry of this sort, of which I fear this project is likely to be a major advance down that path.

…I think members got the flavour of my remarks; that is, I am not trying to lift the temperature and provoke people into antagonism. I understand why a section of the community of Broome opposes a project like this. I have a lot of empathy for them. If the world was different, I would be voting in a different way [i.e. against the Premier's Bill].

Well said Tom!

Colin misleads again!

And of course Colin Barnett repeated his usual misrepresentation about the Land Agreement Bill itself. Once again he falsely stated that, "The bill establishes the Browse LNG precinct as the only site for LNG on the Kimberley coastline—that is important."

In fact, as later questions demonstrated, the Bill does not prevent other LNG projects along the Kimberley coast at all. Under this Bill, for example, gas from the Kimberley's onshore Canning Basin can be processed to LNG anywhere in the Kimberley.

Other interesting comments:

Barnett: this is a very clear exercise of self-determination by Aboriginal people.

Martin:

I will give members an example of one of the things that really, really upset me. We have a once-a-year surf competition, and people come from everywhere. They surf between crocs and stuff, but they still come! These people come to Cable Beach for the surf competition; it is one trip that many people make from all over Australia. We get about 500 people; it is brilliant. What happens? The organisers of the Green mob decide they are going to put on a free concert, but they did not even have the respect to go to the shire and ask for a permit. They did not do that; if they had, they would have found that they could not have one because it would interfere with this one tournament that is run every year. How disrespectful is that? We get 500 visitors to our community once a year, and these people stuffed it up. Then they invited the community to come to a free concert and said, “Oh, these are all our supporters”! I mean, where did they come from? We get 10 000 people a week coming on holiday there—of course they want a free concert!

Fan Logan (ALP): Martin Ferguson should hang his head in shame. [For supporting floating LNG]

 Mr J.J.M. Bowler: It was that hatred that she [Martin] faced that led to her not standing at the next election.

Barnett:

[Martin] talked about the rich and famous who come to the Kimberley in a self-righteous way, as though only they care about the environment, only they care about whales or only they care about dinosaur footprints. Implicit in that is an attitude that we see all too often, particularly from people outside this state, and maybe from people living in the major cities—that somehow this state is a redneck environment, that we do not care about heritage, we do not care about the environment, and that we are somehow incapable of looking after an area like the Kimberley. I believe that the member for Kimberley made that point; I do not think I am putting words in her mouth.

I would suggest that the level of environmental assessment and standards for major projects in this state is world’s best, and it is about time we took some pride in that instead of letting people come over here and treat this state like a bunch of rednecks who do not know what they are doing. I doubt that there is a square kilometre of land in Australia that has been more carefully analysed in every respect than James Price Point.