Jordon Steele-John (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The recent episode of Four Corners gave a disturbing insight into the insidious influence of the gas industry on the Western Australian government and its institutions. In my home city of Boorloo Perth, all you need to do to find out who really runs this town is to look up. We live our literal lives in the shadows of Woodside, Rio Tinto and BHP—and let us not forget good old Chevron! Their giant logos inscribe our skyline, glowing as bright as bushfires and as brilliant as the wealth they accrue by ransacking sovereign country. A shockingly meagre slice of that wealth buys this industry incredible control over our decision-making processes and the government and institutions meant to help us. For the bargain basement price of a few hundred thousand dollars donated to the major parties each year, they snap up the loyalty of ministers, the protection of police and the complicity of media, and they leave the rest of the Western Australian community to pick up the real tab.

The former Labor leader, Mark McGowan, who resigned as Premier, has made the rapid transition into the corporate world, quickly taking up positions with companies that, only weeks before, he had been legislating in relation to. Isn't that perverse? Premier one day, regulating a corporation, paid member of the board the next. When we look at this situation more broadly it is no wonder that WA is lagging behind the rest of the country when it comes to environmental protection laws. It is no wonder that back in 2019 Mr McGowan commanded the head of the EPA to withdraw ambitious new emissions guidelines. You wouldn't want to muck up that nice transition pathway, now would you!

On the other side of that same dirty coin, Four Corners gave us a first-hand insight into the effect this state capture—let's be really clear; this is state capture—has on our democratic system that is meant to serve the community. In Western Australia, peaceful climate activists are facing the full brunt of an industry absolutely livid that their authority is being challenged. These industries have rolled out and called in the political favours owed to them, due to those donations, and the full tactical defence of their industries and their interests by public institutions that are under their control. They have called in the debts in their defence and they now go into battle against climate activists calling for government to respond to the reality of the climate crisis. So the system springs into action to threaten peaceful activists, protesters exercising their democratic rights, applying to them weapons of fear, silence and submission. In at least one case, in Western Australia in 2013, a gun was pulled on a young university student with more conviction in his pinkie finger than the entire Western Australian government put together.

The scientific consensus has long been conclusive. We have a moral and existential obligation to transition away from fossil fuels. The mining and burning of coal and gas is a key reason that we now face a climate crisis. In this critical decade for climate action we need to keep the stuff in the round. Woodside's Burrup Hub mega project in Murujuga, in the north-west of Western Australia, is a disaster for climate and culture, and the Greens will continue to be in solidarity with activists that are calling out that reality and engaging in nonviolent direct action to oppose it.