Disrupt Burrup Hub wasn’t protesting at the Woodside Petroleum boss’s house — it was making a threat | David Penberthy

Call me old fashioned, but showing up at a family home looks more like a threat than a run-of-the-mill protest, writes David Penberthy.

Imagine any political organisation aiming to win hearts and minds by deciding the best way to shift public opinion was to arrive unannounced at a person’s private home and harass them and their family at the crack of dawn.

Imagine a supposedly reputable news organisation in the ABC deeming such an event worthy of recording, effectively legitimising and encouraging it by providing the coverage the protesters craved.

Both of these things happened in Australia this week when members of the extremist environmental group Disrupt Burrup Hub went to the private home of Woodside Petroleum chief executive Meg O’Neill to protest the company’s expansion of energy projects on the Burrup Peninsula in the WA Pilbara region.

Not her office, but her house. At 7am on Tuesday no less, while O’Neill, her husband and daughter were waking up to start the day.

What a complete pack of weirdos.

For O’Neill and her family the whole process was clearly unnerving, if not terrifying, as they had no idea who these protesters were, or what they intended to do as they arrived and entered their private property.

“This was not a ‘harmless protest’,’’ O’Neill said. “It was designed to threaten me, my partner and our daughter in our home.

Meg O'Neill, CEO of Woodside Energy.

“Such acts by extremists should be condemned by anyone who respects the law and believes people should be safe to go about their business at home and at work.’’

The incident is a case study into the lunatic inner workings of the political fanatic. It has ramifications beyond the world of environmental protest and shows how protesters on the extremes now dehumanise the people they oppose.

The nature of that dehumanisation was laid bare courtesy of the completely blasé attitude of Disrupt Burrup Hub media spokesman Jesse Noakes to what unfolded.

With the four protesters arrested by WA Police at O’Neill’s home on Tuesday morning, Noakes issued a completely bizarre statement when they subsequently appeared in court.

His ravings received an unsurprisingly generous run courtesy of the left-wing Guardian news site, letting Noakes blather on unchallenged with his impertinent suggestion that it was actually O’Neill and her family who had somehow got the whole thing out of perspective.

He said one of the protesters was “a courageous 19-year-old” armed only with water balloons; that they had made sure that the rear entrance to O’Neill’s house was not blocked in case she and her family wanted to leave during the protest, and breezily ended by saying O’Neill shouldn’t have been worried about them invading her house as they had no intention of doing that anyway.

As if O’Neill and her family could or should have known any of that.

Police arrest an Extinction Rebellion protester outside the Santos building in Adelaide. Picture: Supplied

Noakes also suggested that it was the protesters who were the victims of what he called heavy-handed “counter-terror” policing, and then made some genuinely unfathomable remarks about how when they were taken away in squad cars, the song Every Breath You Take was playing, suggesting the message from the coppers was “I’ll be watching you”, as stated in the songs lyrics.

If this bloke turned up on my lawn at the crack of dawn I’d be tempted to reverse over him.

My column last week was panned by climate sceptics for stating that the increasing frequency of punishingly hot weather in Europe and the United States was an urgent reminder that we need co-ordinated global action to address the reality of climate change. It is about time we listened to mainstream science and changed our ways.

But the idea that we can simply shut every impure industry overnight, as asserted by hardliners from groups such as Disrupt Burrup or Extinction Rebellion, would see humanity’s ability to live, work and feed itself grind to an immediate halt in the current absence of viable alternatives.

But it is not like those alternatives are not being sought, with real urgency. Commercial realities are such that companies like Woodside and Santos are also painfully aware of the pressure to get their house in order.

Indeed, the need to decarbonise as a matter of urgency was the entire premise of this years Oil and Petroleum Conference in Adelaide, where over several days the city was disrupted as protesters from Extinction Rebellion abseiled off a city bridge and vandalised a cafe which had nothing to do with Santos, but just happened to be located in its lobby.

And as per the response to the outrage at O’Neill’s house, the attitude of the protesters to all that Adelaide mayhem was: Meh. If you think that’s inconvenient, just wait until the planet explodes.

So too with Deb O’Neill. If you think finding four hippies on your lawn at dawn is frightening for you and your family, just wait until your family is consumed by flames.

It’s not so much a political opinion, more like a religious one, where the Book of Revelation meets Tim Flannery, David Suzuki and Sir David Attenborough, creating an unchallengeable apocalyptic theology which renders any form of behaviour legitimate in the face of the coming inferno.

Against this mindset, any rational debate is impossible.

Married as I am to someone who once had photocopied pictures of bullets left in her home letterbox and needed police protection to launch a book about women in politics, forgive me for being a bit old-fashioned about the idea that people whose views differ from yours should not be challenged on their front verandah.

And as for any news organisation that thinks stuff like this is all part of the ruck and maul, merely a sign of the impassioned yearning for real action on climate change, shame on them too.

It’s part of a spectrum of political extremism which sees lunatics with bull horns, bear skin hats and confederate flags occupy the seat of democracy because they’re not happy with an election result. Basket cases all, in the same mad and dangerous basket.