Sarah Hanson-Young: BP decision means Great Australian Bight must be protected from future efforts to drill for oil
THE Great Australian Bight is a national treasure too important to lose to an oil spill, writes Sarah Hanson-Young.
Opinion
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I KNOW I’m not the first to say it, but South Australia’s heaps good.
We’ve got the Flinders Ranges, Kangaroo Island and some of the greatest tourism operators in the world.
We’ve got amazing wineries, exceptional seafood and we export our delicious primary produce to the rest of a jealous nation.
We’ve also got frog cakes, Popeye and the Malls Balls of course but, perhaps most importantly of all, we have a bountiful supply of wind, solar and renewable energy.
I know we shouldn’t boast, but I think it’s pretty clear that our home state is blessed with more than its fair share of natural attributes.
The problem is that a lot of this is being put at risk because of the oil that lies below the sea-floor of the Great Australian Bight Marine Park.
The fossil fuel giant, British Petroleum, has had its eye on that oil for a very long time.
BP were hoping that South Australians would forget that they oversaw the worst oil spill in human history; the 2010 Gulf of Mexico disaster.
That one spill released more than 210 million gallons of oil into the ocean and now, many years later, the devastating effects are still being felt.
We can’t let something like that happen off of the South Australian coast because the Great Australian Bight is a national treasure that is too precious to lose.
BP, and the politicians who have either fallen for their spin or received donations from the fossil fuel lobby, say that this project would have brought much needed jobs to South Australia but that is just not the case.
BP itself admitted that local job creation would be ‘negligible’ and that’s because almost all of the work would have gone to foreign labourers who were being readied to come here to do it on the cheap.
It’s disappointing that so many politicians have ignored the thousands of jobs that drilling for oil in the Great Australian Bight would have put at risk.
The Far West of South Australia is a hotspot for eco-tourism operators and seafood producers.
I was there just a few weeks ago and it was clear that the community relies on the jobs that come from its pristine ecosystem more than the measly local employment and funding offers that were coming from BP.
A handful of jobs here and a sponsored community fun-run there is an absurdly low price to pay for a company that was trying to put the sustainability of an entire region, including Kangaroo Island and Victor Harbor, at risk.
Of course, the risk isn’t just to jobs.
The Bight is a spectacular and essential sanctuary for southern right whales and a feeding ground for threatened sea lions, sharks, tuna and migratory sperm whales.
Thankfully, this week BP announced that it was giving up on its ill-fated plans to drill in the Bight.
Big Oil should see the writing on the wall; BP were never able to guarantee that a spill wouldn’t happen and the South Australian community wouldn’t stand for it.
It’s time the other companies that are trying to drill in the Bight packed up their bats and balls and went on home.
A strong, grass-roots campaign in South Australia has chased BP out of the Bight and the same will happen to any other company that is foolish enough to take this proud local community on.
The Great Australian Bight Marine Park needs to be permanently protected.
I recently moved in the Parliament to make that area off-limits to companies that want to drill for oil and gas.
I hope that all of my South Australian Senate colleagues put our state’s interests first and vote to protect the irreplaceable Great Australian Bight for generations to come.
Sarah Hanson-Young is a South Australian Greens Senator
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