Woodside’s Scarborough gas project halted by ‘black tape’

Woodside joined with much of the big end of town in supporting The Voice. But recent events show it could become one of the ‘Yes’ vote’s biggest losers.

Woodside Energy chief executive Meg O'Neill. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Nikki Short

In the words of famed but now forgotten American humourist and bitingly accurate social and political commentator HL Mencken, the board of Woodside – led, for want of a better term, by chairman Richard Goyder and CEO Meg O’Neill – voted for it, and well and truly deserved to “get it, good and hard”.

Another word also springs readily to mind: schadenfreude. That’s to say, the Woodside board and management’s financially painful discomfort is, well, delicious.

Woodside had joined with much of the ‘big end of town’ in supporting The Voice – under the overall umbrella of big biz’s Business Council.

But precious little good that has done it, when the whales are telling just one ‘traditional owner’ that Woodside’s seismic testing will disrupt their songlines.

The Federal Court has called halt on Woodside’s multi-billion dollar Scarborough gas project, nearly 400km off WA’s northwest coast, because one Mardudhunera woman claimed she had not been consulted over the impact of the seismic testing.

Indigenous woman Raelene Cooper succeeded in using the Federal Court to block seismic works at Woodside Energy’s Scarborough gas project.

Woodside had consulted plenty of traditional owners – although I’m not quite sure how you get to be a traditional owner of the sea 400km off the coast – but not this one.

Nothing could better demonstrate the devastating consequences The Voice would have in exponentially expanding, in both time and breadth, literally to infinity, the existing black tape that resources projects have to traverse.

Proponents of The Voice keep saying that it’s ‘only advisory’.

But the Woodside example and the earlier Santos case – where the Full Federal Court, not just a single judge as with Woodside, put a halt to its multi-billion dollar gas project, over 100km away from the Tiwi Islands off Darwin – give the lie to that.

Santos’s ‘failure’ was exactly the same as Woodside: it had failed to consult one single Tiwi islander, even though it had consulted a number of islanders through the Tiwi Land Council itself.

Voice proponents want to have it both ways.

You only have to ‘consult’; you are not bound to have to accept and indeed then act on what you are told, we are soothingly advised.

But The Voice is also claimed to give Aboriginals the agency they supposedly don’t have now; and for agency to be meaningful, that means acted on, or a pretty damn good reason why not.

The Woodside and Santos cases show they already have to be consulted; and both big time and all-but unlimitedly so.

The Voice would make that ‘consultation’ infinite. And imposed not just by legislation but, for the first time – and so, utterly unpredictable in its legal outcome - constitutionally.

Don’t chairmen, CEOs and boards understand the powerful – entirely negative – ability of activists to already meld red, green and black tape?

Red: the traditional mountains of bureaucratic nonsense.

Then add green tape – the myriad of environmental hurdles, some valid, most fantastical: with ‘climate change’ now providing a whole, limitless, new field of obstruction.

Finally comes black tape - going through the processes of ‘consultation’ with and approval from traditional owners.

Put the three together, written into the constitution, and all I can say is: good luck corporate Australia.

Indeed, good luck Australia.