Andrew Bolt: Tiwi Islands crocodile man shouldn’t stop Santos Barossa gas pipeline

No law or court in this country should stop a project so valuable, causing Santos losses of $1m a day, because of a plainly irrational Tiwi Islander Crocodile Man superstition.

Tiwi Islands elder Dennis Tipakalippa took Santos to court over its Barossa offshore project. Picture: Supplied

It’s hard to believe Australia could be so stupidly irrational that the Federal Court is now deciding whether to ban a $5.6bn gas project because a man supposedly turned into a crocodile.

Gas giant Santos was hours from laying a pipe from its Barossa gas field, 140km from the Tiwi Islands to Darwin, when Justice Natalie Charlesworth told it to stop until she’d heard from a Tiwi traditional owner, Simon Munkara, who claimed the underwater pipe would hurt his culture.

So Munkara and other Tiwi elders last week got their days in court, and claimed the pipeline must be stopped because Wiyapurali, the Crocodile Man, and Mother Ampitji, a Tiwi version of the Rainbow Serpent, live in the seas just where the pipeline is supposed to go.

Members of the Munupi clan from the Tiwi Islands in front of the Federal Court of Australia for the Santos appeal. Picture: Tamati Smith

Munkara claimed he’d learned about the Crocodile Man from his dad: “A man got speared because he was a greedy person – didn’t share no food. He disappeared down to the beach, then he was drifting probably not far from where he got speared, Wiyapurali water, and he changed into a crocodile.”

And what a coincidence, Wiyapurali settled exactly where the pipeline would be.

There are actually two issues here. First is, do many Tiwi seriously believe in Crocodile Man, given 81 per cent are actually Christians?

What’s more, another witness in the case said Munkara had got this story all wrong: Wiyapurali stayed close to the Bathurst Island coast, not near the pipeline route, and Mother Ampitji lived in a freshwater lake, not the sea.

But second, what does any of this matter? Whether genuinely believed or not, no gas pipe way out at sea is going to upset some Crocodile Man and damage the lives of Tiwi Islanders.

Have we really lost all reason? No law or court in this country should stop a project so valuable, causing Santos losses of $1m a day, because of a plainly irrational superstition.

It is only by rejecting unreason and trusting science that our society has become so rich that we can afford, for instance, the welfare that subsidises the 85 per cent of Tiwi Islanders who don’t work.

If they now think Crocodile Man is more important than the taxes and royalties these gas projects bring, then let them sacrifice some of their own welfare payments first.

Cultures have consequences – or should – and it may be a good lesson for the Tiwi to depend on Crocodile Man’s help instead.