Broome against boom

THE West Australian town is a flashpoint in the conflict between local priorities and differing federal and state ambitions.

Anne Poelina

AS the blood-orange and crimson sunset works its magic on Broome's Cable Beach, it is easy to understand how this northwestern piece of paradise has managed to capture the imagination of travellers and the souls of those who call it home.

The evening blaze is the cue for the tourist camel trains to lope along the beach and for an orderly traffic jam of four-wheel-drives to form in the sand dunes near the Cable Beach Club.

Much has changed since English lord Alistair McAlpine first succumbed to Broome's seductions, building the beach club and a zoo. But the town still has its high-profile guests. James Packer and his family reportedly were there this week, staying at media and mining machinery magnate Kerry Stokes's house.

The only town to escape the White Australia Policy, Broome has been a bohemian melting pot since the pearl divers from Asia - Timor, Japan, The Philippines - came more than a century ago to intermingle with the indigenous locals.

But there is dysfunction in Broome: some areas are infected with menace, where gangs of youths roam the streets because they can't go home.

But this is not the only trouble in paradise.

For environmentalists across the nation, Broome is rapidly shaping as the new frontier, a potential flashpoint of conflicting commonwealth and state ambitions. The federal government is being called on to use its pending heritage listing of the west Kimberley - Australia's largest heritage area listing - to rein in the perceived excesses of Colin Barnett's Liberal state government. The dispute is environmental, cultural, economic and indigenous; but stripped to its core it is confirmation that the resources-driven two-speed economy is finally knocking at Broome's door.

Long-time residents fear they are about to be swamped by an investment spike that the WA Premier proudly boasts he hopes will turn Broome into a new Dubai.

From afar it is easy to see this as being the price of progress. Like the opening to Douglas Adams's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the intergalactic highway is coming through for the greater good. The plans have been with the Department of State Development for ages. It's no use moaning about it.

The highway, in this case, is Woodside Petroleum's proposed $35 billion gas hub at James Price Point, 60km north of Broome, which would process gas from the Browse Basin.

If it goes ahead, the project will dwarf the North West Shelf liquefied natural gas project that has already transformed Karratha.

Many locals and environment groups fear the gas hub is the thin edge of the wedge for Broome and the west Kimberley. With it will come associated industrial development such as fertiliser and explosives manufacture and possibly an aluminium refinery, all spewing a toxic cloud over Cable Beach and challenging Broome's unspoiled tourism image.

Protesters fear James Price Point - where dinosaur footprints speak volumes about the changes that have already taken place in this landscape - will facilitate the opening up of the entire Kimberley region to resource development.

The Wilderness Society will fight to encourage Woodside to reconsider its plans and opt for a floating gas production platform, or to land its share of the Browse Basin gas farther south, at existing facilities.

According to the society's national campaign manager Lyndon Schneiders, the gas hub protest will be one of the largest co-ordinated national campaigns in the past 20 years. "We are going to throw everything including the kitchen sink to stop this divisive and inappropriate proposal," he says. The society will hold public meetings across Australia, target project financiers and pursue a range of legal strategies to delay or stop the project getting off the ground. "If we lose here, the whole of the Kimberley will be at threat," Schneiders says.

Federal Environment Minister Tony Burke, who visited Broome this week, is hedging his bets. He has increased the scope of federal involvement in the state government's development decisions by casting the widest possible net in considering a heritage listing for the west Kimberley that will be announced before the end of the month.

As with all controversial projects, there is no shortage of subplots and accusations of dirty dealings over planning approvals and indigenous consent negotiations regarding James Price Point.

There are distractions, such as the appropriately named Hostile Environment Services militia engaged by Woodside Petroleum to provide security for the company's pre-emptive land clearing, now under way. And the buffoonery of West Australian water police chasing whales off the point in full view of protesters' cameras.

But, in the end, Broome's fate is another chapter in the accelerating story of collateral damage being wrought by Australia's resources boom mark II that is being played out at coal and coal seam gas mining and exploration areas across the nation.

It is a theme examined by The Australian's Paul Cleary in his new book, Too Much Luck, which shows how Australia's resources boom blessing can become a curse.

"Under-taxed and under-regulated, big multinational companies are now making colossal profits by selling off our non-renewable resources," Cleary says. "New projects are being rushed through but who is looking out for the public interest? Industries such as tourism and education that, unlike mining, involve many jobs, will fade away."

Economists say the so-called Dutch disease can have its benefits, and in aggregate this is no doubt true. But having watched what has happened to WA's other resources service and process towns such as Karratha and Port Hedland, the benefits are a hard sell for many people already making a good living in laid-back Broome.

"Our families built this town," says Anne Poelina. "We don't believe the corporations have a right to just come here and destroy it. There has been considerable investment already in Broome to build that quality of life, and no one is coming to us and saying what is happening on the peninsula is going to be of no risk to us."

Woodside says it will keep its construction workers in a camp and away from Broome, something residents say is impractical. "We are going to see a lot more luminous shirts, not the Hawaiian ones," Poelina says.

If nothing else, the James Price Point proposal has galvanised Broome's community spirit and sense of place.

"In some ways Barnett has woken the sleeping dragon of Broome," third-generation pearler James Brown says. "I have been coming to and from Broome my whole life and I have never felt the town spirit like it is now."

Challenged by Burke to demonstrate the level of community opposition to the James Price Point proposal, an estimated 5000 to 7000 people from all walks of life gathered on Cable Beach last month. A photograph in the local newspaper shows the human swarm making its way over the sand dunes. But when it came to a mid-week protest called to coincide with Burke's visit, numbers were down to a few hundred.

"I have no doubt it will smash Broome," long-time resident Kandy Curran say. "It will take away the Broome brand and the wilderness brand."

Incensed last month by the events of so-called Black Tuesday, in which riot police arrested many respected Broome residents for obstructing Woodside's clearing works they thought to be illegal, Curran called Barnett on talkback radio and demanded that he resign.

"I said: 'Look, I have been here 21 years, I am a professional person, a law-abiding person, but you have made me feel ashamed of you, you have not consulted the Broome people, you have wasted millions of dollars and it has been a disrespectful and unethical process,' " she says.

"When I went to town afterwards, people came from everywhere to say good on you."

The Broome community is not saying no to the extraction of gas; they just think there are very viable alternatives to James Price Point, Curran says. Poelina prefers to say: "We are saying yes to what we have got."

Nobody wants to repeat the mistakes of the Pilbara, which state Greens upper house member Robin Chapple says is a sociological and environmental mess.

"I don't want to see this place become that," Chapple says. "I think it deserves better."

Chapple is not anti-gas development either: "I want to just see it go through their existing plants and a better effort made to scrub out the sulphur and other emissions," he says.

An old WA political stager, Chapple says Barnett was only doing what State Development wanted him to do, to deliver on its longstanding blueprint for northern development.

"He wants a legacy in the way Sir Charles Court has the Pilbara," Chapple says.

"He is having trouble with Oakajee [port at Geraldton]. He got his fingers badly burned with the Kimberley [water] pipeline, so State Development has given him a new charger to mount."

Save the Kimberley director Peter Tucker likens the James Price Point plan to the head of an octopus. "There's coal, bauxite, uranium, gold, diamonds, copper: every mineral known to mankind in the Kimberley," he says.

"In Barnett's perfect world, if this was all to go ahead, this area the size of Victoria would be completely smashed with token parks in between.

"We are talking about one of the last great wilderness areas left on earth."

Tucker says his fishing business attracts a lot of high-profile businessmen who initially support the gas hub proposal. "When they get the correlation between the head of the octopus and the rest of the octopus they walk away and say: 'Why would you want to do this?' These are people who make millions of dollars out of the resource industry but the common catch cry is 'When is enough enough?' "

For most businesspeople in Broome, however, the threat is more immediate and existential.

Architect Sue Thomas says small business is waking up to the reality that the gas hub will not benefit everyone, the great fear being that cost pressures from the high-salary construction boom will simply send non-mining related businesses to the wall.

"In Karratha, the experience has been that the costs are so massive that unless you are tied into the construction you have to re-engineer your business to a way that makes you viable," Thomas says. "McDonald's [staff] in Karratha are fly-in, fly-out. Even burger flippers are being flown in from somewhere else and overseas in some instances. You get to the point where there is only so much you can charge for a hamburger. You can't charge somebody $250 for a steak and salad down at the local cafe."

Thomas is forced to quote jobs on two scenarios, with and without a gas hub.

"It's no good telling someone it is going to cost $1 million, them getting that $1m, and then having to tell them it is going to cost $2m," Thomas says. "When people say this is going to be great for the local economy, the question is: on what basis have they established this?"

In Darwin, where Woodside joint venture partner Impex is planning to land its share of the Browse gas, the chamber of commerce is asking members to consider how they are going to compete or whether they can compete at all.

"There the proposal is a $12bn gas plant, but we are talking about a $35bn proposal in Broome," Thomas says. "In Darwin they have more than 100,000 people, we have 15,000 people. They have got a population five times the population of Broome and a project that is one-third the size and their chamber of commerce is saying get ready or get out."

Howard Tracey, a builder with 30 full-time staff, including apprentices and labourers, says for many small-business people the gas hub would not be the bonanza they had once thought.

"Small-business people are now saying, 'I thought I was going to be selling 17 more sandwiches a day but I wasn't thinking about who was going to be making the sandwiches or where I was going to get the bread from, because the bakeries have shifted to Perth and we are getting frozen bread,' " Tracey says.

"I am not anti-development or anti-tourism, I am not even anti-gas. I am anti where the plant is going and the impact it is going to have. I'm not a greenie or radical in any shape or form but I do believe that life as we know it is in danger in a big way.

"I don't believe it is a NIMBY issue; it is a concern I have got for everybody that lives here, my family and everybody else's family."

Thomas says the state government is consciously downplaying the potential impacts.

"They are so busy trying to sell the concept that it is not a reasonable debate," she says.

"Because the bad side is so bad, it is being played down so as not to put the project at risk.

"In one way you could just say OK, Broome is a population of 15,000 people and that is an acceptable collateral damage because there are not enough votes there to make a difference. Politically, it may well be a manageable loss that people aren't worried about, but as a local business nobody has been helping to inform me about what the risks are."