Woodside is, along with Santos, Australia’s worst climate criminal, a vast fossil-fuel machine dedicated to making vast profits from pumping more than 60 million tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere a year, and paying minimal tax on the money it makes.
But it’s also a protected species for Australia’s political and media class, who act as bodyguards, lobbyists and enforcers.
The confected outrage over a protest outside the home of Woodside CEO Meg O’Neill, and the fact that the ABC was present to film it, is a perfect example of Woodside’s state capture and dogged support of a compliant media.
O’Neill and the company’s supporters say the protest crossed some sort of line between the corporate and the personal. Sadly, it’s a line unrecognised by the global heating Woodside helps drive. Australians facing floods and bushfires and cyclones can’t draw a line at their front door and politely urge more frequent and intense natural disasters to respect that.
“Everyone has the right to feel safe in their own home,” said one fossil-fuel lobbyist — a right not extended to victims of disasters caused by global heating.
And there’s no line to protect low-income Australians who miss out on government services because companies like Woodside game the tax system. And there’s no uncrossable line for young Australians, who will live long past O’Neill and her defenders and endure the hotter, sicker, deadlier, more expensive and lower-growth world that she and her colleagues in fossil-fuel companies across the world will bequeath them.
But the WA Labor government, the WA police, The Australian Financial Review (where journalists criticised media “covering attention-grabbing stunts by those who have become radicalised by climate change”), Kerry Stokes-owned The West Australian and federal fossil fuels minister Madeleine King, have all rallied to attack protesters, while fossil fuel lobbyist News Corp, the federal Liberals and the far-right Daily Mail have claimed a conspiracy between the ABC and protesters — one supported by the WA premier.
It’s unsurprising that federal governments and the WA state governments — no matter what political stripe — are in the pocket of Woodside. The company makes sure the major political parties are well looked after: over just the past decade, according to Australian Electoral Commission data, Woodside has handed over more than $2.6 million to the major political parties, making sure that the love is spread around at state and federal level.
Importantly, Woodside is not a fair-weather funder: it tries to keep both sides sweet regardless of where they are in the political cycle, and it keeps the money flowing even in non-election years.
Reinforcing Woodside’s deep roots into government at both levels is the presence of former LNP minister Ian Macfarlane and former WA Labor treasurer Ben Wyatt on its board. And Woodside also benefits from federal Labor’s current parliamentary position — it relies on an unusually high (by recent standards) number of Western Australian seats for its majority — meaning that Woodside and other fossil-fuel companies based in WA have the whip hand in dictating policy changes like tax, with WA Labor acting directly as the company’s lobbyists in Canberra.
Woodside’s links into government are also a matter of historical record, with the Howard government spying on the Timor-Leste cabinet to gain an advantage in negotiations over access to the Timor Gap that benefited Woodside, with both then-foreign minister Alexander Downer and then-DFAT secretary Ashton Calvert going on to subsequently take positions with the company.
Woodside is thus virtually untouchable — protected and cosseted at the federal level and having the state government act as its government relations and PR strategists and tax advisers, and the WA police as its security force. And all for an average spend of $260,000 a year.
Are Woodside and fellow fossil-fuel companies’ claws into governments too deep? Let us know by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
