When former Western Australian premier Mark McGowan announced his sudden resignation from politics, he put the decision down, at least in part, to his exhaustion with the level of conflict the job required. So his immediate post-politics work choices aren’t at all surprising.
The one-time state daddy is, it appears, heading to BHP, with a side hustle at Mineral Resources Ltd, the resources sector being one place where he’d managed to keep conflict to a minimum over his time as premier. Let’s take a look back at the relationship between his government and some of our biggest polluters.
Revolving doors We have noted previously that WA is a place that scarcely raises an eyebrow when the government puts out a media release about draft emissions reduction legislation co-written by the state director of oil and gas industry lobby, the Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association (APPEA). It was probably relatively easy for McGowan to get hold of APPEA WA director Claire Wilkinson given his special adviser Kieran Murphy had worked there for just under five years before joining the premier’s office.
In the other direction, in June 2021 McGowan’s treasurer, Ben Wyatt, waited nearly three whole months to join the board of Woodside Energy. And it was only three days later that Rio Tinto announced he would do the same for them later that year. You may remember the last time Rio and Wyatt were mentioned in the same sentence was when the then-Aboriginal affairs minister was helping draft the Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Act, introduced as a response to the destruction of irreplaceable cultural patrimony at Juukan Gorge thanks to… Rio Tinto.
Of course, the job swap program isn’t always necessary for access. In the first three years or so they were in government, McGowan, former regional development minister Alannah MacTiernan, Mines and Petroleum Minister Bill Johnston and former environment minister Stephen Dawson met with gas companies and lobby groups nearly 140 times between them. Comparing these meetings with political donation data, advocacy group 350 Perth found donations from those companies had an uncanny knack of landing in the party bank account soon after these meetings took place.
Money coming in, money going out According to The Australian Institute, the WA government spent $320 million assisting fossil-fuel industries in 2022-23, McGowan’s last financial year as premier, with $1.4 billion budgeted for the future.
And of course, the largesse moves in both directions. To pick an entirely random example, Mineral Resources Limited paid $126,000 to WA Labor over the last two financial years.
Rhetoric In the lead-up to the 2021 election, ill-fated former Liberal leader Zak Kirkup announced a $400 million renewable energy plan that would see coal phased out. McGowan said the plan would mean “many many billions of extra debt, huge increase in family bills, rolling blackouts across the state and huge job losses” — rhetoric that could have quite literally been copied and pasted from arguments mounted by fossil-fuel companies across the world for years.
And lest we forget his final act as premier, awarding Western Australia’s Person of the Year — decided by Celebrate WA, a non-profit sponsored by BHP, the WA government and Lotterywest — to humble mining billionaire Gina Rinehart.
Of course, McGowan is far from alone in these entanglements. To pick one example, his two senior staff members with connections to the resources sector look positively restrained compared with the six employed by his predecessor, Colin Barnett. But it’s also worth noting that McGowan doesn’t need to take any job, let alone a resources sector role: after 26 years in Parliament, he’s one of the only remaining state MPs on WA’s old political pension scheme. This entitles him to $275,000 a year for the rest of his life, or a one-off payment worth around $3.5 million.
