Nick Butterly: Fracking an ALP reality check

Few stories better illustrate the growing gap between green idealism and the economic realities faced by Aboriginal communities than that of the Yungngora people at Noonkanbah Station in the Kimberley.

In 1980 Noonkanbah was the scene of one of Australia’s seminal Aboriginal land rights clashes when WA Liberal premier Charles Court shamefully sought to force access to the area to allow American company AMAX to carry out oil drilling.

When drillers backed by police eventually got into the area it was revealed the country held no oil. But as it turns out, locals could be sitting on a rich bounty of gas.

Back then local Aboriginal groups were furiously opposed to the intrusion by resource companies, complaining drilling would violate sacred sites. Today the Yungngora people firmly back gas exploration, arguing industry will create jobs and keep local kids off the grog.

In a submission to the State Government’s gas fracking inquiry, the Yungngora Aboriginal Corporation pleaded that companies Buru Energy and Japan’s Mitsubishi be allowed to continue gas exploration in the area.

“Drugs and alcohol are the biggest threat to our community,” the corporation said.

“A gas project on Noonkanbah will strengthen our community for now and future generations by giving our people jobs and training.”

In recent times fracking and gas drilling has become a totemic issue for the environmental movement — helped by eye-popping documentaries and YouTube videos of household taps exploding in flames in North Dakota.

A recent full-page advertisement in this newspaper opposing fracking boasted an unusual range of signatories.

Singer John Butler and WA writer Tim Winton were there, but so too were others such as footballer Matthew Pavlich, WA scientist of the year Peter Newman and epidemiologist Fiona Stanley.

This arm wrestle between growing opposition to gas fracking and hopes for indigenous economic empowerment presented an almost existential problem for WA’s union movement — should they back the environmental cause of the moment or support an Aboriginal community chasing jobs and cash? In the end, unions backed the anti-frackers.

Though resolutions passed both by the Left of WA Labor and by the ALP’s State executive acknowledged the potential “negative and positive” impacts fracking could have on remote communities.

“WA Labor is committed to ensuring long-term, sustainable jobs and opportunities for traditional owners who have been denied self-determination for too long,” the Labor State executive resolution passed this month said.

“We call on the State Government to recognise that there may be some traditional owner groups who are in favour of fracking out of economic necessity due to the failure of successive governments to provide investment, infrastructure and jobs in their communities.”

In other words, it was preferable that Aboriginal communities should continue to rely on welfare than fracking be permitted.

But the State Government faced a couple of major hurdles in even contemplating union demands for a Statewide ban on fracking.

Firstly, its promised independent scientific panel inquiry into fracking led by respected Environmental Protection Authority head Tom Hatton could find few problems with fracking in the WA context, provided demanded guidelines were followed.

A substantial tome of work, the panel is silent on whether fracking is “safe” or not, but notes the risks to land and environment are “limited” and goes out of its way to point out fracking has been taking place in WA in one shape or another since the 1950s. More pressing for the Government was the issue of sovereign risk.

Premier Mark McGowan confirmed as much at his press conference on Tuesday. The Premier suggested the State could have faced legal action from the handful of companies already exploring for gas on existing leases had the industry been shut down.

It would have been a shocking look for a resource-based economy on the cusp of emerging from a downturn to shutter an emerging industry, particularly when any royalties collected from gas operations conducted onshore go to State coffers — not Canberra.

In the end the Government had little choice but to grudgingly give fracking the green light. Though only on existing petroleum licences, and only providing landowners and native title holders such as the Yungngora people agreed.

Existing bans in Perth, Peel and the South West would be kept in place.

The industry has been given a chance to prove itself. Stuff it up, they were warned and you would be shut down.

Show the community it can work, and who knows...

A few curiosities linger around the process.

The biggest loser in the decision to block any fracking on the Dampier Peninsula appears to be billionaire Andrew Forrest and his gas plays Goshawk Energy and Squadron Energy. No explanation was given for the carve-out.

And questions remain as to how the Government’s union base will take the rejection of its demand for a ban. The Government was clearly extremely sensitive to the “internals” of the decision.

MPs were given speaking notes on how to deal with questions from reporters on the issue, and theories swirled when the Government pushed out the damning Greenough prison riot report the next day, ensuring the headlines were about prisons, not fracking.