Thursday, 29 May 2025

Woodside Burrup gas project

Katherine COPSEY (Southern Metropolitan) (21:47): (1684) The action I seek tonight is for the Minister for Environment to advocate to his federal counterpart to withdraw the provisional environmental approval of the Woodside Burrup Hub gas expansion project. Climate science is clear, the community is watching and the time to act is now. Labor’s support for a number of massive new gas projects is incompatible with Australia’s stated goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees. Woodside’s North West Shelf extension gas project alone would use 91 per cent of the government’s net zero 2050 carbon budget at a federal level. All of our scientists and expert organisations – the CSIRO, the International Energy Agency and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – tell us that no new gas projects can proceed if we are to meet our climate targets.

This decision has also dropped a bomb on one of Australia’s most precious cultural treasures. Murujuga country has one of the world’s most significant and dense collections of ancient art, with more than 1 million rock carvings, some dating back nearly 50,000 years. These petroglyphs depict species that are now extinct, early human figures and cultural narratives of immense importance to the region’s traditional owners. A rock art monitoring project compiled last year, but shamefully only issued on Friday, acknowledges that emissions of nitrogen oxide and sulphur dioxide from existing gas projects have damaged the rock types on which the art is etched. It has been reported that the minister’s decision to give approval to the project has been made in the absence of meaningful consultation with the traditional owners. We have also seen shameful behaviour by Woodside. Not only did they recently spill 16,000 litres of toxic petroleum products into the ocean, this week we saw their CEO take the most extraordinary swipe at young people, trying to shift the blame for Woodside’s climate harm. Well, millions of young Australians would need to order about 215,000 Temu T-shirts each for them to reach the emissions estimates for the North West Shelf extension. They see right through your spin, Woodside.

While Labor stands with the fossil fuel CEOs who are sneering at young people while blowing up their future, the Greens know which side we are on. Just this morning a Victorian Greens request to urgently debate the federal government’s decision to approve the extension of the North West Shelf gas project here in the Victorian Parliament was denied. The Greens say if Labor approving a climate bomb with projected emissions of up to 6.1 billion tonnes is not a matter of urgent public importance, then what is? We will keep standing up for a safe climate and a fossil fuel-free future.