Western Australia was as soon as a byword for a selected sort of corruption: a free-wheeling tradition during which spivs and crooks like Alan Bond and Laurie Connell solid shut relationships with the WA Labor Occasion below Brian Burke and Peter Dowding, and in flip obtained substantial assist for his or her monetary ventures.
The eventual value to WA taxpayers, of what was dubbed “WA Inc.”, is estimated to be not less than $600 million — in Nineteen Nineties cash — with a path of spectacular company failures. It additionally threatened to ensnare the Hawke authorities, with allegations useful resource taxation coverage was dictated by WA pursuits and political donations.
WA Inc. is now again — however it’s not your grandmother’s form, the venal corruption and systematic misuse of taxpayer cash that characterised 1983-89. It’s on an altogether bigger scale.
The company gamers concerned are actually large fossil gas firms and their executives — significantly Woodside, in addition to international gamers like Shell and Chevron. Like Bond, Connell and different forged members from WA Inc., Woodside is a beneficiant donor to WA Labor — it has given the state get together greater than $220,000 over the previous decade (Chevron has given greater than $170,000 to WA Labor in the identical interval).
However the favours extracted from WA Labor go far past the sort of dodgy investments of taxpayers’ cash and bailouts of spivs’ monetary ventures that characterised WA Inc. Mark 1. What has resulted is full-scale state seize of the governing equipment by fossil gas corporations, during which the regulatory, policing and lobbying powers of a state authorities are successfully on the disposal of fossil gas corporations.
Earlier this 12 months, Crikey outlined the extent to which the WA authorities, together with federal Labor and Liberal politicians, had engaged in demonising local weather protesters, along with the WA Police appearing as Woodside’s safety arm and enforcers.
In the meantime, WA Premier Roger Prepare dinner determined, on the behest of WA’s extractive industries, to jettison new Indigenous heritage legal guidelines put in place within the wake of Rio Tinto’s shameful destruction of Juukan Gorge in 2020, mere weeks after their bipartisan passage by way of WA Parliament. Prepare dinner earlier this week introduced new legal guidelines to expedite fossil gas and mining challenge functions, arguing environmental teams had been exploiting minority factions in Indigenous land neighborhood teams to pursue authorized challenges to fossil gas initiatives.
The independence of the WA Environmental Safety Authority, which has embarrassed WA Labor by calling for extra formidable carbon emissions targets and mentioning the spectacular failure of Chevron’s Gorgon carbon seize and storage challenge, may even be curbed by Prepare dinner, and it will likely be compelled to expedite approvals for sources initiatives.
It could be cheaper for WA taxpayers if Prepare dinner and his cupboard merely took up jobs with Woodside, making the state run its workplaces fairly than pretending there’s any distinction between fossil gas pursuits and their political arm in Parliament.
In one other echo of WA Inc., federal Labor is concerned as nicely. There aren’t merely allegations that WA pursuits formed federal sources tax coverage — we all know they did: Prepare dinner’s predecessor Mark McGowan lobbied for fossil gas corporations towards federal Labor plans to repair the Petroleum Useful resource Hire Tax regime, which was permitting offshore gasoline producers to pay just about no tax.
WA MP and Federal Assets Minister Madeleine King has been a stalwart backer of Prepare dinner as nicely, and has now supported his conspiracy idea that Indigenous teams are being infiltrated by environmentalists.
Through Alan Bond and his media firm, WA Inc. had vital ramifications for Australia’s media panorama. And there are many parallels there too. Mining providers billionaire Kerry Stokes is 100 instances the businessman Bond was — an genuine titan of Australian enterprise, not the fraud that Bond was finally revealed to be. However his media firm Seven West Media — present share worth, 24 cents — is a malignant power in Australian media.
The West Australian has cheered on Prepare dinner at each stage in delivering for fossil gas pursuits. Seven Community is constant to spend huge sums funding accused rapist Bruce Lehrmann (which he denies), and has a lengthy historical past of giving a platform to far-right extremists. Stokes himself has funded the so-far unsuccessful defamation case of accused conflict felony Ben Roberts-Smith towards the forensic journalism of the 9 Community.
It’s onerous to keep away from the editorial conclusion of The Sydney Morning Herald this week that “Stokes’ Seven West Media has fallen right into a darkish hole, with a part of its information division just lately was a platform for confirmed and alleged wrongdoers and egotists, the place the priorities of late appear to outweigh a way of stories or professionalism”.
It’s not the previous WA Inc. It’s far larger, extra systemic, extra normalised, and its impacts past the borders of WA are far better. However it’s the identical story of a authorities that’s far too near company pursuits that exert a dangerous affect throughout the nation.
Who’s actually operating WA — the state authorities or the company powers? And will the steadiness of energy be shifted? Tell us your ideas by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please embrace your full title to be thought-about for publication. We reserve the correct to edit for size and readability.