Well-oiled Machine
Bells Beach is closer to the Bass Strait oil and gas fields than it is to the Equinor site locals are protesting about.
The activists who swung the election in Corangamite ironically are heavy consumers of the product against which they were protesting. By Fred Pawle.
GetUp was not the only environmental group at work during the recent federal election campaign.
In Corangamite, Victoria, rookie independent candidate Damien Cole, in his first attempt at parliament, was one of the main deciding factors in the ousting of the sitting Liberal MP, Sarah Henderson. Cole attracted 4440 votes, many of which would have, if they followed his how-to-vote card, eventually gone to Labor’s Libby Coker, who won the seat by 2581.
Cole’s main contribution to the campaign was to convince locals that a proposed exploratory oil well about 1000km away at the western end of the Great Australian Bight presented a serious threat to Corangamite’s world-famous surf beaches, including Bells Beach, near Torquay.
The well is proposed by Norwegian company Equinor, whose application is currently being assessed by the independent National Offshore Petroleum Safety and Environmental Management Authority.
Cole is the figurehead for the protest movement, which consists mostly of surfers along the Victorian and South Australian coasts. A brief trawl through the social-media hashtags around which Cole’s supporters coalesce reveals a cause defined more by religious fervour than facts.
Scroll back far enough, and you will find the source of all the environmental anguish: an illustration by Greenpeace purporting to show the areas of the Southern Ocean and coastlines that would be affected by a spill from Equinor’s rig.
The affected area extends from southwest Western Australia to northern New South Wales, enveloping Tasmania on the way. It is 10 times the size of the Deepwater Horizon spill, the biggest in history.
Surf website Coastalwatch quickly asserted that the illustration represented the area affected by a single spill, which is at best a naive misinterpretation of a simple passage in Equinor's proposal.
The illustration is in fact the total area affected by more than 100 worst-case scenarios, each of which is highly unlikely, given the safety record of the oil industry and the heavy losses incurred by companies that damage the environment.
Cole spent part of the election campaign travelling all around the coastlines included in the scare campaign, addressing beachside protest meetings and paddling out with other surfers to chant, “No way Equinor” while splashing the water.
To his credit, Cole did acknowledge to the hundred or so people who attended the Hobart protest that his travelling to Tasmania was in some ways hypocritical. “I flew down here last night,” he said. “I contributed to this crisis. I put my hand up for that. But this isn’t about pointing fingers at each and every individual. This is about standing up together and demanding systemic change from our government.”
Then he got to the point: “This is our planet. And this is our ocean. And she (the ocean) has given tirelessly. She has given and given and given and given. And she has never asked anything from you. And she has never asked anything from me. And she is now - she is crying out for help.”
Back in Corangamite, Henderson was also crying out for help, from security guards to protect her signage, which was being vandalised and stolen by green activists.
Few campaigns in this federal election were characterised by as many ironies as this one. Consider these unedifying contradictions:
When the World Surf League pro surfing tour rolled into Corangamite in late April, at the start of the campaign, some pro surfers and tour commentators attended one of Cole’s protest meetings (as did Henderson). This feel-good message was prominently published on the WSL’s own website. The WSL’s main sponsor is Jeep, manufacturer of mostly petrol-guzzling cars.
The outcome of the election had no bearing on Equinor’s application, which is being assessed by NOPSEMA, an independent arbiter. Nevertheless, both Henderson and Coker promised an independent investigation into the independent body’s assessment.
The oil and gas fields of the Bass Strait have operated for decades without incident. Unlike Equinor’s proposed well, which is 1000km away, the Bass Strait field is only about 300km from Bells Beach.
Cole visited five states during the campaign. If not for modern aircraft and cars, fuelled by the very product against which he was protesting, his journey would probably not have been completed before the election - the 2022 election, that is.
Even more ludicrously, Cole’s thousands of followers are some of Australia’s most enthusiastic supporters of oil byproducts - the surfboards they ride and wetsuits they wear are made from oil byproducts.
Like much of the environmental movement, Cole’s campaign amounted to little more than mass virtue signalling and NIMBYism. The outcome of the federal election confirms that Corangamite's activists are out of step with the rest of the nation, many of whom don't have the luxury to forgo jobs in pursuit of a solution to a highly unlikely threat.