The West Australian Government has finalised its acquisition of controversial gas hub land to supply projects in the Kimberley region.

The land at James Price Point, north of Broome, has been bought from traditional owners.

It was originally planned for the use of oil and gas company Woodside as an onshore processing site but the company abandoned that proposal earlier this year in favour of floating LNG technology.

The State Government still wanted the land for a possible Browse Basin supply base, and it has now been registered with Landgate.

It now officially owns 3,414 hectares at the site.

The Premier Colin Barnett says it will be up to oil and gas companies to develop it.

While Woodside chose another option, Mr Barnett hopes other Browse developers will use the land as a supply base.

“Then companies using that site will lease the land off the government but the government will not be building infrastructure for the oil and gas industry, I think they’ve enough money to build their own infrastructure,” he said.

“The agreement that’s been put in place and backed up through Parliament is that it not be an industrial site with chemical industries and the like, it is simply a gas processing and supply base.

“A supply base is largely a marina, we’re not talking about massive ocean vessels coming in there; these are supply boats that might be 60, 70, 80 metres long.

“They will simply take out suppliers’ equipment.”

Barnett confident some gas will come ashore

Mr Barnett says the supply base developers could still include Woodside and its joint venture partners.

“There’s no immediate prospect of development on the site,” he said.

The Premier says WA owns about 15 per cent of the oil in the Browse Basin, and the Commonwealth the rest.

He says he still has not amended the conditions of the WA-owned retention lease, but building a supply base is one of the concessions he is willing to make.

“Some of the leases offshore are state rather than commonwealth leases and we are working towards getting some of that gas at least coming onshore,” he said.

“I’m very confident at some stage in the future you will see some of that gas coming onshore.”

The acquisition triggers a $30 million benefits payout to the traditional owners.

However, because the Jabirr-Jabirr Goolarabooloo group recently split, that money will be held in a trust until the Native Title Tribunal decides who the rightful land owners are.

Matters before the tribunal can sometimes take years to be resolved, but the Premier says this will not be one of those cases.

“It won’t be years at all,” he said.

“Those issues will be sorted out. I can’t predict it but it’s not going to be years and years.”

Choice of site drew numerous protests

The site choice prompted numerous protests over a number of years.

Environmentalists argued that the Kimberley should be kept free from industry and said James Price Point was not appropriate for LNG processing.

The decision to give the go ahead for the hub was also the subject of a court battle.

The court found that three board members of the Environmental Protection Authority had participated in the approval process despite declaring conflicts of interest.

The gas hub project was approved in the final stage by the EPA’s chairman alone.

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Indigenous empowerment is being able to say no

By ABC’s Ben Collins – http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-10-11/collins-indigenous-empowerment-is-...

11 October 2013

The Kimberley gas precinct arguably demonstrates that by giving traditional owners the right to say ‘no’, there’s a greater chance they may say ‘yes’, writes Ben Collins.

During the recent election campaign, Tony Abbott said he would do whatever he humanly could to make Aboriginal land “... an economic asset as well as a spiritual asset …”.

There are lessons to be learnt in the Kimberley where a forceful approach to economic development for Aboriginal people has failed to produce favourable results for anyone.

No one could question how badly WA Premier Colin Barnett wanted to bring gas processing to the Kimberley coast north of Broome at James Price Point. Shortly after being elected, he decided the best way to avoid failure was to tell traditional owners that if they didn’t sign an agreement with his government and Woodside Petroleum, then he would compulsorily acquire the land and the project would proceed with or without their consent.

“Probably compulsory acquisition would take somewhere between 18 months to two years. The point about it is that it is a certain process. It will succeed and it will acquire the land,” Mr Barnett said in 2010.

Although Mr Barnett used every available option to push this project forward, the result was a process fraught with division and opposition. Endless legal challenges became the weapon of choice for those with little other power.

Even traditional owners who did eventually sign the agreement questioned the Premier’s approach.

“He calls it self-determination; we call it standing on our own feet with a gun to our head,” Jabirr-Jabirr spokesman Wayne Barker said in May 2011.

Two protest-filled years after this, the deal fell through when Woodside decided not to proceed with the project due to ballooning costs. No one got what they wanted. There was no benefits package for Aboriginal people, and no mega-project for government. Even environmentalists and traditional owners opposed to the project haven’t succeeded in stopping industry potentially using James Price Point in the future.

Wayne Bergmann is a Kimberley Aboriginal leader who champions Aboriginal-controlled economic development as the best opportunity to increase the quality of life for disadvantaged Indigenous people. He argues that lives could literally be saved by restoring a sense of purpose essential to moving away from the relentless tragedy dogging his community. But he blames native title as it stands for failing to empower Aboriginal people to negotiate the James Price Point project successfully.

“We’ve got a not-so-fancy bit of law that gives some token rights called native title,” Mr Bergmann told the World Indigenous Network Conference in Darwin earlier this year.

He used an analogy of an Australian backyard to explain why he advocates for native title change.

“If you own a house … and you’ve got a backyard and someone wants to go and use your backyard and say, ‘Well, I’m taking your interest’, then they just wait six months, go in your backyard and do whatever they want: that’s the Native Title Act. That’s what they call our sovereign rights. That is so unfair and unjust.”

It might seem strange that someone who sees economic development as a key to reducing Indigenous disadvantage is campaigning for the right for Aboriginal people to say ‘no’ to development.

The reasoning comes down in part to the counterintuitive effect of empowering people. By giving traditional owners the right to say ‘no’, there’s a greater chance they may say ‘yes’, and the Kimberley gas precinct is arguably a case in point.

The WA Labor Party have long criticised the Liberal Premier’s approach on Kimberley gas, saying that Mr Barnett’s heavy-handedness was the biggest threat to the project proceeding. Before Mr Barnett was elected in 2008 the Labor government had a policy of Indigenous veto for negotiations with traditional owners for a Kimberley gas hub.

The former ALP minister for regional development Jon Ford claims that giving traditional owners the right to stop the project gave people trust that it would bring benefits across the community.

“And so people were comfortable to talk about ideas right up to a very final decision point knowing that in the end they could say ‘no’,” says Mr Ford.

In this way, Jon Ford argues the project would have avoided the ballooning costs that ultimately sank the Kimberley gas precinct as the Colin Barnett-led process dragged out until April this year.

“Everybody had signed up to the agreement, so that was all the local environmental groups and stakeholder groups … And I think the plant would have been at least started within two to three years so the end of 2009, to early 2010,” Mr Ford says.

Making native title deliver control over land to Indigenous people would be a radical change from the previous Coalition Government’s infamous “bucket loads of extinguishment”. It would carry the risk that sometimes Indigenous people will choose to say ‘no’ to industry, and sometimes they’ll say ‘no’ to environmentalists; that’s the catch. But perhaps Australia is ready to take the risk of blowing out the cobwebs of terra nullius once and for all and really relinquish Indigenous land to Indigenous people.

Tony Abbott has to balance the risks of a new approach to native title with the risk of sticking with the status quo, as Wayne Bergmann explained to the largely international audience.

“My cousin-brother, I was one of the last people to see him alive … But he ended his life, saw no future at the age of 22. These are the kind of powerful challenges where we are trying to build a community and economy.”