Murray Watt fails first test with Woodside North West Shelf approval

In a sense, Murray Watt is the very model of a modern Labor politician. School captain of his high school. President of the University of Queensland student union. President of Young Labor in Queensland. Chief of staff to a Labor premier, Anna Bligh. A stint at Maurice Blackburn, doing refugee advocacy. One term as a state member in the Brisbane suburbs.

All the while, Watt was building. He took the Left faction of the Queensland ALP to the top, establishing a surprising paramountcy in a state branch notorious for its four-way factional brawling. He then set about building the power of the Queensland Left nationally, working the numbers at national conferences, entrenching his position as a key apparatchik.

Competent and personable, Watt is well-liked within the party. Journalists find him easy to talk to. Staffers say he is an unusually organised and consultative minister.

As a junior minister for Anthony Albanese, Watt performed well in difficult portfolios. He stared down opposition from the agriculture sector to end live animal exports, a Labor election promise. As emergency management minister, he was a tireless reformer to improve Australia’s resilience to natural disasters. In employment, he wasn’t afraid to stick the boot into the CFMEU, a union that even Labor hard-heads fear.

But what was it all for? The endless number counting, the years climbing the factional pole, the long apprenticeship in the corridors of power: all have led Watt to the Environment portfolio, at one of the most critical times for the environment in modern Australian history. Here we have a key figure of the ALP Left, a moderate, intelligent politician, confronted with one of the most consequential decisions of the newly reelected Labor government: whether to approve Woodside’s proposed life extension to its West Australian gas facility beyond 2030.

Some observers were optimistic — after all, said the chief executive of the Australian Conservation Foundation of Watt, “he has a reputation for fixing really hard things.”

With his first crucial decision, just weeks after taking on the portfolio, the newly minted minister for the environment faced a stark choice: to protect the environment, or to approve a massive fossil fuel development that will destroy the environment, both locally and globally. He chose destruction.

We don’t need to spend too much time explaining why Watt’s decision to give the long-awaited environmental approval for the North West Shelf project to be extended to 2070 was a bad decision — a craven, cowardly capitulation to corporate power and political expediency. The dimensions of the cave-in are immediately obvious.

Just for form’s sake, though, let’s spell it out. North West Shelf is a gas development. Gas is warming the planet and destroying the environment. Any child can understand the physics, which is why Australian children have already protested against climate change in their hundreds of thousands.

The scale of North West Shelf is truly remarkable — a development on a planetary scale. Burrup is already the largest fossil fuel project in the southern hemisphere.

Watt’s decision primes a massive “carbon bomb” of future emissions, which some credible estimates put at 10 times Australia’s annual emissions.

Watt can approve this project without reference to future carbon emissions because of the big lie at the heart of Australia’s climate policies: the convenient fiction that coal and gas burnt in other countries somehow doesn’t count towards Australia’s emission reduction targets.

This is technically correct, in terms of the black letter of the Paris climate treaty and the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act. There is no climate trigger in the EPBC Act; Labor had a chance to amend the law in the last parliament, but Albanese intervened to block environmental reforms.

As the new minister, Watt could still have blocked this decision. He had a number of strong grounds. The ancient rock art at Murujuga is of world significance — so significant, in fact, that the government is seeking world heritage status for it. Emissions from the Karratha plant are quite clearly degrading the art, causing little holes to open up in the rocks. A draft decision from the UN that landed just before Watt’s decision was announced has put the bid in doubt, with the report citing concerns about emissions degrading the carvings. Gas drilling also has plenty of negative impacts on local coastlines and waterways. Was protecting sacred, irreplaceable Indigenous art enough to stop a gas development? Of course not.

Perhaps the most irresponsible aspect of the decision is the way it locks Australia into a fossil export future, at the very time that key overseas markets are finally decarbonsing. Recent data shows emissions are falling in China, with the reduction attributed to massive new investment in wind and solar. China added a gigantic 23 gigawatts (GW) of new solar and 13GW of new wind in March alone. While gas is in demand now, it may be a stranded asset well before 2070. But by that time, the damage will have been done

As a former emergency minister, Watt knows that climate change is hurting ordinary Australians. But even leaving aside the spectre of ever-worsening natural disasters, it’s hard to find much economic logic in the decision to extend North West Shelf. Woodside is an Australian-listed company that pays a few billion dollars in company tax, but the majority of this extractive windfall will flow to global shareholders.

The North West Shelf pays remarkably little in royalties, especially compared to gas revenues collected by international competitors like Qatar. In 2023, according to its “Payments to government” report, Woodside paid just $325 million in royalties for the North West Shelf gas, and none at all for its Pluto production. The much-maligned Petroleum Resource Rent Tax collected a further $114 million for the North West Shelf and $368 million for Pluto. The Conservation Council of WA points out that “WA drivers pay more in car registration than the gas industry pays in royalties.”

There aren’t that many jobs in play. Capital intensive and highly automated, gas is simply not a big employer. While Woodside is obviously a big player in the town of Karratha, the firm has less than 1,000 employees in Western Australia in total.

The politics of this decision are daubed in stark monochromes. While Woodside’s boss Meg O’Neill (2023 remuneration: $7.45 million) hams as a cartoon villain, throwing out insults about kids buying clothes on Shein and Temu, WA Premier Roger Cook grins in the background. The WA government has attempted to subvert its own multimillion-dollar scientific report.

Watt’s decision is a taste of what a newly dominant, centrist, pro-fossil fuel Albanese government will deliver in coming years. Industry and the captured bubble of Western Australian media will no doubt be pleased. This decision signals that no meaningful action will be taken to curb fossil fuel exports — even as New South Wales is deluged, and South Australia struggles through a devastating drought.

At the Karratha plant, there are tall towers with flames burning atop them. These are gas flares that burn round the clock.

Gas flaring is a perfect encapsulation of Australia’s addiction to fossil fuels. Everyone knows flaring is bad: combusting methane, ethane, propane and butane, it sends carbon dioxide soaring into the atmosphere. Even rabidly pro-mining minister Madeleine King has pledged to stop it, in a speech at the resources conference in Brisbane this week (the same forum where O’Neill took a shot at young people).

But, because no-one actually wants to stop this development or the wealth it extracts, gas flaring at Burrup continues. Unlike Labor’s light on the hill, the flames are never extinguished.