James Price Point...............

The Kimberley region in northern Western Australia is a globally significant natural and cultural landscape, home to rare and endangered wildlife and a marine wonderland of unrivalled beauty and diversity. The region can only be compared to places like the Amazon, Great Barrier Reef, or the Antarctic in terms of majesty and scale of relatively pristine and healthy functioning natural landscapes.

The Browse basin is a large undersea area off the Kimberley coast contains significant reserves of gas and some oil.  A number of companies hold leases over this region, and are now looking to extract the fossil fuel resource.

With so much interest from companies wanting to process the Kimberley’s huge gas reserves – the Government set up a process to find one location in an attempt to minimise the impacts.

A Government taskforce looked at 40 potential sites along the Kimberley coast but it paid only lip service to assessing sites outside the Kimberley despite the fact the Government had committed to doing so.

Then the State Government changed; Premier Colin Barnett was elected, and the whole process was abandoned. Premier Barnett quickly moved to make a unilateral decision that James Price Point, north of Broome was the best site.

A major industrial complex on the Kimberley coast would be environmentally destructive; compromise the sustainable economic future of the Kimberley (tourism, well managed fisheries etc.) and would act as a ‘thin edge of the wedge’ to trigger many other damaging developments in the Kimberley such as strip mining for bauxite and alumina refineries, and polluting fertiliser or ammonia plants.

We can protect the environment and create jobs through investment in sustainable industries such as ecotourism and improved land management which are not environmentally destructive.

Recent research mapping the world’s oceans placed the Kimberley alongside Antarctica as one of the world’s least impacted marine environments. It is clearly comparable to the Great Barrier Reef in conservation significance and value.

The Kimberley’s clean seas, innumerable islands, coral reefs, mangroves, bays and estuaries are home to an astonishing variety of wildlife including Humpback whales and Dugong, five species of turtles, crocodiles, rare Snub fin dolphins and a coral reef network of global significance. The Kimberley coast also has outstanding cultural values for the region’s many Indigenous peoples.

If the large multinational resource companies have their way however, the pristine Kimberley region is about to change.

The Wilderness Society. 2010. James Price Point FAQs - your questions answered. [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.wilderness.org.au/campaigns/kimberley/kimberley-lng-gas-plant-and-james-price-pointfaq-your-questions-answered. [Accessed 12 March 11].

In my opinion this whole debacle has been totally and irrevocably unethical; how can the Barnett Government possibly claim they have behaved in an ethical way, when the original decision to allow the LNG precinct was made without any consultation of the stakeholders who have an obvious vested interest in this region?

Surely, in a democratic country there should have been some consultation of this project? How can a project that has been collectively panned as a major ecological disaster waiting to happen?, that is unwanted both by the indigenous community who belong to that land, and the locals who choose to make their homes in the Kimberly region be allowed to go ahead, especially with viable alternatives that would suit all interested parties

Adding insult to injury, Colin Barnett is now on the offensive; announcing the process of compulsory acquisition of the land in question.