NO GAS on the Kimberley coast! The protest against the proposed James Price Gas Point Project in The Kimberley.

The Letter John Butler delivered to Peter Coleman:

Dear Mr Coleman

The Kimberley is too precious to plunder
Welcome to your new job as CEO of Woodside. You join as your company and its joint venture partners are pioneering the industrialisation of the Kimberley, one of the World's last great wildernesses.

Woodside, Chevron, BP, Shell and BHP are collaborating on a massive development to processes petroleum gas on the Kimberley coast that will put at threat an ecosystem of global importance. This cannot be allowed to happen.
The Kimberley coast is one of the most undisturbed regions on Earth, with the low level of human impact on its waters comparable to only the Arctic and Antarctic oceans. Its ancient lands give refuge to many threatened species, with parts of the Kimberley having had no mammal extinctions since European settlement. It has an intact landscape of a sort that has disappeared from almost every other region on the planet.

There are alternatives available that will allow you to process the gas with lower environmental impact. You could process the gas in the Pilbara, as Woodside has done for decades, or on offshore floating facilities, as you are proposing to do in the Timor Sea. Either way, you and your partners can access your gas without putting the Kimberley at risk.
Woodside has claimed that it has indigenous support for the development, but Woodside and the Western Australian Government have been unfairly coercive in their negotiations with local communities. Indigenous people were told that if they did not support the development they would receive lesser services, fewer educational resources and poorer health facilities. The Western Australian Premier said that if indigenous people did not voluntarily forfeit their land, it would be forcefully acquired from them anyway. This pressure robbed indigenous people of their democratic right to freely decide on the future of their land.

In recent years almost the entire Kimberley has been pegged under mining exploration permits. Your development will spearhead a process of industrialisation in the region on a potentially devastating scale. And for what? Little more than some bigger near-term profits. Australia already accommodates mining and industry in most regions. Why not preserve the environmentally valuable coastline of the last untouched corner of our country?

We are going to tell Australia and the world about your plans for the Kimberley. We will tell people about how you will build one of the world's largest pieces of industrial infrastructure in one its last great wildernesses. We will tell them about the beauty of the Kimberley, its gorges, reefs, whale breeding grounds, dugong habitat, rare mammals, water birds, dinosaur footprints, and ancient gwion gwion paintings. And we will remind them of the inadequate track record that the petroleum industry has when it comes to controlling its impact on wilderness.

The Kimberley coast must be protected forever. It needs National and World heritage listing. It needs our care, not a gas plant.