Media release: “It’s Woodside vs the future. Pick a side”

Last night, Four Corners exposed the excessive targeting of peaceful protestors brave enough to stand up against Woodside’s Burrup Hub and the reasons that young campaigners continue to escalate their response despite the crackdown.

Since February 2023, the State Security Investigations Group, WA’s counter-terror police, have executed more than a dozen raids of the homes of Disrupt Burrup Hub campaigners. Dozens of electronic devices have been seized from campaigners, compromising their ability to communicate, and more than a dozen Data Access Orders have been issued by counter-terror police. Each of these campaigners have been targeted by police following peaceful protests against Woodside’s plans to expand its gas processing projects on the Burrup Peninsula. This is the price paid by WA citizens for standing up to Woodside’s corporate power in this State. 

The Burrup Peninsula in Western Australia is known as Murujuga to traditional custodians, a deeply sacred place that contains the largest, oldest collection of Aboriginal rock art in the world. This priceless cultural treasure is currently nominated for UNESCO world heritage listing, but the sacred songlines and stories contained in these carvings are being damaged by emissions from the Burrup Hub and face total destruction within decades. Woodside has previously been responsible for the destruction of around 5,000 sacred rock art sites in the construction of earlier parts of its Burrup Hub mega-project, including the Karratha Gas Plant and Pluto LNG processing facility.

Woodside's Burrup Hub is the biggest new fossil fuel project in Australia. It consists of the Scarborough and Browse Basin gas fields, the Pluto Project processing plant, and other linked liquified natural gas (LNG) and fertiliser plants on the Burrup Peninsula in WA’s remote north-west Pilbara region. The Burrup Hub is projected to produce more than 6 billion tons of CO2 by 2070, making it four times larger than the Adani coal mine and one of the biggest carbon bombs in the world. Woodside’s Burrup Hub is an outlier - a proposal to develop massive new fossil fuel resources that Australia and the world do not need at a time in the future when fossil fuel use must decline in order to avoid catastrophic climate change.

Nineteen-year-old Disrupt Burrup Hub campaigner Matilda Lane-Rose said last night:

“I’m willing to take this kind of action because I’m frightened of the impacts that projects like the Burrup Hub will have on our quality of life - starvation, mass displacement of climate refugees, and weather events of increasing frequency and severity. Woodside is trying to shut us up with legal threats and police intimidation, but Disrupt Burrup Hub won’t back down, we’ll double down.”