Coral Whitewash

Last week, the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS) released devastating new research about the scale of coral bleaching along WA’s coast, the worst in recorded history. Some reefs, including the much-loved Rowley Shoals off the Kimberley coast, are at 90% mortality following an extreme marine heatwave extending from late last year.

“The length and intensity of the heat stress, and its footprint across multiple regions, is something we’ve never seen before on most of the reefs in WA,” AIMS senior research scientist Dr James Gilmour said.

“Climate change is driving these events, which are becoming more frequent, more intense and more widespread, giving our amazing, valuable coral reefs little time to recover.”

Their report was national news last week, running widely across ABC radio and TV and as far afield as the BBC. One outlet where the story didn’t get much of a run at all, however, was in The West Australian newspaper, owned by Kerry Stokes' Seven West Media.

A brief piece ran behind a paywall on the West’s website, supplementing wire copy with banal remarks from WA’s new Environment Minister, but the story didn’t make it to the print edition of the paper.

Indeed, the only corals seen in the pages of WA’s only major print newspaper were those featured in front-page advertisements running all week regarding a new sponsorship agreement between the WA Maritime Museum and fossil fuel company Woodside — celebrating a ‘Woodside Open Day’ for kids as part of National Science Week.

Seven West Media is 40% owned by Stokes’ Seven Group Holdings (SGH), whose CEO is Kerry’s son Ryan, also the chair of Beach Energy (in which SGH has the largest single stake), which itself controls substantial WA gas interests including the Waitsia gas project that exports its LNG overseas via Woodside (relying on a special exemption from the WA government to do so). SGH also owns WestTrac, the mining outfitter that supplies Caterpillar trucks to WA’s resources industry (which explains the otherwise bizarre ‘Resources Technology Showcase’ event staged annually by Seven West, or why you’ll rarely see a photo of a rival bulldozer brand in the pages of Stokes’ paper). Oh, and SGH also directly bought $100 million of Woodside shares (this one was reported in the West).

On Sunday morning, attendees were outnumbered by protestors outraged about Woodside’s use of the WA Museum to whitewash their brand at a time when heating waters driven by fossil fuel extraction have whitewashed coral along 1500kms of WA’s coast.

It should escape no one’s notice that the bleaching is happening on the same coastline as Woodside’s Burrup Hub, a massive gas export facility that includes the North West Shelf extension that the federal government is about to approve to operate until 2070. The Burrup Hub has been described as the biggest fossil fuel project in the Southern Hemisphere, and is projected to emit 6 billion tonnes of carbon pollution over its lifetime. That is 13 times Australia’s total annual emissions, rendering existing mitigation measures including the Safeguard Mechanism redundant.

Alec Coles, the CEO of WA Museum, declined to be interviewed but sent me a lengthy statement.

“The WA Museum aims to advance understanding of Western Australia’s rich biodiversity, heritage, and cultures,” Coles said. “As part of this work, the WA Museum has been carrying out original biodiversity research off the WA coast for 28 years, with financial support from Woodside.  

Coles stated that this research is independently led by the museum,with Woodside neither directing nor participating in it. However, he did not respond to questions about discomfort with Woodside’s advertising blitz using the museum’s logo, except to say that he understood the sentiment.

As the major daily newspaper in the state, the West still sets the agenda for other media according to Mignon Shardlow, a senior lecturer in journalism at the University of Notre Dame in Fremantle. “What it puts on the front page is usually picked up by the other news organisations in WA’s small media ecosystem, so what the West Australian decides is news is important,” she told me. The print version of the West Australian has long had a peculiarly powerful hold on the minds of the state’s political class as well.

“When there is a lack of reporting on an issue that is of significant interest to Western Australians, readers are entitled to wonder what other important stories are being omitted? Are vested interests undermining its news values? When marine scientists come together to report that virtually no WA reefs have been left unscathed from an unprecedented marine heatwave, it’s a story. Why wasn’t that covered in the state’s only daily newspaper?”

Last November, I was part of an expedition out to Scott Reef off WA’s Kimberley coast alongside John Butler, the ARIA award-winning musician. We were there to document the coral, which is also at direct risk of subsidence and oil spills from Woodside’s gas drilling plans in the surrounding Browse Basin, but something deeper seemed amiss - the water was five degrees warmer than normal, and shortly afterwards the first bleaching alerts were issued.

In January, I was in Karratha when 30,000 marine creatures washed up dead on the beach, and shocking images of Ningaloo and other reefs have rolled through my newsfeed since February. Butler repeated a pretty simple message for Woodside at the protest on Sunday.

“Fuck off. There's no other way to say it. I'm not going to be polite about it. What they're doing is so perverse. What they're doing is such a slap in the face,” he told me.

“Watching a fossil fuel company trying to groom our children to accept their absolute nonsense and the perversion of facts, whilst they make money, not pay tax and trash our world. The whole thing is so perverted and so sick.

“The fact that [the WA Museum] have to schlepp up to people like Woodside to get funding for basic science and to highlight species either being discovered or actually becoming extinct - it's just the worst B-grade Hollywood movie I've ever seen. And it's happening in our state.”

The editor-in-chief of the West Australian newspaper, Christopher Dore, didn’t respond to repeated enquiries about the extensive Woodside advertising and whether it was related to the absence of any print coverage of the coral bleaching in his newspaper. It’s also possible that the West’s extensive print coverage last week of disrepair in WA’s hospital system (which also happened to provide political attack fodder for longtime Seven West employee, now Opposition Leader Basil Zempilas) may have squeezed space for other stories.

But then Dore was busy at a different expo on Sunday. At the same time as the protest at the museum, Seven West boss Stokes was leading Australia’s Prime Minister and Resources Minister around the Woodside stand at this year’s Resources Technology Showcase, with Dore and Woodside Chair Richard Goyder hovering in the background. Woodside proudly posted the footage of Stokes telling the PM (or his robot dog) to “take instructions”. Perth’s a small town, and there’s only so many ways to spend your Sunday.

This piece was co-published with Crikey.