July 25th, 2012
Why I’m proud to be an ‘anarchist’ in the Kimberley
The Australian
GEOFF COUSINS
IN the Weekend Australian, Woodside and National Australia Bank chairman Michael Chaney labelled me an “anarchist.”
I had not expected this high praise from Michael, since I am a strident opponent of Woodside’s planned massive gas hub in the Kimberley – a project that could be easily be located viably at several less sensitive sites, according to ardent green groups such as JPMorgan, Merrill Lynch and other financial analysts.
But to be in the same category as Nelson Mandela, Andre Breton, Leo Tolstoy, JRR Tolkien, Noam Chomsky, Jack Mundey and Germaine Greer is something I had never dared to hope for.
However, when I read further and discovered that Chaney appears to label anyone who questions or protests against any decision by a governmental authority as anarchists, I realised that his somewhat incomplete knowledge of the meaning of the word had praised me beyond my true worth.
The stimulus for Chaney’s outburst appears to be a piece I wrote in The Global Mail that canvassed the various environmental and indigenous issues surrounding this project and the history of the failure of the WA government and Woodside in all of these.