{"id":3142,"date":"2013-06-21T10:17:50","date_gmt":"2013-06-21T00:17:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/?p=3142"},"modified":"2013-06-21T10:23:43","modified_gmt":"2013-06-21T00:23:43","slug":"cooper-creek-oil-spill-australian-outback","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/cooper-creek-oil-spill-australian-outback\/","title":{"rendered":"Cooper Creek Oil Spill & the Australian media ignoring the outback"},"content":{"rendered":"

I have my ear to the ground fairly well but it took\u00a04 weeks for me to hear about the Santos crude oil spill<\/strong> in the vicinity of Cooper Creek.<\/p>\n

But in the meantime I’ve heard all about, ad nauseam; Labor in-fighting and electioneering, celebrity rubbish,\u00a0yet more asylum seeker debates and endless conversations about whether gay marriage should be legalised.<\/p>\n

While a precious piece of our environment, which will be around eons after all of the above issues have been and gone, suffers a catastrophe.<\/p>\n

Perhaps the standard of Australian journalism hasn’t actually fallen; but the advent of the internet and more recently social media, has highlighted all the stories the media are\/were overlooking and accentuated the obsession with a\u00a0ridiculously narrow range of topics, which\u00a0are rehashed over and over and over.\u00a0 Either way; the Australian public\u00a0deserves more accuracy, a broader range of stories, and less obsession with relative trivia.<\/p>\n

Contrary to what Senator Waters<\/strong> said in this Radio National<\/a> interview,\u00a0 the current Queensland LNP<\/strong> is absolutely in no way responsible for the situating of oil and gas wells amongst<\/em> the pristine channels of the Cooper Creek<\/strong>. This occurred during the many years the Labor Government<\/strong> was in power.\u00a0 What a load of absolute bull about\u00a0the area being protected by the Wild Rivers legislation<\/strong>!\u00a0 \u00a0Political point scoring at it’s lowest.\u00a0 These oil and gas wells didn’t arrive in the last five minutes!\u00a0 Wild River Protection did diddly squat bugger-all! \u00a0The fact that 3 weeks later no employee of the Queensland Government’s Department of Environment<\/strong> had even bothered to visit the site of the Eromanga\/Cooper Basin<\/strong> oil spill, is just a continuation of all Australian governments (State and Federal)\u00a0lack of concern for remote areas (social as well as environmental).\u00a0 Senator Waters need look no further than the Lady Annie\u00a0mine<\/strong> tailings dam spill for a great example of the\u00a0Queensland Labor Government’s absolute disregard for outback Australia<\/strong>.\u00a0 \u00a0It is truly\u00a0a case of “out of sight and out of mind” for politicians of all persuasions, other than the tiny few who have been voted in to represent these vast, sparsely populated areas in parliament.<\/p>\n

By contrast; the Great Barrier Reef<\/strong>, rainforest\u00a0regions<\/strong> and coastal areas<\/strong> generally, receive\u00a0by far the lion’s share of attention with regard to environmental protection.\u00a0 While politicians eye off the remotest, most fragile parts of Australia for nuclear waste dumps<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Hey we can’t let a few thousand head of starving cattle into a handful of specific national parks<\/strong>, that ran cattle for more than 100 years (and until relatively recently); and were considered in such good environmental shape they were taken out of private ownership; but it’s fine for Santos to let oil spill from one of their wells into the environment for a whole week, uncapped.\u00a0 And both the government and the media are happy to ignore it.<\/p>\n

How big is this spill?\u00a0 Santos says nearly a quarter of a million litres of oil<\/strong>.\u00a0 Excuse my scepticism, but when the fox is left in charge of the chookhouse, is there a single fox on the planet that would accurately count & report the number of chooks eaten? <\/em>Yet we have Radio National – our publicly funded national broadcaster – repeating this figure as if it’s the immutable truth; and a Santos spokesperson saying the leak was plugged “quickly”<\/a> (5 days is quick? I’d hate to see slow…)\u00a0 The public comment on the Mining Australia website<\/a> sums it up.<\/p>\n

And where is the leaked oil and contaminated soil being moved to; where is this ‘bio remediation site’<\/strong>?\u00a0 Down a gully amongst the silent little stony hills and red sand dunes?\u00a0 Who knows – because not a single independent observer appears to have been out there to look!\u00a0 Oh great, the government department in charge of managing one of the most pristine parts of Australia, is using a French satellite<\/strong> to verify information provided by Santos!<\/p>\n

Here’s a few facts, which the media appear incapable of determining themselves:<\/strong><\/p>\n