Australian Summer Cancelled Indefinitely

Norwegian energy company Equinor announced this week that they intend to drill for oil in the Great Australian Bight later this year, 370 kilometres off the South Australian coast.

Accidents are rare, Equinor claim, but buried deep inside their own environmental plan is a graphic showing what would happen if it all goes tits up. Here it is:

Yup. Say goodbye to Australia’s beaches, all the way from Port Macquarie to Perth. Cheerio to hundreds of thousands of whales, and birds, and fish, and penguins, and seals, and sharks. Take a chainsaw to your surfboard because that’s over. Hang up your damp bathers/swimmers/cossie/whatever you call them because unless you like swimming in crude oil, the summer holidays are cancelled. Which means no more tourists either, so there goes the Australian economy, dickheads.

I live on Phillip Island, in the Bass Strait. We have some of the best surf beaches in the world. Coachloads of visitors come to the island every night of the year to watch the Penguin Parade. There’s a colony of 32,000 penguins here. An oil spill in 2001 almost wiped them out. They were saved by thousands of people around the world who knitted jumpers for the little buggers, so they wouldn’t ingest the toxic material while their feathers were cleaned. That spill was from one ship. One. Solitary. Ship.

If, unlike Norwegian oil companies and the Australian federal government, you actually give a shit about the wildlife and culture of this country, and would like to see drilling for oil in our ocean consigned to the annals of history where it belongs, there are a couple of things you can do. Email your local Federal Member of Parliament and remind the prick that it’s an election year. Email the Minister for Resources, Matt Canavan. Email the Minister of the Environment, Melissa Price. Vote smart when it comes to election day. The only boats we need to worry about are ones with an Equinor logo on the hull. Email the Norwegian embassy in Canberra, which unbelievably has a page crowing about their oceanic environmental credentials.

You can also let NOPSEMA (National Offshore Petroleum Safety and Environmental Management Authority) know how you feel here.

Or you can just email any and all of these bums. They’ve tried to hide their emails, but some clever clogs nailed a screenshot before it was too late.

The National Offshore Petroleum Safety and Environmental Management Authority (NOPSEMA) is accepting public comments on Equinor’s plan until 20 March. Express your feelings on the preservation and protection of the Australian coastline here, and don’t hold back. If these guys fuck up just once, it’s all over and nothing will relieve the pain.