By Sonali Paul
MELBOURNE (Reuters) – Australia’s environment minister on Tuesday rejected a request to block construction of a A$4.5 billion ($3.1 billion) fertiliser plant after consulting traditional owners about its potential impact on ancient indigenous rock art.
The government sided with the desire of the local indigenous representative group to proceed with the plant over the objections of some indigenous women.
Two Murujuga indigenous women last month asked the government to bar Perdaman Chemicals and Fertilisers from starting construction on a urea plant on the Burrup Peninsula in Western Australia under a law protecting indigenous heritage.
The Burrup Peninsula has more than a million rock carvings, some more than 40,000 years old, which have been nominated for a UNESCO World Heritage listing. Those sites lie near an industrial area where there are already two liquefied natural gas (LNG) plants and two fertiliser plants.
Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek said she had decided not to bar construction as the Murujuga Aboriginal Corp (MAC) was the “most representative organisation” for the five traditional owner groups in the area and they did not want to block the urea plant from going ahead.
Plibersek said the MAC had made agreements with Perdaman on the appropriate cultural treatment of the sites including moving some of the rock art.
The two women who sought to block construction of the urea plant belong to a group called Save our Songlines, who say their views are not represented by the MAC and its Circle of Elders.
“Traditional Owners – like any group – can sometimes have different views,” Plibersek said.
“I am satisfied, however, that the MAC are the legally constituted and democratically elected group that safeguards First Nations culture in the Burrup area,” Plibersek said in a statement.
Plibersek said she is still considering a separate application to bar construction under the Aboriginal heritage protection law.
“The community, the country and the whole world will be outraged if this leads to another Juukan Gorge because the federal government would not stand up to industry and protect sacred Aboriginal sites from further desecration,” Save our Songlines spokeswomen Raelene Cooper and Josie Alec said in a statement.
Juukan Gorge was an ancient cave destroyed by global miner Rio Tinto in 2020 for an iron ore mine, a disaster that deeply distressed the traditional owners and led to a public outcry.
($1 = 1.4507 Australian dollars)
(Reporting by Sonali Paul; Editing by Christian Schmollinger)
