Resources minister’s road trip — courtesy of the fossil fuel lobby

Where’s Resources Minister Madeleine King — the fossil fuel industry’s friend at court — at the moment? According to her most recent entry in the parliamentary register of interests, filed with commendable promptness yesterday, she’s off to Karratha in the Pilbara as part of an all-expenses-paid trip around Western Australia’s key extractive industry sites, including iron ore mines in the Pilbara and gas extraction facilities offshore.

All paid for by the WA Chamber of Minerals and Energy, the Minerals Council of Australia and the arch fossil fuel lobby, the Australian Petroleum Production & Exploration Association (APPEA).

This is not to suggest the trip is some sort of junket. According to her entry, King’s accommodation in Karratha is accommodation for mining workers, and it’s not much better in Newman. Five star it ain’t. But it does make us reflect on how state capture works when the mining and extractive industry pays for a minister to visit them.

Included in King’s tour is a trip today to Barrow Island — location of the spectacular carbon capture and storage (CCS) failure that is Chevron’s Gorgon field. King is a big advocate for the CCS project. Will she ask hard questions about why the project has routinely come nowhere near the storage targets Chevron has long promised, despite Gorgon being the simplest and easiest form of CCS there is? Or will she be receptive to Chevron officials spinning her the same excuses they tried unsuccessfully on the WA Environmental Protection Authority about Barrow Island?

On the upside, the fact that APPEA is paying for the trip represents the biggest contribution major gas exporters like Santos, Origin and Woodside have made to the public purse in years — far bigger than what they’ve paid in petroleum resource rent tax or, in some cases, company tax, despite tens of billions in revenue. Grateful taxpayers can but thank them.