Woodside weirdos blow candles out on nation interest

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What kind of nation is it when one-half of politics arcs up over a birthday party for a corporation while ignoring that the same is raping every Australian east of WA?

Tony Abbott is incensed:

It says something about the mindset of the modern Labor Party that not a single federal Labor MP turned up at the weekend’s 70th anniversary celebration of our largest gas exporter.

Gas is our second-largest export earner, the essential feedstock for the fertiliser and chemical industries absolutely needed for modern life, and the only way to ensure that the transition to renewable energy doesn’t put the lights out, yet because it’s an “evil” fossil fuel, not a single federal Labor MP could attend this milestone, even though Woodside is one of the very biggest businesses headquartered in Perth.

So is Ian Macfarlane, former resources minister turned mining puswad:

Ian ‘Chainsaw’ Macfarlane has a serious beef with Andrew ‘Twiggy’ Forrest. The Woodside Energy director and former federal resources minister laid into Forrest at the launch last week of Coal Australia, a new peak body for the sector. “You may be a fan of Twiggy Forest, I’m not,” Macfarlane rasped at the function at Brisbane Tattersall’s Club.

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“He said some pretty unkind things, in fact, disgusting things about our CEO at Woodside, Meg O’Neill.” Forrest in a controversial radio interview last year accused O’Neill of being trained by liars and of “peddling poison”. Woodside hit back, describing the Fortescue chairman’s comments as “personal vitriol” that set a terrible language for public debate and should be condemned. Now with Twiggy’s hydrogen ambitions looks shaky, Macfarlane went on the offensive. “Twiggy’s hydrogen bubble burst last week and it blew up faster than the Hindenburg,” said Macfarlane, referring to big job cuts at his flagship Fortescue company.

Err, Woodside is a company, not a person. The only reason to worry about who attended its birthday party is to ask who is unduly influenced by its bribes donations versus the national interest.

As CEO of Woodside, Meg O’Neill has proven to be a vicious rent-seeker, buying the dying Bass Strait assets from BHP to squeeze the last drop of blood from east coast households.

But we can’t blame her. This is how the Game of Mates is played.

The LNP’s whining is because it captured.

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The ALP is silent because it is captured.

The stoush over who attended Woodside’s birthday is a kind of corporate virtue signalling by entitled lunatics seeking a sinecure that is the precise opposite of why both political parties exist in the first place.

Canberra should be doused in Woodside petrol and razed.

About the author
David Llewellyn-Smith is Chief Strategist at the MB Fund and MB Super. David is the founding publisher and editor of MacroBusiness and was the founding publisher and global economy editor of The Diplomat, the Asia Pacific’s leading geo-politics and economics portal. He is also a former gold trader and economic commentator at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the ABC and Business Spectator. He is the co-author of The Great Crash of 2008 with Ross Garnaut and was the editor of the second Garnaut Climate Change Review.