Perth protest rally targets oil and gas giant Chevron’s New Zealand operation

A large and noisy ral­ly tar­get­ing off­shore hydro­car­bon cor­po­ra­tion Chevron has tak­en place out­side the New Zealand con­sulate in Perth on the morn­ing of Tues­day 12 May 2015.

The protest was called by the Mar­itime Union of New Zealand (MUNZ) and Inter­na­tion­al Trans­port Work­ers Fed­er­a­tion (ITF) to alert the New Zealand pub­lic to the poor prac­tices of Chevron, that have led to major dis­putes in the Aus­tralian off­shore oil and gas indus­try and around the world.

Chevron are a new entrant into the New Zealand oil and gas indus­try and it was recent­ly award­ed three off­shore explo­ration per­mits in the Pega­sus Basin, in part­ner­ship with Sta­tOil. Chevron is the oper­a­tor.

Chevron is the oper­a­tor of Australia’s largest LNG (liqui­fied nat­ur­al gas) project Gor­gon, on the remote north­ern coast of West­ern Aus­tralia, which has dis­ap­point­ed local com­mu­ni­ties by fail­ing to meet com­mit­ments for local jobs and to local busi­ness­es, poor safe­ty and oth­er con­di­tions for work­ers, mas­sive cost over­runs and project mis­man­age­ment in its con­struc­tion phase.

A let­ter was pre­sent­ed to the Con­sulate for the New Zealand Gov­ern­ment detail­ing work­ers con­cerns at the way Chevron oper­ates.

Mar­itime Union of New Zealand Nation­al Sec­re­tary Joe Fleet­wood says the pres­ence of Chevron is not wel­comed by New Zealand mar­itime work­ers.

“Our mem­bers work in this indus­try, we sup­port respon­si­ble drilling with high safe­ty stan­dards, but we do not sup­port com­pa­nies that have a bad envi­ron­men­tal record and anti-work­er agen­da enter­ing our indus­try.”

Mr Fleet­wood says the nat­ur­al resources of New Zealand must be used to the ben­e­fit of New Zealand work­ers and the peo­ple of New Zealand, not sim­ply to boost prof­its for multi­na­tion­al oper­a­tors.

ITF Pres­i­dent Pad­dy Crum­lin says Chevron have a record of anti-work­er activ­i­ties and oth­er bad prac­tices in their glob­al oper­a­tions.

“We are alert­ing the New Zealand pub­lic that this oper­a­tor has a very dubi­ous record and Aus­tralian work­ers have expe­ri­enced that first hand.”

The ral­ly was the first step in the New Zealand link in what has become a glob­al cam­paign to demand Chevron respect the com­mu­ni­ties they oper­ate in.