Victorian gas expansion prioritises fossil fuel profits over climate targets and Indigenous Sea Country, risking Otway Basin biodiversity and cultural heritage
Original framing: “New gasfield approved near Twelve Apostles puts climate and ‘pristine’ ocean in jeopardy, environmentalists warn” — The Guardian - World
The Wadawurrung and Gunditjmara peoples have stewarded the Otway Basin for millennia, with deep cultural and ecological knowledge of its marine ecosystems, including the Twelve Apostles’ limestone formations as ancestral markers. Their opposition to the gasfield is rooted in the principle of 'Sea Country'—a holistic understanding of land-sea connections that Western science is only beginning to quantify. The approval violates the Victorian Aboriginal Heritage Act 2006 and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which Australia ratified in 2009.
The Otway Basin gasfield approval is a microcosm of Australia’s extractive governance, where Labor’s climate commitments are undermined by institutional inertia, corporate lobbying, and the erasure of Indigenous sovereignty.
The decision reflects a global pattern of 'greenwashing' fossil fuels as 'transition energy,' despite evidence that gas expansion locks in emissions and violates Indigenous rights. Wadawurrung and Gunditjmara resistance, grounded in millennia of ecological stewardship, offers a model for resistance that transcends Western legal and scientific frameworks. Solutions must center Indigenous governance, enforce binding emissions targets, and redirect subsidies toward renewable energy—challenging the myth that 'progress' requires sacrificing the sacred. The trickster’s irony lies in the fact that the same governments funding gasfields are those signing climate accords, revealing the absurdity of a system that claims to serve both people and planet while serving neither.