Nev Power, Chairman of the National Covid-19 Commission (NCC) Advisory Board, was the guest speaker at a “Success and Leadership” breakfast held in Perth on Friday 21 August. Because of Covid restrictions, this was the first opportunity any community in Australia had to show their opposition to the gas-fired Covid “recovery” that Nev and the NCC are proposing. Nev’s vision of a fracking, fossil-fuelled “recovery” is not one that we want for our future. So 350-Perth teamed up with School Strike for Climate WA to show the NCC and the government that we want a future that is free of fossil fuels and an economy that is solving the climate crisis, not pushing us further towards disastrous climate change.
Nev Power has the ear of many influential people, including that of Scott Morrison the Prime Minister. As part of his duties as Chair of the NCCC he has license to fly in and out of WA to Canberra and does so regularly. He has his own private jet which he likes to pilot himself and offers lifts to and from Canberra to prominent WA politicians. Mattias Cormann has been known to fly back and forth on Nev airways along with Julie Bishop.
He is also linked to WA Billionaire Twiggy Forrest whom he used to work for as CEO of Fortescue metals. While at Fortescue, Nev advocated for a gas pipeline linking the West and East coasts to facilitate an expansion of onshore gas in WA. It didn’t take long before he was championing this idea of a west – east pipeline as a “great opportunity for Australia”. Not only is this a terrible idea for our climate, but it makes no economic sense either. This is common among all fossil gas projects moving forward; THEY NO LONGER MAKE SENSE. We can not solve one crisis – the Covid recession – by making another crisis even worse. Yet that’s exactly what Nev and his fossil gas mates are proposing.
Nev Power has a vested interest in a gas fired recovery. He is a Non-Executive Director of Strike Energy which is currently looking to exploit further gas reserves in the Perth basin, just 4 hours north of Perth at their West Erregulla project.
The NCC is full of fossil fuel executives like Nev, whose ideas about a recovery from the Covid crisis are intertwined with fossil fuel expansion and little else. Find out more about all the members of the NCC at https://fossilfuel.watch
What should the NCC have been working on?
Two days before our protest at Nev’s breakfast, a brand new report was released by Clean State showing 26 big ideas for 200,000 clean jobs in WA. It is ideas like these that the NCC should have been working on for the last few months instead of the continuation of last century’s power sources.
Find Clean State’s jobs plan here: https://www.cleanstate.org.au/jobs-plan