Leaked documents reveal confidential Woodside deal with traditional owners

Woodside's traditional owner partners of almost 30 years have publicly opposed the company's Browse expansion.

It comes amid stalled renegotiations over a confidential 1998 land access deal.

Woodside says it accepts standards have changed, but rejects claims that elders were pressured into signing.

Traditional owners say Woodside's proposed $50 billion expansion into the Browse Basin cannot go ahead while a confidential mining agreement over its most valuable asset remains "unfit for purpose".

They have broken their silence in a push to modernise the 1998 land access deal that ushered in the North West Shelf joint venture, more than 1,530 kilometres north of Perth.

The agreement for Australia's biggest oil and gas project was written more than a decade after scores of sacred Indigenous sites, some of which were thought to date back 50,000 years, had been demolished by its construction.

Speaking publicly for the first time, senior present and former members of Ngarluma-Yindjibarndi Foundation Limited (NYFL) decried the document's signing and claimed it pressured elders who could not read or write

"Ngurra (country) is the main thing for our people: to have our country, not to be destroyed, not to be touched or damaged," elder and NYFL director Ricky Smith said.

Woodside is seeking to shore up gas production at the facilities by tapping the Browse Basin off the Kimberley coast and pumping the resource to its Karratha Gas Plant via a 900km pipeline.

The ABC understands NYFL tabled a new agreement at a meeting with Woodside executives last November, calling for $30 million a year on the assumption currently approved gas fields will deplete within the next 10.

Woodside countered the $300 million package in May with an offer of $20 million cash for the same period, on top of the terms agreed upon in 1998.

The company would also transfer NYFL 20 homes over 10 years and $400,000 annually to manage the properties.

NYFL chief executive Sean Paul Stephens said the organisation had formally asked government not to approve Woodside's bid for Browse while talks were at an impasse.

Woodside said it was "proud" of its long-standing relationship with NYFL but acknowledged the negotiations.

"The North West Shelf Project recognises that expectations and standards for agreement making with Aboriginal communities have evolved significantly since 1998 and is working with NYFL to modernise the arrangements," a spokesperson said.

The near-200-page agreement followed a native claim lodged by the Ngarluma and Yindjibarndi people for the Pilbara region's Burrup Peninsula in the early 1990s.

The two language groups are among five with cultural ties to the peninsula, a landscape scarred by colonial violence and traditionally known as Murujuga.

The deal, viewed by the ABC, included a lump sum of $500,000 "as compensation for deprivation of any possession of land or waters".

These funds were used to establish NYFL and released the gas joint venturers of liability for damaging the area's dense collection of Aboriginal rock art.

NYFL estimates 1,700 engravings were moved and thousands more destroyed to build the North West Shelf's onshore processing facilities.

By its calculation, the $500,000 compensation alone equates to about $50 to $100 per cultural site affected.

The agreement also set out strict confidentiality and no-challenge clauses that former NYFL chairperson Clinton Walker says have stifled people from standing up for country.

"We were forced with gag clauses … we couldn't speak up for what we wanted," Mr Walker said.

Another $2.5 million was put aside by the deal for the Roebourne Cultural Centre, along with "goodwill" annual donations of $1.25 million to NYFL, partly indexed to inflation.

In 2019, Woodside said it updated some conditions after NYFL declared insolvency, increasing its community investment across a complex suite of programs.

NYFL correspondence obtained by the ABC said Woodside currently provided the foundation about $1.7 million each year, unlike the value-based royalties paid by other Pilbara mining companies.

In October, Woodside posted a year-to-date operating revenue of $17 billion.

A 2023 study by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development found certain streets of Karratha and Roebourne, two towns close to the gas project, were among the most disadvantaged in Australia.

Mr Stephens says traditional owners bore the greatest costs of WA's resource boom and gained little material benefit.

"It is being locked out of the engine room that people describe the Pilbara to be," he said.

"The life expectancy for First Nations men in the Pilbara is almost 30 years less than a non-Indigenous person like myself, and that tells us that the system is broken."

In 2003, the WA government brokered the Burrup and Maitland Industrial Estates Agreement (BMIEA) for the land around the Karratha Gas Plant and not covered by the NYFL deal, extinguishing native title rights to clear the way for further industrial development.

A few months later, the Federal Court ruled Ngarluma and Yindjibarndi native title did not extend to the Burrup Peninsula.

It leaves NYFL's path to a new agreement unclear, with no legal right to the compensation provisions that have led other groups to win payouts for economic and spiritual loss.

Mr Walker, who was a teenager in 1998, said Woodside was eager to pre-empt the native title decision, and some elders did not understand what they were signing.

"They didn't really know a lot of English. They couldn't read," Mr Walker said.

A Woodside spokesperson said the agreement was fairly understood under the future act stipulations of the Native Title Act 1993, and all signatories received independent professional advice.

Ahead of a Commonwealth decision to extend the North West Shelf for 40 years, NYFL wrote to successive state and federal environment ministers in the hopes of securing support for a new deal.

When federal Environment Minister Murray Watt approved the extension in 2025, he did so with 48 conditions aimed at protecting the surviving Murujuga rock art, which received a UNESCO World Heritage listing shortly after.

He said he weighed these heritage risks against the project's social and economic benefits, but did not mandate a modern agreement with NYFL.

Woodside is now awaiting permission to breach Australia's largest undeveloped gas reserve in the Kimberley's Browse Basin.

The project is expected to cost upwards of $50 billion to develop and, according to Deloitte modelling, generate more than $141 billion in gross domestic product over a 31-year span.

NYFL says Browse must not be approved with the 1998 agreement unresolved.

Mr Smith said it was about ensuring a legacy for the generations to come.

"Make a good agreement with each other to benefit and help our family to get strong," he said.