At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, I discovered the show RuPaul’s Drag Race. Watching on my phone screen, between my shifts as a casual dairy farm hand, I distracted myself from the crisis with the joyous spectacle of drag. But a controversy erupted midway through my binge, shocking me out of my pandemic-proof cocoon of dirty clothes and noodle cups, when the show’s host, RuPaul Charles, made a surprising announcement.

Fracking is a process for extracting oil and natural gas from under the earth by pumping huge amounts of high-pressure water, sand and chemicals into shale rock beds deep beneath the ground, cracking open tiny fissures in the rock and enabling the gas to seep out. It pumps methane into the atmosphere, makes earthquakes more likely and can even make your tapwater flammable. About three dozen oil and gas wells are being drilled across RuPaul’s 60,000 acre property in Wyoming. Meanwhile, the show has hosted a climate-change-themed design challenge, and featured guest judge Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whose bill to eliminate fracking by 2025 failed to pass Congress this year.

So it’s with some guilt that I continue to sweeten my lunch breaks with episode after episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race. But it’s not just RuPaul who sees money in fracking. In fact, the federal government is earmarking vast swathes of land for fracking projects right here in Australia, proposing to make it a central part of our recovery from the economic chaos of the pandemic. It’s no surprise that Labor and the Coalition are paving the way for the big gas companies that sponsor them. If even RuPaul can’t resist the temptation to frack, it’s surely far too much to expect from an Australian politician.

‘No-one is opposed to new gas.’

Anthony Albanese spoke these words at the federal budget announcement in September. The budget allocated fifty million dollars to map out feasibility plans for gas reserves across the country, including the Burrup gas hub in the Pilbara, the Narrabri gasfields of New South Wales and the North Territory’s Beetaloo Basin. Both Morrison and Albanese have endorsed plans to massively expand fracking in Australia, steering the country even further away from the Paris climate targets and placing the gas industry firmly in the driver’s seat of the national energy market.

The National COVID-19 Commission, assembled to advise the government on the nation’s economic recovery, is largely populated by the executives of energy companies. It’s led by Neville Power, the former CEO of Fortescue Minerals and a stakeholder in multiple gas companies, and includes people like Catherine Tanna, the former chair of British Gas and QGC (Queensland Coal and Gas). In 2010, Tanna signed off on some of Australia’s biggest coal seam gas fracking projects, spanning across 30,000 kilometres of Queensland.

Advisors to the commission include Andrew Liveris, director of oil giant Saudi Aramco and the deputy chair of Worley, which is the world's biggest oil and gas engineering firm. Liveris has long advocated for gas as the “silver bullet” to Australia’s energy woes. He’s joined by James Fazzino, the director of the Australian Pipelines Association, who in 2018 said at a conference that Australia should ‘frack like the Americans.’

A final addition is Innex Willox, the CEO of AiGroup, which includes coal and gas company AGL Energy. Willox has a long history of maneuvering to undermine climate legislation, as well as lobbying against moratoria on fracking. As long as people like this are running the COVID-19 Commission, it’s clear that any prospect of a green recovery from the COVID crisis is a pipe dream. By stacking the Commission with gas executives, the federal government is forcing us down the road towards an unsustainable fossil-fuel economy.

The biggest climate bomb on the government’s list is the Burrup Hub project, which aims to extract gas from the seafloor off the coast of WA. In a controversial move, gas giant Woodside Energy has attempted to game the environmental-review process by splitting the project up into seven separate proposals. You don’t have to be fooled by this, however. If you add up the estimates from the seven environmental reports, you discover the Burrup Hub would emit around 80 million tonnes of greenhouse gas per year, making it Australia’s largest single source of atmospheric pollution.

In the first phase of the Burrup project, fifty gas wells are set to be drilled in areas of ocean near the precious atolls of Scott Reef and Seringapatam. Acidic emissions from gas processing is already eating away at the Indigenous carvings of the Murujuga rock art site, which includes over fifty thousand years’ worth of Aboriginal art, etched into the stone near Woodside’s LNG processing facility - including what may be the oldest known image of a human face, which has been nominated for World Heritage protection.

Meanwhile, in New South Wales, the gas industry has its sights set on the northern town of Narrabri. Santos plans to conduct fracking across 95,000 hectares around the town, including parts of the state-owned Pilliga forest. This is the biggest development project in the history of the state’s planning system, more than four times the size of any previous coal seam gas project in NSW. Federal and state authorities have approved the project, though the consultation process registered record-breaking amounts of public opposition.

Fracking companies are even advancing into the catchment of Lake Eyre, or Kati Thanda, Australia’s largest salt lake, a gleaming eye caught in the crosshairs of state borders. The lake sits in the Simpson desert, fed by a network of rivers and creeks that crosses four states - including the Channel Country of western Queensland, currently under threat from fracking expansion. Legislative protections for the state’s “wild rivers” were scrapped under Campbell Newman. The Palaszczuk government has so far failed to keep its promises to reinstate them.

Queensland recently commissioned an independent report into the potential impacts of fracking in the Kati Thanda basin, appointing a panel of scientists to make recommendations for the industry. But the findings of the panel, which recommended a total fracking ban, were swept under the rug and deliberately hidden from the public. In April 2020, the Queensland government announced that 7,000 square kilometres of land in the Channel Country will be released for coal and gas exploration. The state has waived rent on land used for exploration until September 2020, and frozen fees for explorers until July 2021—essentially giving land licenses away to gas companies for free.

Around six trillion cubic feet of natural gas have been found in the Northern Territory’s Beetaloo Basin, where Origin, Santos and Pangaea intend to sink more than 1,200 wells in the next 25 years. They’re projected to extract more than 2.5 billion litres of groundwater a year, with unpredictable impacts on the aquifers that 90% of Territorians rely on for their drinking water. A fracking ban in the NT was lifted by the state’s Labor government in 2017, after Morrison, then federal treasurer, threatened to withhold GST payments from the state unless they committed to gas development.

“What they’re saying,” said state treasurer Nicole Manison, “is that if you don’t frack, then you don’t get the services that people get access to in Sydney, in Melbourne, in Queensland.” She described Morrison’s move as “disgraceful,” and said that “Territorians should not be held to ransom”, but that hasn’t prevented the project from going ahead.

In general, the states don’t quite share the federal government’s enthusiasm about gas. Fracking is currently banned in Victoria, although the drilling of conventional gas wells was made legal in early 2020. NSW energy minister Matt Kean has come to blows with his federal counterpart over the issue, defending his government’s investment in renewable energy. But with millions of dollars in donations from major gas companies flooding into parliament each year, fueling politicians on both sides of the aisle, the gas industry clearly retains the upper hand. By stacking the COVID-19 Commission, gaming environmental reviews, dodging public consultation, hiding scientific reports and leaning on state governments, they’ve demonstrated how far they’re willing to go to lock Australia into a doomed and destructive gas-fired recovery.

Across the country, a coalition of activists from the Lock the Gate Alliance, Seed Indigenous Youth Climate Network, Clean Slate and many more are standing up against fracking expansion. Coming up against a government which seems to think that a handful of unelected corporate executives should be able to decide Australia’s destiny, free from any democratic oversight, they’ve demonstrated they’re willing to take power into their own hands. The course of Australia’s pandemic recovery should be determined by its people, not by gas companies. These activist groups show us how we can begin to build a social movement that puts a halt to unconventional gas expansion, and steers our country towards a safer, more sustainable future.

Zowie Douglas-Kinghorn is a young writer and farm hand. Her work has recently appeared in Overland, Kill Your Darlings, Going Down Swinging, Rabbit Poetry, and others. In 2018 she won the Scribe nonfiction prize, and she was shortlisted for the 2020 Rachel Funari fiction prize. She is a non-fiction editor for Voiceworks magazine. She tweets @zowie_dk.

Art by Edwina Olwen.