Australia got its latest “ethics wake-up call” last week when Peter Plod, the copper on the beat outside the St George’s Terrace office of Woodside Petroleum in Perth, was heard to say “Hello, hello, hello, what have we ’ere then”.
What attracted Peter’s eye was the curious case of the Mauritanian oil minister and allegations of bribery.
The Slug has struggled to follow who allegedly paid what to whom in the case of a Mr Zeidane Ould H’Meida.
And that’s part of the problem.
No one really knows what happened, or if anything happened.
What is known is that the good name of a very successful petroleum company has just been dragged into the mud by a person, or persons unknown, as Peter Plod would say.
It is unlikely that any good will come of the investigation being launched by the police into Woodside. As with all such matters, especially one being fanned along by a Greens member of Parliament who, by definition, hates anything to do with the oil industry, reputations will be damaged whether or not a wrong has been committed.
The problem for the oil industry, as The Slug has pointed out on other occasions, is that it has become a bigger and fatter target than at any time in its history.
Sky-high oil prices are producing sky-high profits, and sky-high anger among the great unwashed forced to allocate more and more of their weekly budget to buying petrol.
The people, in a word, are angry. And when the people get angry the politicians are not far behind, looking for an explanation or a scapegoat, which can absolve them.
Demonising oil is the name of the game being played today and as much as the industry doesn’t want to hear this, part of the blame lies squarely at the feet of the people who run the industry.
For decades, forever probably, the oil industry has treated the public with contempt. It has virtually no concept of true public relations, dismisses anyone who doesn’t speak its jargon as an ignoramus, and has totally failed to explain how it works, and why.
Go to any oil conference around the world and you will find a small group of people talking to themselves.
There should almost be a sign on the front door saying “public not welcome” – in fact, there probably is.
Little wonder then that when the public gets hurt, as it is today, the politicians and their close associates in the anti-business lobby groups, come hunting for scalps, and if they can’t get a scalp, they’ll take a few reputations as second prize.
Woodside’s Mauritanian nightmare is effectively no different to that faced by ExxonMobil in Indonesia where some of its contractors are accused of mistreating locals, by Shell in Nigeria where Ken Saro-Wiwa died, or by BP in Texas after an oil refinery explosion.
Accidents happen. Employees do bad things. Executives stuff up.
There is nothing new in any of this, and most industries have procedures to handle what are essentially the dilemmas of morals and ethics – or simply the problems of being human.
For some people in the oil game, adding a moral dimension to business is a new experience. Very few of the engineers and accountants who run the industry have studied morality, or human behaviour.
They’ll soon wish they had because big oil is entering a unique period as the industry the world loves to hate the most.
This will be a time when hard facts become almost meaningless and when perceptions and images do the damage. It’s a time when the industry will wish it had reached out a lot earlier to opinion leaders in the media and in politics, because friends are going to be hard to find when the brown stuff really hits the fan.
Note: The views of Slugcatcher are not those of APPEA.
