Twiggy (13 page)

Each week, Bowler experienced what he referred to as the inevitable “FMG Friday crisis”, involving a
problem that Forrest needed addressed by Monday. If it wasn’t fixed, Bowler conceded, there would be “hell to pay”. When he appeared before the CCC to answer questions about his close links to Burke and Grill, Bowler made no apologies for cutting a few corners in pushing through Fortescue’s approvals. “This was a multibillion-dollar project that has – under my guidance and help, along with other
ministers – been driven quicker than anyone could imagine,” he said. “Andrew Forrest drove it, pushed everyone, pushed his staff, and sometimes we helped him along as quick as we could. I don’t see anything wrong with that. That is my job as minister, to help people, and if I can cut a corner – maybe it’s my attitude to do so, that’s my natural instinct, and it might get me into trouble sometimes.”

Bowler cut as many corners as he could for Forrest, but by the middle of 2006 there was still one crucial approval that Fortescue needed to get its project started. The company wanted to build its railway line to Port Hedland through a 2500-square-kilometre patch of land that was shielded from development under the Aboriginal Heritage Act. This was a potentially major obstacle for Fortescue
because the region, known as Woodstock Abydos, had been given the highest level of protection available under state law. It contained some of the oldest and richest indigenous rock engravings in the world, as well as many Aboriginal ceremonial sites, artefacts, stone arrangements and rock shelters.

Western Australia has a woeful record in protecting the internationally renowned Aboriginal
rock engravings of the Pilbara. In the 1980s, Woodside Petroleum was allowed to destroy or relocate thousands of rocks on the Burrup Peninsula to make way for its huge North West Shelf gas project. To this day, many of the 30,000-year-old pieces of rock art that were cleared remain stacked behind a cyclone fence. The artefacts dumped there are thought to be twice as old as the Pyramids or Stonehenge.
The rocks that were not removed are subject to deterioration, theft and vandalism, leading the New York-based World Monuments Fund to declare the Burrup rock art one of the 100 most endangered heritage sites in the world.

At Woodstock Abydos, which lies about 200 kilometres inland from the Burrup Peninsula, BHP had already been granted special approval to build its railway to Port Hedland.
This and other approvals prompted the federal environment department to sound the alarm in 2011 over the intrusion of industry into the area. “The Woodstock Abydos experience is perhaps one of the most striking examples of development incrementally disturbing an area of recognised outstanding heritage significance,” the department found.

There are many sites very close to rail tracks
and maintenance roads, so dust accumulation on rock art poses an ongoing, serious threat. Sites suffer from neglect, poor fencing and lack of protective measures. There is no program of monitoring of the sites or individual images, and there have been reports that additional rail corridors are planned in the years ahead. Woodstock Abydos shows that even the highest form of protection available
for Aboriginal heritage sites under Western Australian law may not be a guarantee of protection, and that individual approvals can have a serious cumulative adverse effect.

In early 2006, Fortescue asked the indigenous affairs minister, Sheila McHale, to excise a corridor of land from the Woodstock Abydos protected area measuring about 200 metres wide and fifty-six kilometres long.
But McHale – who was not as helpful as her cabinet colleague John Bowler – sat on the application for months without making a decision.

Brian Burke phoned Bowler, the resources minister, and asked him to tell McHale that her indecision was holding up Fortescue’s entire project. But McHale said she was planning to reject the application because, as Bowler reported back to Grill, she believed
allowing the railway would set an “unhealthy precedent”. As McHale later told the CCC, she also felt uncomfortable that Bowler was pushing her to make a decision at the behest of Burke and Grill. She’d probably have felt even more uneasy if she’d known Bowler was relaying most of their confidential discussions straight back to the lobbyists.

McHale referred Fortescue’s application to the
state’s Aboriginal Cultural Material Committee, an advisory body that evaluates the importance of indigenous sites and makes recommendations to the government. On 7 June, the committee recommended to McHale that she should reject Fortescue’s application. This was a huge blow for Forrest. Making matters worse, a group of Aboriginal custodians, led by renowned author Sally Morgan, had been made aware
of Fortescue’s plan to build through Woodstock Abydos and had been campaigning against it.

Fortescue decided to crank up the pressure on the government to ignore the ACMC’s recommendation. Julian Tapp, as head of government affairs, sent Bowler an email on 16 June saying the company needed a decision urgently because it was running the risk of being unable to obtain financing for the project.
“The project will be killed by indecision – we need a decision now,” Tapp wrote.

Nobody seems to have queried why Fortescue could not have simply spent a few extra million dollars to divert its railway line around the protected area. Forrest would later claim this to have been virtually impossible. “We’d have had to go around [Woodstock Abydos], which would have been another set of applications,
put the project back two years and we’d have gone broke,” he said.

Faced with this apparent crisis, Forrest decided to take matters into his own hands. In a meeting with McHale on 7 July, he used all his persuasive powers to try to convince her to allow the railway. Forrest promised McHale that Fortescue would use non-explosive blasting techniques in its excavation work that would not damage
the ancient engravings nearby. “I said, ‘Minister, each time they go to blast, I will personally stand in front of the carvings so if I happen to be wrong, I will get hit and not the carving. Do we have a deal?’ And she said, ‘If you can commit to that, we have a deal.’”

Significantly, McHale appears to have agreed to meet Forrest only after the intervention of the premier, Alan Carpenter.
Evidence to the CCC showed Bowler had personally raised the issue of Fortescue’s delay with Carpenter. Later, in a secretly recorded phone conversation, Grill said Bowler had been responsible “for getting Alan to put a bit of pressure on Sheila to come up with the right sort of answer”.

It’s not known whether Forrest ever fulfilled his promise to act as a human shield for the rock art during
the railway construction. But the pledge must surely have helped his argument. Three days later, McHale approved Fortescue’s application. The government’s respected planning minister, Alannah MacTiernan, then signed off on the final route for the railway. When Fortescue’s first train eventually ran down the track in 2008, it was called the “Alannah MacTiernan Express” and Forrest stood on the
cowcatcher waving the Australian flag.

On 10 July, the same day as McHale’s critical decision, Grill rang Forrest to discuss their successful lobbying efforts. The conversation was being covertly recorded by CCC investigators. The recording shows Forrest was concerned Grill should not “leak” McHale’s yet-to-be-announced decision and that he viewed himself as a person who “loves” Aboriginal
rock art.

Forrest: Hello.

Grill: Oh, Andrew, Julian Grill. How are you?

Forrest: G’day, mate, how are you?

Grill: Yeah, good, I heard from inside the Department of Indigenous Affairs that Sheila’s virtually reached agreement with you in respect to the basic elements of the rail route on Friday. I just wanted to find out whether that was correct, as to whether we needed
to take any further action, just what the score was.

Forrest: No, look I hope not, Julian, hope that we can just go very quietly now, let the government announce it when they’re ready. We really got to make sure, Julian, it does not leak, ’cause Sheila’s petrified about that. What she did is put us through a very, very fine-mesh sieve, which … suits me fine as a West Australian who loves
rock art, we’ve been able to guarantee and enshrine the safety and protection of every single carving … and still not hassle the railway line particularly.

Grill: Oh, that’s good. It’s just that it seemed to me from the description I was getting that you might have to deviate it somewhat but …

Forrest: No. What was given away was large chunks of the 200-metre corridor. And I’m comfortable
with that.

Grill: Alright, then, so we’ll leave it on that basis, then?

Forrest: Yeah, I think so. Just make sure
,
mate
,
no one leaks the fucking thing, please.

Grill: Yeah, sure. And you know, as far as I’m aware, the only person that’s been informed is myself. I am not aware of anybody else. Of course there’ll be other people within government, you know that, don’t you?

Forrest: Other people within government but Sheila is … I think it is a very brave decision by her. She’s taken a very long time to reach it and strung this out to a point where, you know, I had decided the project will break. It can’t stretch … you know projects, they usually just stretch and stretch. We will actually go under … and she considered it all.

Grill: Oh, you’re very persuasive
too.

Forrest: Well, the facts really helped.

As a result of its investigation, the CCC found Bowler had taken advantage of his public office by passing on confidential information to Burke and Grill that he gained from his discussions with McHale and Carpenter. But it also found there was no evidence that Bowler’s actions constituted misconduct. By the time of the CCC’s finding
on this issue in 2009, however, Bowler had long resigned as a minister over his close links to the lobbyists and Forrest had greatly benefited from the Burke–Grill connection by winning all his approvals and building the whole project.

As soon as the CCC hearings into Burke and Grill began in late 2006, Forrest ran as fast as he could from the pair. He told journalists that Fortescue had
engaged Burke and Grill only to train Julian Tapp, who was unfamiliar at the time with the state bureaucracy. “As far as any lobbying goes, they don’t do that for us,” Forrest said. “When we need to speak to a minister or a member of the bureaucracy, we do that.” He repeated this claim to the
Australian Financial Review
a few months later. “We did retain Burke and Grill to show our new government
relations manager the ropes, and they did that effectively. But we did not ever use them in our approaches to government,” he said.

Forrest was either mistaken in making these statements, or else he was deliberately telling untruths. Perhaps his comments showed how desperate he was to distance himself from the stench of corruption that had suddenly enveloped Burke, Grill and their mates
in the state government. As evidence given at the CCC would show, Burke and Grill did have extensive contact with John Bowler and senior public servants on behalf of Fortescue. Grill also now confirms he had direct contact with McHale in relation to the Fortescue rail application. Burke and Grill had also lobbied Labor MPs and senior bureaucrats to push Fortescue’s state agreements through parliament
during 2004 and 2005 – a point Forrest must have temporarily forgotten when journalists quizzed him about how well he knew the pair.

As soon as the media storm erupted over Burke and Grill in 2007, Forrest ceased all contact with them. These days, the pair are still bitter at the way their contract was ripped up. “Most clients took the time to express gratitude for the work we’d done, and
explained they could no longer use us, which was fair enough in the circumstances,” Grill says. “Forrest just cut us off.” Grill’s wife, Lesley, sent bills to Fortescue seeking payment for the $10,000 owing for the previous month’s work. She followed up with emails but never received a reply.

Within weeks, Brian Burke’s name had also infected federal politics as John Howard’s Liberal government
attempted to drag the Opposition leader, Kevin Rudd, into the controversy. Rudd had been the VIP guest at a Perth dinner Burke had organised in 2005 to introduce him, as Labor’s foreign affairs spokesman, to Burke’s best clients. Forrest sat alongside Rudd at the dinner, which was held in the private dining room at Perugino restaurant in West Perth. At the height of the Burke paranoia, federal
treasurer Peter Costello unwittingly insulted Forrest, and plenty of other Perth business leaders, by gleefully telling parliament: “Anyone who deals with Brian Burke is morally and politically compromised!” But Costello’s own party was soon dragged into the mess when WA Liberal senator Ian Campbell, the federal minister for human services, was forced to resign after admitting he once chatted
to Burke for twenty minutes.

Fast-forward six years and Brian Burke is reclining in a chair in Julian Grill’s plush apartment, which overlooks the city they once dominated. The pair have agreed to discuss their work for Forrest – one of their best clients – but Burke seems especially keen to rehabilitate his name. He says his lobbying business has been dead ever since the CCC began examining
his lobbying efforts for Fortescue and scores of other Perth companies. The investigation, he claims, was purely a witch-hunt that was designed to destroy him, but that only produced a string of failed prosecutions.

Like others, Burke believes BHP’s failed attempt to cut Forrest down became the catalyst for his success. “BHP made a fundamental mistake by wrongly assessing the character of
Andrew Forrest,” he says. “BHP did everything they could to stop him; they brought every bit of their firepower to bear. They basically created him. If they had gone easy on him, he wouldn’t have fought back so hard.”

Reflecting on his work with Forrest, Burke says he soon overcame his initial scepticism and came to realise that Forrest was a freak – even better than the deal-makers he knew
well in the 1980s, including Alan Bond and Robert Holmes à Court. “I don’t think anyone else but Twiggy Forrest could have gotten that company off the ground,” says Burke. “I’ve met a lot of entrepreneurs but Forrest was the best I ever saw. He was the best salesperson, the best driver, the best demander. He is the best at exuberance I’ve ever seen. He got people to do things they thought they
could never do. He would treat people in ways that were not the best, but maybe that’s an ingredient of his success. He’s unique – but that doesn’t make him likeable.”