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Last week, Gerard Mazza was wrongfully arrested while getting out of bed – proof of Woodside’s power in WA and the farce of policing climate activism. By Gerard Mazza.
Climate activist arrested over a hat
Early on Wednesday, July 2, my phone rang. It was a Western Australian police officer informing me he was outside my house and about to arrest me. I was in bed at the time and as I scrambled to get dressed, he and his partner made their way inside.
I was being accused of breaching a restraining order taken out against me by Meg O’Neill, chief executive of fossil fuel giant Woodside Energy. O’Neill had taken out the restraining order in 2023 after I’d been caught outside her house by counterterror police, who’d been lying in wait to thwart a planned nonviolent protest at her front gate.
The restraining order, which expires next month, not only keeps me away from O’Neill but also 100 metres away from any property owned by Woodside, including the company’s North West Shelf gas export facility and other components of the Burrup Hub megaproject in Western Australia’s Pilbara region.
The officer pulled out his phone and showed me a grainy CCTV still of a man he said was me. The figure wore a wide-brimmed hat, like mine, and the blue jeans could be my Levi’s, but I didn’t recognise the shirt. The police seized my phone, took photos of my belongings and rifled through my wardrobe. They couldn’t find a match for the shirt.
Still, they handcuffed me in my bedroom as my girlfriend stood next to me drying her hair. I was bundled out to a waiting car and taking me to Fremantle Police Station where I was piled into a holding cell. I sat for hours staring at the crusted blood on the floor, trying to work it all out.
The CCTV still they had shown me was clearly from Murujuga, where Woodside operate in the Pilbara. The red rocks in the background were unmistakable. I’d spent plenty of time at Murujuga in recent months, sometimes visiting Country with the Traditional Custodians of the area, sometimes capturing content intended to expose the deadly emissions Woodside is spewing into the air at their North West Shelf gas processing plant. The blurry figure in the image kind of looked like me, but I’d always been wary, verging on paranoid, about not getting within 100 metres of Woodside infrastructure. Plus, that wasn’t my shirt.
When I was finally led into a stuffy interview room, I was presented with flight records that showed I’d been in the Pilbara in late May, at the same time I was accused of breaching my restraining order by getting too close to Woodside’s facilities.
However, when I was shown more CCTV stills, it became obvious that this was a case of mistaken identity. More than that, I recognised the man in the photos. It was Tim.
Tim Oliver is a WA Greens staffer and was seen standing with three more people I recognised – Murujuga custodian Raelene Cooper and WA Greens parliamentarians Sophie McNeill and Jess Beckerling. Turns out they had made a Pilbara trip about the same time as me.
This new angle showed Tim wore a feather in his hat, something I could never pull off. I explained the mix-up to the police and suggested they give Tim a call. A glance between them revealed they knew their case was falling apart.
Before they called Tim, they presented me with one more piece of evidence. “If that’s not you, how do you explain this?”
It was a witness statement from a Woodside security guard, saying he’d pulled up a group of travellers on the Burrup and immediately recognised one of them as me.
“I don’t know,” I told them.
What I should have said was this: I can explain this statement, and this whole situation, as an attempt by Woodside to weaponise the restraining order system, designed to protect vulnerable people, in order to shield their operations from scrutiny. Woodside is wasting police time and resources by making false accusations against me. They have captured the state’s politics and laws and use police as their private army.
Tim soon arrived at the police station wearing the blue shirt the police couldn’t find in my washing pile. He promptly identified himself and, because there were no restrictions on his movement, he was not guilty of any breaches. The police returned my phone and let me go.
The facility I had been in the Pilbara filming, from more than 100 metres away, was Woodside Energy’s North West Shelf gas processing plant, which has just been given provisional approval by Environment Minister Murray Watt to operate until 2070.
The facility is one of the most polluting fossil fuel proposals in Australian history. Scientific research shows its industrial emissions are a risk to the sacred, 40,000-year-old Murujuga rock art.
This week in Paris, the UNESCO World Heritage committee convened to decide on an application for World Heritage listing of the Murujuga Cultural Landscape. The area clearly deserves to be listed and protected, but an evaluation report from UNESCO’s advisory body recommended the application be returned to the Australian government to address concerns about emissions from Woodside’s North West Shelf extension and other industrial facilities.
Despite Minister Watt blaming environmentalists for jeopardising the World Heritage nomination, if the application is knocked back the blame will lie with the federal government for giving Woodside permission to degrade the Murujuga rock art for decades to come.
The public anger against Woodside is growing and the company appears increasingly obsessed with stifling scrutiny of their climate- and culture-wrecking gas export plans.
When I’ve taken nonviolent direct action in response to the existential threat of the climate crisis I’ve been told that, while my intentions are good, I ought to go about things the “right way”. Every time there’s a disruptive protest, Woodside condemns it, while telling the media it “fully supports respectful debate, including in relation to complex challenges like climate change”. In reality, Woodside will go to extraordinary lengths to shut down any criticism of their operations.
At the company’s annual general meeting this year, O’Neill cut off questions about climate and environmental concerns from shareholders and proxies, including Professor Fiona Stanley.
About the time of the North West Shelf provisional approval, O’Neill deflected the climate concerns of “ideological” young people, blaming the climate crisis on them ordering from online retailers Shein and Temu.
To match Woodside’s current emissions, every one of the 3.3 million young people in Australia would have to buy 4888 Temu T-shirts every year, according to campaign group Market Forces.
These are not signs of a company willing to engage in good-faith debate.
The weekend before I was arrested, under the influence of a pharmaceutical weed gummy, I’d stared at myself in the bathroom mirror and thought, “You better be careful; you’ve got some powerful enemies.”
I immediately chalked it up to paranoia, but perhaps it was a premonition.
As an anti-Woodside campaigner in Western Australia, it can be hard to know what degree of suspicion is rational. Police have raided my home and photographed me as I drank coffee in a cafe. I’ve had conversations with individuals I’m certain were undercover police trying to infiltrate activist groups.
I have a friend who had a gun pulled on him by the cops, and a former housemate who had the SD card of her camera seized by police as she undertook journalistic work on the Burrup.
Exposed to events such as these, you begin to ask yourself questions. Is that police car following me? Are my phone calls being intercepted? Is that friendly person I met at that climate rally really concerned for their children’s future or are they a cop in disguise telling me what they think I want to hear? Just how long and detailed is Woodside’s file on me?
Last month, I was fined $10,000 by the WA District Court for attempting to bring a stink bomb into Woodside’s 2023 AGM. It was a juvenile stunt, a product of desperation to do something to avert the damage fossil fuel expansion will cause to young people and future generations.
After the two-year court process was resolved, I was ready to move on and campaign within the bounds of the law. It turns out, however, you can be chucked in a police cell for being a tall white guy in an Akubra and sunnies in the Pilbara.
All of my visits to Murujuga have been born of an urge to protect and preserve. If only the same could be said of Woodside, which operates on that sacred country for the sole purpose of extracting profits, regardless of the grave costs others must pay.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on July 12, 2025 as "The wrong hat".
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