The silence of Fortescue's Noel Pearson
The Indigenous leader now serves as a director of Fortescue, the only major mining company running roughshod over the native title rights of its traditional owners.
In lingering grief more than schadenfreude, Indigenous leader Noel Pearson seethed in The Weekend Australian on Saturday over Peter Dutton's defeat of the Voice referendum in October 2023. "The problem for the Liberal Party was the remaining 6.2 million Australians who voted for the Voice included many whom Dutton needed (last) Saturday," Pearson wrote. "Only his black brothers and sisters, and their children, know anything of the pain that now consumes Dutton".
Pearson was also scathing of Anthony Albanese and Labor for "run(ning) away fast from their association with the Voice and blackfellas… To me it was shameless…"[[Pearson was also in full flight on the subject of Jacinta Nampijinpa Price. "This election is her denouement as a one-trick pony," he wrote. "You can't just replay your greatest single hit and expect to have a political career of any substance". I must say, it is absolutely hilarious seeing the Liberal Party contemplate Nampijinpa Price as any kind of solution to its existential woe. The political stage has seen some outlandishly talentless people in my time but she just about takes the cake. Of course, fans of Jacinta already vote for the conservative parties (and get their politics from Sky News). They are galaxies apart from the 1.4 million voters who have deserted the Coalition since 2019. Yet the Liberals seem determined to repulse this former constituency; to disappear ever further up their own, and Gina Rinehart's, arseholes.]]
And he lamented "the blacks (being) banished to the wood heap once again, their rightful place in (this) country".
Pearson speaks abundant sense, and is peerless at showing us how indifferent we truly are to the plight of Aboriginal people. Anyone with a conscience would squirm when he's soaring through his long soliloquies.
And yet, in August, he accepted Andrew Forrest's invitation to join the board of Fortescue Metals Group, a position that affords him a consoling $250,000 stipend.
BHP and Rio Tinto both campaigned actively for the Voice and donated millions to the 'Yes' campaign. Fortescue did not. Twelve months before his appointment as a Fortescue director, Pearson joined a battalion of Forrest adherents schlepping an absurd distance to Fortescue's Solomon hub in the Pilbara for the miner's 20th birthday party.
Few of Twiggy's guests would've comprehended that Fortescue built the Solomon hub then proceeded to mine it for a dozen years – even to this day – without the permission of its Aboriginal traditional owners, the Yindjibarndi people. Of course, Pearson fully comprehended this.