Anthony Albanese under pressure from to ditch Woodside project in exchange for minority Labor government

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is set to face demands from the Greens and the teals to ditch Woodside’s North West Shelf project extension in exchange for supporting a minority Labor government.

The Australian reported that data was sent to Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek regarding the impact on ancient petroglyphs in the area which could be enough to trigger the government to cancel the project.

Both the Greens and the teals are set to demand an end to the project, and in turn support a minority government.

It comes as a junior federal minister hit back at Roger Cook and Reece Whitby’s insults slung during a fight over the handling of paperwork for the $30b project, defending the Commonwealth bureaucrats “who are doing their best for the country”.

The Federal department pushed back by a month its deadline to decide whether the project’s lifetime should be extended to 2070.

The WA department had already taken more than six years until it gave approval in December.

The Federal department then needed updated information from WA for its own process, but didn’t receive this until February 5, after Ms Plibersek took the unusual step of personally writing to request it.

“I suspect that there’s a nerdy little bureaucrat in an agency in Canberra somewhere who’s trying to cover his butt, that’s my suspicion,” Mr Whitby said last week of this explanation.

Assistant Minister Tim Ayres told a Senate estimates hearing on Monday night he didn’t agree with that at all.

“(I’m) not very impressed with people applying the sort of pejorative language like that to the work of very fine qualified Australians who are doing their best for the country,” he said.

Senator Ayres also extended the attack to the Coalition, which has pledged to sack some 36,000 public servants if it wins the election, although is yet to detail where the cuts would fall.

“We’ve increased the size of the department so that applications get done more speedily and that the environmental and other development questions are considered properly,” he told Liberal senator Jonno Duniam.

Senator Duniam asked whether he would also characterise Mr Cook’s comment that he was “angry that . . . some boffin over in Canberra said we didn’t get the paperwork in time” as pejorative language.

Senator Ayres — no doubt conscious the Premier is in election mode — replied that he was “a terrific bloke” who was entitled to make his own observations.

“We, as a government, really enjoy working with the Western Australian Government. They’re a very fine State government doing a very fine job,” Senator Ayres said.

Department officials also revealed that the Conservation Council of WA had filed a separate application to reconsider the Woodside approval.

“We’re just turning our mind to that now to see if that’s substantive in nature,” environmental approvals division head Bruce Edwards said.

He said the slow documentation from the WA department was the latest version of a rock art study, which ran to several hundred pages, and that the Commonwealth also still needed to seek legal advice.

Deputy secretary Rachel Parry said Commonwealth officials had been engaged in an “process . . . with our WA colleagues since December, trying to get access to the information” so the decision was based on the latest data.

The department is yet to hand a decision brief to Ms Plibersek.