Labor leader Mark McGowan has announced plans to ban fracking in the South West of WA if his party wins the State election in March next year. 

So the State of Victoria has just banned fracking and other forms of onshore unconventional gas extraction [1].

Oh wow. How great is that? Answer: very, very great indeed. I’m stoked. If you care about food and farming, safe water supplies, human physical and mental health, the environment, climate change, this whole beautiful world of ours…. you’ll be stoked too.

Seriously, this is great. Well done to the farmers, the wine-makers, the unions and faith groups, the environmentalists and business owners, academics, politicians, traditional owners and everyone who’s worked so hard for a frack free future in Victoria.

It’s people power that’s delivered the ban in Victoria, just as it made the fight against the fracking such a key determinative issue in the Northern Territory election.

NT Labor stomped home on a commitment to a moratorium on fracking in the territory, ahead of a potential ban there too. There were other factors too for sure, but Adam Giles’s outgoing CLP party paid heavily for its unremitting support for the gas industry [2].

Yep, it’s people power, backed up by a growing body of evidence, especially from the US where fracking’s been going on longer, that shows the real impacts this dangerous and accident prone industry has on health, water quality and the environment.

Just last week health researchers in Pennsylvania, US, released further evidence of a link between shale gas fracking and human health impacts, including birth defects, asthma and migraines [3]. Shale fracking in Pennsylvania is similar to what we could see across much of WA. 

So now it’s all eyes on WA – just six months to go to the March 2017 State Election.