GEOFF Cousins — Telstra director, former advertising whiz and one-time confidant of John Howard — has made plenty of powerful enemies in his colourful career.
Now he can add Woodside Petroleum’s heavyweight chairman, Michael Chaney, and its outspoken American chief executive, Don Voelte, to a list of famous foes that has included Rupert Murdoch, Kerry Packer and Malcolm Turnbull.
Cousins met Chaney and Voelte recently to tell them about his next big mission in life: to mastermind the campaign against Woodside’s planned $30 billion liquefied natural gas plant near the tourist town of Broome in Western Australia’s Kimberley region.
The former chief executive of advertising agency George Patterson is devising a strategy to pressure Woodside shareholders, joint-venture partners, financiers and gas customers to stay away from the Kimberley.
It’s a fight that places the pin-striped warrior firmly in the camp of Greens leader Bob Brown, activist group Get Up and other “progressive” types rather than the more traditionalist circles in which he has mixed for decades.
The 68-year-old Sydneysider – labelled “egotistical”, “erratic”, “tenacious” and “extremely smart” in equal measure by those who know him – says he came away from the Woodside meeting unimpressed with the men who run Australia’s biggest oil and gas company.
“I’ve got to say that when I met Michael Chaney and Don Voelte, there was a lot of corporate hubris, a lot of arrogance,” Cousins tells The Weekend Australian.
“They said you don’t know what you’re talking about and you’re not going to get anywhere – that sort of stuff.”
