It's a hot Sunday morning on Varanus Island off the Pilbara coast, and there's a sickly sweet scent in the air.
A Background Briefing investigation, however, can reveal that mistakes were made during Santos' response to the spill. On the water, samples were being collected and regular updates were being sent to multiple government departments. "Until Santos' articles came out denying responsibility for the dolphin deaths, I'm fairly confident that everybody on the island, supervisors included, would have believed what happened that day had something to do with the deaths," he says.
A dead dolphin floats on the water, and a tanker can be seen in the far background. This image was one of the ones Alex sent to senator David Pocock."It's not that easy to pick a dolphin up and get it onto a boat in the middle of an oil spill," he says.But he agrees the decision proved to be a mistake.In this episode of The Whistleblowers, when three dead dolphins turn up in an oil spill, the company denies they had anything to do with it.
That view is also supported by a December 2022 review of DMIRS by WA's Office of the Auditor General. "Sitting down in David's office I felt extremely out of place, pretty underdressed, a little bit overwhelmed," Alex recalls.It was unclear if it was technically possible to have a video covered by parliamentary privilege.To have Alex's statement and the images covered by privilege, he needed to convince other senators to let him table the documents at a Senate estimates hearing.
Nearly a year after the oil spill, Alex's testimony, eight pictures, and two videos of the accident had finally been put on the public record.In the wake of the estimates hearing, international media picked up the story.