In December 2021, 2,638 Indigenous residents of 64 villages along the Sepik River made a complaint to the OECD Australian National Contact Point for Responsible Business Conduct.

The complaint was lodged on behalf of the complainants by Project Sepik and Jubilee Australia Research Centre. The complaint was made in Australia against PanAust, the Australian company directing the Frieda River project.

The complaint was the first of its kind in Australia, arguing that PanAust had not secured the Free, Prior and Informed Consent of the people of the Sepik for its Frieda River project.

The complaint also alleged that PanAust had breached multiple provisions of the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises, a set of international guidelines that state the responsibilities of companies operating across multiple countries.

In October 2023, a Final Statement was handed down by the Independent Examiner, who found that:

‘It is apparent that the proposed project entails significant impacts on Indigenous groups, such that those groups’ free, prior, informed consent (FPIC) will be necessary for the enterprise to proceed with the project… FPIC will be needed from those groups, which could include some of the communities identified by the notifiers, and FPIC is not simply evidenced or achieved by a government’s grant of all necessary permits or licences…

The enterprise acknowledges it will need to obtain FPIC from some communities, because of the expected impacts, for the project to proceed…’

Importantly, the Independent Examiner recommended that:

The enterprise’s future stakeholder engagement in relation to the project should:

a) include the notifiers [Project Sepik and Jubilee Australia Research Centre];

b) consider the views from the Haus Tambaran they represent;

c) disseminate the dam break analysis; and

d) address the full lifetime of the dam and any facilities which are expected to continue even after any mine has finished.

Despite being recommended in 2023, it was not until 2025 that PanAust published a ‘dam break analysis’ – a key document that modelled what would happen if the project’s dam catastrophically collapsed.

Despite being recommended by the AusNCP to do so, PanAust have continued to fail to consider the views of the Haus Tambaran and the voice of the Supreme Sukundimi Declaration.

PanAust has also failed to address how the tailings dam and hydroelectric facility will be managed safely, forever, after PanAust has left the mine, and how this heavy responsibility will not be passed on to the people of Papua New Guinea to pay for.

PanAust have also failed to properly explain to communities how the open pit mine site will be rehabilitated and safely managed, or to properly address communities’ concerns about contamination to the Sepik River – their source of life, livelihood and spiritual wellbeing.

The Sepik complaint was powerful as it was the first of its kind in Australia, and has broken new ground for complainants across the world who are seeking to hold multinational corporations to account.

The full documents regarding the complaint can be seen on the AusNCP’s website, at Complaint 29.