Coleman described Australia as being quite mature in terms of remaining exploration opportunities, with significant barriers to frontier exploration that needed to be addressed in order to entice oil companies to be more adventurous.

He suggested something similar to the UK's Promote licences, which allow geology and geoscience for two years before companies need to make a drill or drop decision.

"It is hard in Australia. The way the work program commitments are is that you bid for frontier exploration making very, very significant commitments when you don't know what you have in many instances," he said.

"We saw that with the Outer Canning program that we drilled last year."

Woodside bid on the Outer Canning blocks in 2012, and drilled three costly dusters last year: Hannover South-1 in WA-466-P, Steel Dragon-1 in WA-464-P and Anhalt-1 in WA-462-P.

"That was a big commitment from Woodside, but it was part of the Australian commitments that we had, and yet that that was a frontier basin," he said.

"If I go elsewhere in the world, and I look at what we are doing on the Atlantic Margins, and even Myanmar, the structure of those exploration blocks that we have farmed into or have been awarded, is such that we get a two year period up front to look at the block and run seismic and make decisions before we make that very big commitment to drill.

"I think there is going to be a very bid debate in Australia over the coming months, as to whether the current structure delivers for us in this particular pricing environment"

He pointed to the Skippy Rocks-1 and Stokes-1 dusters, drilled in February, as particularly salient reminders of issues with the system. They led to the contingent well at Big Brooks-1 within WA-473-P being scrapped.

Coleman said it was apparent early that the Beagle Sub-basin blocks were not as attractive as originally suspected.

"During post getting the blocks and during the assessment phase we formed a view that they had a low probability of success, and it wasn't a huge surprise that we got the result that we did, but it is one of those things that we don't know that until we have actually farmed in or secured the block," he said.

"As we look at where we spend our exploration dollars we can do it elsewhere and not have that kind of commitment.

Coleman said Woodside had now met all its commitments in the Beagle Sub-basin and was assessing the block's future, which could be bad news for BHP Billiton, which has identified the basin as one of its three big oil exploration focuses, with plans for drilling a number if wells in 2017 and 2018.

He said the current permit system was just another dent against Australia's attractiveness as an exploration destination, although he said Woodside would continue to be involved, particularly in the hunt for gas around its Pluto and North West Shelf LNG interests.

He said Woodside's strategy now was to move away from the wildcat frontier areas, which would be a major loss for Australia, with an increasing focus on areas where hydrocarbons have been proven, so the risks are more in trying to match hydrocarbons and reservoir.

The 30,000sq.km Beagle Sub-basin is adjacent to the Rowley Sub-Basin and the emerging Bedout Sub-basin Triassic oil play, and has fewer than two dozen well penetrations, with a single oil discovery, just five million barrels in the Calypso Formation defined by the Nebo-1 well.