The Northern Territory government has been accused of making a “blatant and shameless” attack on nature by planning to delete a legal requirement that water must be allocated to the environment. In what has been described as the latest in a series of attacks on the environment by the NT’s Country Liberal party, the Finocchiaro government plans to change water rules that govern how much ground and surface water industry can take. It comes as the government plans a major expansion of fracking, datacentres and agricultural development.
The Wilderness Society chief executive, Kirsty Howey, said the latest move was “extreme even for the NT CLP government”. She called on the federal environment minister, Murray Watt, to withhold commonwealth water funding if the bill passed. The Central Land Council, which represents Indigenous people in the southern half of the NT, said the territory government was trying to “covertly” remove the last remaining protections Territorians had in the use and management of water.
The council’s chief executive, Les Turner, said: “It is actively undermining community aspirations for improved and transparent water planning laws. This flies in the face of national trends and ignores the voices of Aboriginal people from across the NT.” Turner said it was “clearer than ever” that the federal government needed to strengthen its powers to intervene on projects that affected water and aquatic ecosystems. They are part of a larger package that would also make changes to marine pollution, heritage and mining legislation.
Other planned changes include removing a rule that total water use by industry remains below a limit set in each water allocation plan, and another that requires water resource management to comply with water allocation plans. Environment groups said the bill would also weaken the definition of “estimated sustainable yield”, which is the amount of water that may be taken or used from a water resource. Howey said the government risked trading the territory’s aquifers and rivers for “short-term gain and profiteering” by the gas, agriculture and tech industries.
They’re not even pretending any more that they’ve got an interest in protecting these places.” The NT environment minister, Joshua Burgoyne, denied the bill dismantled environmental safeguards. He said the territory’s “core framework” of environment-related laws – including those relating to environmental assessments and approvals, mining licences, pollution control, water allocation planning and heritage protection – remained. The bill before the NT parliament follows a raft of earlier changes that have dismantled environment and climate protections since the CLP won government.
They include scrapping the NT’s renewable energy target, abandoning a promise to implement an emissions reduction target of 43% by 2030, and creating a territory coordinator role within the bureaucracy with the power to override 32 territory laws to fast-track developments. Bree Ahrens, the executive director of the Environment Centre NT, said the proposal to rewrite water rules puts the needs of industry above nature. Ahrens called on the Albanese government to rule out handing federal assessment and decision-making powers under national nature laws to “an increasingly rogue NT government that is dismantling water safeguards”.
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