Whose Territory?

Owen Gale

The current CLP government are the golden child of Abbott's conservative faction, and are pushing to make the Northern Territory a case study in placing the interests of big business above those of the people. This is demonstrated by their desperation to get a fracking industry into full swing with unconventional gas exploration licence applications over more than 90% of the area of the NT, including almost all the Aboriginal-owned land.

Abbott and Giles' northern food bowl is another fantasy they are pushing on us, with promises of massive food production out of some of the poorest soils in the country, and no consideration of environmental flows or the rights of Aboriginal communities to any kind of water allocation for their own use or possible future enterprise plans.

We have won the campaign against the nuclear waste dump at Muckaty, but like a macabre game of whack-a-mole it just keeps re-appearing in a new location. Will it be near Alice Springs or somewhere on the Tanami in its next incarnation? When will we get the message through to the federal government that nuclear waste must not be trucked all over the country, and putting it in a shed somewhere in the bush is not acceptable.

Darwin is now home to growing US Military facilities (Defence are desperate to state that they are not bases) which includes prefabricated housing for at least two thousand Marines at Robertson Barracks and unspecified plans for new facilities to support US aircraft operations out of RAAF Bases Darwin and Tindal. We already have a variety of US aircraft operating out of RAAF Darwin (which is literally in the centre of the metropolitan area of Darwin) including tilt-rotor Ospreys with their appalling safety issues, nuclear capable B52 bombers and the giant Super Stallion helicopters. Add to that a host of other aircraft visiting for exercises and we are becoming a significant part of the US military machine. The NT Greens are opposed to being structurally bound to US foreign policy like this. We want a peaceful independent future for the NT and Australia.

The NT government has been implementing a series of structurally, and actively racist policies against Aboriginal people, attempting to force residents of remote communities off their land and into regional towns, to force young Aboriginal people to leave their families and culture or miss out on a proper education, and to turn alcohol management into a racial issue. Alcohol management in the NT today consists of a draconian and ineffective mandatory rehabilitation system combined with policing which focuses heavily on racial profiling and harassment.

The anti-nuclear campaign continues including a visit to the NT by the ex-Prime Minister of Japan, Mr Naoto Kan, who spoke at the NT Parliament, visited Ranger uranium mine and met with Mirarr traditional owners in Jabiru. Despite recent industrial disasters Ranger is still one of the biggest uranium producers in the world and continues to ship yellowcake out through Darwin. We in the NT Greens are painfully aware that a significant proportion of the uranium in the reactors in the Fukushima disaster came from Ranger, and we feel responsible for allowing that to happen. Mr Kan spoke about how impressed he was by the obvious wealth of renewable energy potential in the NT and said he cannot understand why we are not focussing our efforts on becoming a major energy exporter.

We are working on early preparation for the next federal election by developing an outreach campaign to remote Territorians, and preparing plans to seek volunteers from the southern states to come up for a bush trip next election to help with the remote polling circus which travels around isolated communities in the fortnight leading up to the main polling day. If you would like a real experience of the outback, and think you might be willing to help reach the thousands of Territorians who are so disheartened with the two old parties that they don't even bother voting, watch this space.

Finally, we are also preparing for a by-election where we will be trying to win our first seat in the NT Parliament, and to stop the CLP from gaining any margin on their fragile majority.

More to come on all these issues!

Owen Gale,
Convenor, NT Greens.

Above right: Annie Ngalmirama and Naoto Kan at Gundjeihmi Aboriginal Corporation Jabiru
Above left: Naoto Kan being interviewed by Japanese TV in front of RP1 and the tailings stockpile at Ranger–Mt Brockman.