Dorinda Cox (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

As the Australian Greens' spokesperson for northern Australia, I know that Darwin is the cultural capital of Australia for good reason. It is a unique place and a budding tourism hub, home to many Territorians who love country and fight fiercely to protect their beautiful, sacred and precious places. The current government, and successive governments in the Top End, are consistently disregarding the community's self-determination and, in fact, ignoring a lot of the science. Last week the NT's CLP government rammed through the Territory Coordinator Bill, which overrides 32 statutes relevant to any project they consider economically significant. I want to be crystal clear: this green-lights an unelected bureaucrat who will be Australia's Elon Musk. They will facilitate projects for fracking, carbon dumping and cotton expansion, all with no oversight, community input or environmental assessment, which basically equals disaster. You couldn't even put lipstick on that pig of a bill.

The coordinator has powers to fast-track regulatory processes and prioritise approvals almost at will. Mobs from the gulf and Roper regions have told me of the issues they see in these ramped-up projects, which need urgent regulatory oversight for water and for country. The Northern Territory desperately needs renewable energy, yet this is being sidelined in favour of these climate- and environment-wrecking projects without any accountability or oversight. The fact that the Northern Territory government chose a gas executive to be the interim coordinator while the bill made its way through the parliament says absolutely everything we need to know.

Federal Labor must now publicly condemn this bill and urgently commit to federal environmental protections to safeguard the unique and sacred biodiversity and the cultural heritage that exist in the Northern Territory. Leaving the cowboys in charge, with no checks and balances—again—equals disaster.