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.
“In August, the high court quashed the NT government’s decision to grant the Singleton Station licence because they found it had been unlawfully granted,” he said.
“The way the [proposed] law is now, we wouldn’t have been able to support native title holders to challenge the merits of such a licence in the first place.
“This is especially troubling when we might be faced with future high-water-consuming developments like data centres looking to take advantage of lax regulations and free water.”
The proposed changes would scrap a legal requirement that water allocation plans set aside water for the environment to maintain rivers, springs, wetlands and water-dependent 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.
“It’s so blatant and shameless to literally be deleting the environment’s water allocation,” she said.
“The scant safeguards that did exist – and they were threadbare – have just been ripped up altogether. 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.
“Our government remains focused on facts, not the fearmongering tactics of environmental lobby groups,” he said.
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. “This is a smash and grab bill that puts water and nature last,” she said.
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”.
After changes to Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act last year, the federal government can transfer its decision-making powers about whether or not a development can proceed to state and territory governments.
Watt declined to comment.
Burgoyne said the NT government had “a track record of protecting the environment, such as extending the Limmen Bight marine park”.
“We support responsible development, effective environmental and water regulation, and continuing our work to rebuild the economy and restore our unique Territory lifestyle,” he said.
