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Residents are opposed to Santos' plan to drill underwater gas wells and lay 262 kilometres of pipeline in the Timor Sea, pointing to opposition from Tiwi people and climate scientists. Stephen W Enciso reports.
Tiwi Islanders initially raised no objection to tapping the Barossa gasfield or the pipeline linking it to Darwin. Then the green lawyers rolled in with their academics-for-hire, persuaded a hanful of locals to rewrite their creation myths and stopped the project in its tracks. As the Federal Court has found, that campaign was a gigantic and cynical fraud
Claims against fossil fuel projects based in Indigenous cultural heritage suffered a setback after the emphatic dismissal of a case blocking Santos’ Barossa project.
Judges should give up blocking valuable projects based on stories passed through generations that can’t be proven or are myths.
Court ruling is challenging for the Tiwi Islanders who fought the case and likely to prompt a rethink about how Indigenous cultural heritage matters are run