The existential threat this poses to our post-Second World War Northern defence infrastructure was pointed out last year by the Australian Security Leaders Climate Group in its 2024 report, Too Hot to Handle: the scorching reality of Australia’s climate-security failure. They highlighted that at 2.7 degrees of warming, much of Northern Australia would be subject to the kind of lethal heat that would make it unlivable, putting our key Northern defence assets at risk. How can you defend the North if no one can live here?
There are other, far more horrific, ways to represent the data. Hundreds of First Nations communities are dotted throughout the forecast zone of unlivability in Northern WA, Queensland and the Northern Territory. These places and people will be impacted most of all, with climate change worsening existing inequalities and challenging the capability of essential health, infrastructure and service delivery. And that’s not to mention the multitude of non-human species whose lives are interconnected across space and time in the North. Our Northern ecosystems, already showing signs of collapse, will teeter over the brink. Nothing and no one will escape.
The North is a climate sacrifice zone, but in service of what and whom?
Surveying the skyline from Stokes Hill Wharf as the sun dips, it strikes me that nowhere reflects Australia’s warped present geopolitical and economic reality quite like Darwin Harbour. I scan from left to right, and note the rapidly multiplying structures that are beginning to dominate the skyline.
To my left, 11 massive white tanks gleam in the setting sun. Constructed for the US military in 2024 to store jet fuel for their operations in the Indo-Pacific, they are not yet operational due to a rolling series of environmental scandals, including the revelation that they are unlikely to withstand the category three cyclones (and stronger) that regularly threaten our coastline and which will only intensify with climate change. Co-located at East Arm is the Darwin port, controversially sold off to Chinese company Landbridge by a cash-strapped NT Government in 2015, igniting a geopolitical and national security storm that is yet to be resolved.
Behind the tanks on the Middle Arm peninsula, rises the huge Japanese-owned Inpex Ichthys liquified natural gas (LNG) processing and export hub, one of the most polluting fossil fuel factories in the country.[1] Japan is now an ally and valued trading partner, and Inpex’s relationship with the NT Government borders on the sacrosanct. It was revealed last year that in 2021‒22, Inpex had spewed twenty-two times more cancer-causing volatile organic compounds into Darwin’s airshed than it had originally estimated.[2] Those emissions have now been revealed to be an underestimate. In October, Inpex revealed it had been underreporting cancer-causing emissions of benzene (a category of volatile organic compounds) by around 13,400%.[3] Inpex has big plans for Darwin, including the construction of the world’s largest carbon capture and storage project, which could greenwash not only Inpex’s gas expansion plans but would also turn us into a global dumping ground for other countries’ carbon pollution.[4]
I keep scanning to the right as the sun dips. Directly opposite Stokes Hill Wharf, a massive tank glows orange, presumably illuminated for passing vessels. It’s part of Santos’ Darwin LNG export hub, soon to process gas from the toxic Barossa reservoir after exhausting the lucrative Bayu Undan field in Timor Leste. Barossa is often described as the ‘dirtiest gasfield in the world’ due to its monstrously high carbon dioxide content.[5] It was recently revealed that the glowing storage tank has been leaking huge amounts of polluting methane for close to two decades, in full knowledge of multiple regulators but not the people of Darwin.[6] Despite growing national outrage, the facility’s licence was just renewed by the Northern Territory Environmental Protection Authority (NTEPA) without a condition to fix the leak.[7] So leak it will, for another 25 years, just six kilometres from where I am sitting.
The Santos and Inpex facilities in Darwin Harbour are two of ten LNG export hubs dotted across Australia’s North: in Gladstone, Darwin and Karratha. They are all the advance guard for the vast expansion of the gas industry planned in this country, set in train most recently by Minister Murray Watt’s decision to approve the extension of Woodside’s North-West Shelf near Karratha. If the fossil fuel industry has its way, billions of tonnes of climate pollution will be generated from a number of proposed new gas fields in the North: as well as the taxpayer-funded Middle Arm project, there’s Woodside and Inpex projects in the Browse Basin near the pristine Scott Reef, fracking in the Kimberley’s Canning Basin and the NT’s Beetaloo Basin, Eni’s Verus field and Woodside’s Greater Sunrise project.
The one thing that could tip the North into complete climate collapse is the one thing we seem intent on pursuing at all costs. We’ll drain the very last drops from this dying land in pursuit of that goal that has eluded the North since colonisation: wealth from extractive development. Compromises must be made, we’re told, when pursuing ‘abundance’. Leaking methane, air toxics, and the risk of uncontained jet fuel explosions are the price we must pay.
‘Abundance’ is certainly the buzzword of 2025. Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s book has quickly become a manifesto of sorts for the Albanese Government. In it, environmental regulations, such as those enshrined in our national nature laws, are cast as a burden, hindering us from reaching our true potential. ‘We’re getting in the way of ourselves’, says Treasurer Jim Chalmers. Many nod sagely in response. Approvals are taking too long. We’ll need to speed things up. Centralise and coordinate. Devolve decision-making from the federal government to states and territories to remove duplication. And we’ll protect nature at the same time, of course! Our federal environmental laws aren’t working for it either. The political arguments for the abundance agenda focus on stimulating flagging housing builds and speeding up the race to become a renewable energy superpower. It’s precisely to address climate change and protect nature that we need these reforms, we’re told. But make no mistake—the fossil fuel industry also plans to benefit. Inpex, for one, has echoed calls for ‘streamlining’ of our environmental laws, decrying the maze-like laws they must navigate for their proposed carbon dumping project in Darwin.[8] Never mind it’s a project utilising unproven technology at a scale that has never been tried anywhere in the world, much less in the heart of a capital city.[9]
If a surfeit of regulation is the problem, then the Northern Territory Government’s proactive rip, strip and ship agenda should logically serve as the exemplar jurisdiction for abundance, not the pariah. One of the more extreme measures enacted is the ability of an unelected bureaucrat—the Territory Coordinator—to exempt approximately thirty-two environmental, planning and local government laws from projects deemed of sufficient significance. Of note, the current Territory Coordinator is a former executive of Inpex’s operations in the Northern Territory.[10] Is this what we mean by abundance?
The sun has set at Stokes Hill Wharf, showcasing the vivid purple, orange and red hues of the world-famous Darwin sunset. The swarming batfish, trevally, queenfish and barramundi are illuminated by restaurant lighting as kids hurl their leftover chips over the wharf after dinner. Darwin Harbour is a natural wonder—fish species diversity on a scale to rival Ningaloo Reef, one of the largest and most biodiverse mangrove forests in the world, and home to a nationally important population of migratory shorebirds. The entire expanse of Northern Australia—ground zero for new fossil fuel exports in this country—is indeed a global treasure for nature, with the largest savanna ecosystem remaining in the world, the last free-flowing rivers on mainland Australia, and one of the most intact coastlines anywhere on earth. So far, despite our valiant efforts to destroy it, the land and waters of the North retain their life and shimmer as they have done across countless generations. This is the abundance we should make it our collective mission to cherish and protect, not sacrifice.
