Stop our public money fracking the NT

The Federal Government is proposing to give away $50million of public money to fracking companies targeting the Northern Territory. Traditional Owners from the NT have spoken up strongly against this dangerous waste of money. In response, the Federal Senate has called an urgent inquiry into oil and gas fracking in the NT. They are questioning if it’s appropriate for taxpayer dollars to be spent in this way.

You have only until Wednesday 7 July to have a say and put in your thoughts to the Senate Inquiry. We’ve started on a submission here that you can add to and click to send to the Senate Committee that is running the Inquiry.

The Federal Government is proposing to give away $50million of public money to fracking companies targeting the Northern Territory. Traditional Owners from the NT have spoken up strongly against this dangerous waste of money. In response, the Federal Senate has called an urgent inquiry into oil and gas fracking in the NT. They are questioning if it’s appropriate for taxpayer dollars to be spent in this way.

You have only until Wednesday 7 July to have a say and put in your thoughts to the Senate Inquiry. We’ve started on a submission here that you can add to and click to send to the Senate Committee that is running the Inquiry.

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Please note that a submission becomes a committee document and must not be disclosed to any other person until it has been accepted by the committee. Unless you have requested that your submission remain confidential, it will be published on the committee's website after the committee has examined, accepted and authorised its publication. Once a committee has authorised the release of a submission, subsequent publication is protected by parliamentary privilege.

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Thank you for the opportunity to respond to a new legislative instrument proposing to publicly subsidise private oil and gas companies fracking the Beetaloo Basin, via a $50 million dollar grant program known as “the Industry Research and Development (Beetaloo Cooperative Drilling Program) Instrument 2021”.

I strongly object to the Industry Research and Development (Beetaloo Cooperative Drilling Program) Instrument 202 for a number of reasons.

Traditional Owners who speak for the impacted region of the Beetaloo sub-basin have said they do not want fracking on their land and have been fighting to prevent it for years now. I support Traditional Owners' fight to protect their land and water from fracking. I think it’s absolutely inappropriate for the government to continue to support this fracking industry in the face of ongoing demonstrations of opposition from the Traditional Owners of the impacted area.

Pastoralists, farmers and local community members across the impacted areas from Katherine to Elliot to Booroloola have also been speaking up against fracking and the risks it poses to their businesses and their water supplies.

Fracking is extremely unpopular in the Northern Territory, with the NT Fracking Inquiry and numerous polls conducted over recent years finding the majority of Territorians are opposed to fracking. To fund such an unwanted industry from the public purse is undemocratic.

Paying for exploration is also fiscally irresponsible, putting all the risk on the Australian taxpayer with possibly no return on this investment. There are no guarantees that gas fracking in the Beetaloo will ever reach production stage. Major gas importing countries are now committed to net zero emissions by 2050, so the prognosis for new gas fields is not looking good. Offsetting the greenhouse gas emissions caused by fracking the Beetaloo would be prohibitively expensive. An Australian Institute Report found the cumulative cost of offsets from 2030 to 2040 (the likely operational life of gas fields) could be up to $146 billion.
 
The federal government has been framing its proposal to give public money to gas companies to frack as being a policy of a “gas fired recovery”. Yet there is a notable lack of evidence to support the merits of pinning Australia’s covid recovery to gas development. The oil and gas industry has one of the lowest job densities or rate of jobs per money spent of any industry in Australia.

Some of the corporations likely to land these fracking grants are:

Big polluters and avid political donors like Origin Energy and Santos, who book billions in revenue but pay almost zero corporate tax in Australia.
Falcon Energy, a company that is part-owned by a company controlled by a Russian oligarch who is facing US sanctions.
Empire Energy, who are run by Liberal donors and have already benefited from almost $173M in grants for fracking roads leading to their petroleum leases.

It certainly appears the public money being thrown at fracking could be a blatant give away to companies that make political donations or are chaired by individuals who make political donations. This is not a wise use of taxpayer money.

I implore the Senate to reject this money for fracking companies.

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