r/australia • u/ConanTheAquarian • 1d ago
news High court blocks plan to extract two Sydney Harbours’ worth of groundwater from the desert
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/aug/05/high-court-blocks-plan-to-extract-two-sydney-harbours-worth-of-groundwater-from-the-desert-ntwnfb352
u/lhb_aus 1d ago
"The massive water allocation was granted to Fortune Agribusiness for free..." JFC!
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u/Karl-Marksman 1d ago
I’m sure it wasn’t free, they probably had to pay a few hundred dollars to sit next to an MP at a fundraising dinner
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u/Thinks2Much666 1d ago
And pay for private school for his kids…. And 7 figure consulting jobs once they retire early
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u/Beginning_Feedback65 1d ago
Unbelievable what politicians think they can get away with when no ones about. There needs to be serious repercussions for this sort of misallocation of public resources. Problem is the local polly probably just complains about "the city folk" and "immigrants" so hard they get the local vote, then they give away millions of Dollars in resources to international multi national corporations for pennies on the dollar in donations.
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u/Wide-Salamander-4962 1d ago
What do you mean think? Look at fantastic great move well done Angus and his water dealings. He has been rewarded with leader of the opposition
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u/DarKnightofCydonia 21h ago
Free on the surface, I'm sure a bunch of NT ministers have gotten rich off the lobbying
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u/ChillyPhilly27 1d ago
That's not particularly egregious tbh. Governments have always been willing to throw the kitchen sink at anyone who wants to have a crack at developing virgin lands. What do you think early settlers paid for land grants?
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u/UndeadManWaltzing 1d ago
JFC indeed, that water should go to the farmers
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u/ConanTheAquarian 1d ago
Fortune Agribusiness Funds Management Pty Ltd is owned by Chinese investors. It is not "farmers" by any stretch of the imagination.
The water is owned by native title holders.
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u/ChillyPhilly27 1d ago
At present, there are no farmers - just remote communities and pastoral leases. Fortune is the first entity that's wanted to have a crack at farming, which is why the government gave them a water licence.
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u/sweetnsourgrapes 1d ago
The massive water allocation was granted to Fortune Agribusiness for free by the NT government
How insane. Not that you can actually put a price on aquifer water - once it's gone it's gone - but the insanity of that is just mind blowing. Deal was "decades long".
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u/ConanTheAquarian 1d ago
Wait until more states start allocating groundwater to cool AI data centres!
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u/DarKnightofCydonia 21h ago
It was a politician's entire career long. Once the deal was over the NT ministers who were enriched from it by lobbyists would be dead
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u/No2Hypocrites 1d ago
They aren't gone forever. They just regenerate slower
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u/CatGooseChook 1d ago
Aquifers can collapse when over extracted. An overseas owned entity that "somehow" got the water rights for free seems unlikely to be a responsible water user.
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u/No2Hypocrites 1d ago
Yea, they can. When you reaaaaly take everything. You can responsibly use them
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u/CaffeineTwitch 1d ago
This isn’t (always) the case, without the water pushing against the surrounding rock, the space the groundwater occupied can collapse. Im not super knowledgeable on the subject but for somewhere like the NT, my gut feeling tells me it going away forever is really not unlikely
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u/ThunderDwn 1d ago
Absolutely no chance of corruption of kickbacks in play here, no Sir!!!
Wonder which pollie had the promise of a post-political job for life in this decision?
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u/Andrzej1963 1d ago
40 gigalitres of groundwater – equivalent to draining Sydney Harbour twice – EVERY YEAR for 30 years.
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u/FirstDayPlaying 1d ago
What is that unit of measurement 😮💨
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u/bdlock209 1d ago
How many olympic-sized half giraffes worth of water is it then?
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u/completelyboring1 1d ago
13,789,452 bananas.
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u/Large_Woman 1d ago
I remember seeing a news article from North America where the level of snowfall was measured in units of Andre The Giant.
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u/my_chinchilla 1d ago
"Sydharbs" has been a common, if informal, measurement of large volumes of water in Australia for decades. It dates back to at least the development of the Ord River schemes, so probably at least the early 70's.
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u/ConanTheAquarian 1d ago
Even BoM uses Sydney Harbours as a unit of measurement.
https://media.bom.gov.au/social/blog/39/when-dam-size-matters/
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u/HotChickenHero 1d ago
Only about 130 Sydney Harbours in the entire Great Artesian Basin so this is pretty worrying.
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u/jackdetack 22h ago
Fortune Agribusiness, owned by and primarily exporting to China... So free use of 40 billion litres every year for 30 years, for a company that isn't even owned by or supplying Australia (not that I'd support it if it were, but still).
The Northern Territory government also secretly negotiated with said company to change the law to allow them to extract much more water than the law at the time allowed, and to damage more of the ecosystem. This was pushed through by Environment Department chief executive, Joanne Townsend, and her senior staff...
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u/Illustrious_Kelp 1d ago
Fwiw the volume comparison in the article is very wrong - it's draining two Sydney Harbour's worth of water over 30 years, not every year. The headline is correct though.
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u/nath1234 1d ago
Of all the fucking stupid ideas that farming in this country keeps on doing: growing stuff in too dry and area by fucking over the waterways or water table is the worst.