Tiwi Islands traditional owners say they're devastated by a federal court decision this week... To allow gas giant Santos to resume laying an underwater pipeline. Elders applied for an urgent injunction to stop the work -- arguing Santos had failed to adequately assess whether the project would damage underwater cultural heritage sites -- which run about seven kilometres west of the Tiwi Islands.
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TVTranscript
00:00 This project, this Barossa Gas Project and Santos, are the smallest part of a big picture.
00:08 Now we've gone down that pathway because we had to. It was the only legal avenue that
00:14 we had at the time to be able to put an injunction in to stop them from drilling off the coast.
00:19 They were already two kilometres down drilling when we won our first case. So we had to stop
00:24 them so that we could assess what our human rights are. So when we did that, we made a
00:30 decision to look at the entire system. Now this system starts with NOPTA. It's the National
00:37 Offshore Petroleum Titles Administrator. Madeleine King, the Federal Minister for Resources,
00:44 can travel around the world and sign off leases offshore. Now Japan and South Korea or anyone
00:52 in the world can request to lease land offshore. Once they get that lease, it starts the cycle
01:00 of seismic testing. It then goes to NOPSEMA, the regulator, and then companies can put
01:05 in an application to do seismic testing, exploration drilling. So by the time it gets to the investors,
01:13 there's already investment decisions being made because the Federal Minister has a right
01:18 to go and sign off all of the sea. In the Northern Territory, there is 59,000 square
01:25 kilometres of offshore leases that's been sold off internationally. None of it's for
01:31 Australia. Majority of it is for Asian countries. So if we start there, we have a chance. Now
01:40 we want people to use this as education. We've exposed the system. That is our strategy and
01:46 we have a right to challenge anything legally, a human right to challenge anything legally
01:52 and challenge government decision. We are a democracy.
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