Dutton to tear up Chinese deal on Port of Darwin in national security fight
Peter Dutton has said Australia should not have done a 99-year lease over the Port of Darwin with China, which is now a national security issue. It comes as the PM tried to steal his thunder.
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A Chinese company’s 99-year lease over the Port of Darwin will be torn up under a Coalition government as Peter Dutton shifts the federal election campaign to a fight on a national security.
Mr Dutton says the 99-year lease on was a “mistake”.
Speaking in Darwin on Saturday following Friday’s leak of his major national security announcement, Mr Dutton said Australia needed to deal with the strategic circumstances that we face at the moment.
He said the situation had deteriorated, pointing to Chinese naval ships circumnavigating the country.
“It’s clear that the mistake was made many years ago in relation to the lease and the way in which that was undertaken by the Northern Territory government,” he said.
“An elected Coalition government will move immediately to secure the Darwin Port and to make sure that we can bring that national asset, that strategic asset, back into Australian ownership, or into into a model where we have greater assurance about the operator and the way in which the lease operates.”
Anthony Albanese has insisted the federal government has talked to the owners of the Port of Darwin, despite owners Landbridge insisting there has been no conversation.
He also wouldn’t be drawn on whether Mr Dutton’s planned announcement was leaked to him or his team, which led to him taking to radio last night to announce his own plans to buy it back from the Beijing-controlled company.
“We have engaged with them, and individual companies have reached out about whether a sale (is possible),” he said.
Mr Albanese got wind of the announcement on Friday afternoon, calling in to a Darwin radio station to say his government had been working on getting the port back into Australian hands.
He said this had included “informal” talks through potential buyers, particular superannuation funds.
But Mr Dutton said the Prime Minister had had three years to deal with the concerns.
“The landbridge operators have told us publicly … that there’s no discussion with the government that’s been underway,” he said.
“I think this shows that this Prime Minister, like the fireman, who turns up to the fire when the fire has already been extinguished. I mean, it’s he’s too late to everything.”
Mr Dutton said the military relationship with the US was more important than ever.
But the decision about the port was being worked on prior to the Trump’s administration’s decision on tariffs.
He refused to say how much would be too much for taxpayers to pay if the government was forced to compensate Landbridge for the lease, which could cost $1.3bn.
Under the Coalition’s promise, a specialist adviser would be immediately put in place to help find a new operator of the Darwin Port — one with no direct or indirect control by a foreign government.
And if a private lease can’t be secure within six months of the process starting, the Coalition would move to buy the lease back on behalf of Australia.
Such a move would bring to an end a decade of concerns over threats to Australia’s national security caused by the Northern Territory Government’s decision in 2015 — when the Country Liberal Party was in power — to lease the port for $506m for 99-years.
Mr Dutton argued the vital piece of infrastructure needed to be operated by a trusted government approved entity in the current geopolitical environment.
The Port of Darwin promise comes a week into a federal election campaign where Mr Dutton has been perceived to be on the back foot and steels the Coalition for a fight on national security.
The leasing of the Darwin Port to Chinese-owned Landbridge sparked enough concern at the time to prompt then-US President Barack Obama to raise his concerns about the deal with Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull.
There have been repeated calls for the federal government of the day to seize back control of the Port of Darwin, but a number of reviews — including one championed by Mr Dutton as Defence Minister — found no grounds to do so.
The Department of Defence review in 2021 found there was no national security grounds to overturn the 99-year lease.
An Albanese government review in 2023 also found there were insufficient national security grounds to overturn the lease.
Landbridge has confirmed it is willing to offload the lease if an investor stumped up $1.3bn--- more than double what it paid.
The Port of Darwin has continued to be a political issue, with Prime Minister Anthony Albanese just last month reviving the possibility of a lease buyback by claiming he would have “more to say” during the campaign.
Mr Albanese, in a stunning move, dialled in to ABC Radio Darwin on Friday afternoon and revealed he wanted to see an end to the 99-year lease and said the government had been “working on this for some time”.
He described the port as a strategic asset but did not go into further detail, instead promising more would be said through the campaign.
The federal and NT governments have also been locked in discussions since March about a deal to take back the Port of Darwin, with Landbridge’s financial struggles opening up a potential buyback avenue.
It was revealed in November that Landbridge was yet to make a profit since acquiring the lease in 2015, and had made a $34m loss in the 2024 financial year according to a directors report submitted to the Australian Security and Investment Commission.
A collapse of Landbridge would spark a series of events that ends in the NT government being given the right to scrap the port’s lease and pay out financiers.
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