Bolt: We’re sacrificing our future to what seems a cultural power-flex based on mumbo-jumbo and irrational superstitions

The Federal Court has halted one of our biggest new gas projects far out at sea because Indigenous people might be buried deep underwater.

It seemed a joke. But, no, the Federal Court last week really did halt one of our biggest new gas projects far out at sea because Indigenous people might be buried deep underwater.

Oh, plus the Dreaming hates gas projects Indigenous people never heard of until modern times. Enough. We’re sacrificing our future to what seems a cultural power-flex based on mumbo-jumbo and irrational superstitions.

Santos was hours from laying a pipe from its Barossa gas field, 140km from the Tiwi Islands to Darwin, when Justice Natalie Charlesworth told it to stop, despite the “significant financial impact” to the $4.7bn project.

A Tiwi traditional owner, Simon Munkara, had supposedly new evidence the pipe would hurt his culture, and, the judge said, cause him “irreparable damage”.

Justice Natalie Charlesworth told Santos to stop.

“Irreparable damage” from a pipe laid on the ocean floor and never coming closer than 7km to the islands? Seriously?

Here’s Munkara’s central claim: “People lived on that land (under the sea) and there are burial grounds and other important things from our ancestors there, even though it has been a long time, and it’s under the water, it was always our heritage, and it is all part of our beliefs … We tell our stories and our history orally through our songlines … some lines go all the way from the land to the sea.”

Yet if there are burial grounds under the pipeline route, I doubt any Tiwi Islander could tell you exactly where. Indeed, Santos had already been forced to check for underwater cultural heritage sites along the route and – unsurprisingly – found none. An anthropologist also concluded there were none.

Santos had already been forced to check for underwater cultural heritage sites along the route.

But now Munkara, backed by the Albanese government-funded Environmental Defenders Office, said a new report commissioned by Islanders now claimed the opposite. The judge ordered Santos to stop work until it considered this evidence and got a fresh approval from the National Offshore Petroleum Safety and Environmental Management Authority.

This seems mad. Even assuming the incredible – that this pipe disturbs previously unknown graves sites – and even if the Dreaming has something to say about gas projects, so what? Why let any of that stop a massive project that brings gas and money to Australians, including Tiwi Islanders who so depend on government handouts, since 85 per cent don’t work?

We don’t let the religious taboos of other Australians stop such projects. Given 81 per cent of Tiwi Islanders are Christians, courts shouldn’t treat Dreaming superstitions with such awe.