Parliamentary committee urges Coalition to take Port of Darwin lease back from Chinese-owned Landbridge
PARLIAMENTARY committee calls for Commonwealth to take “measures to have the Port of Darwin brought back under Australian ownership”
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THE leasing of the Port of Darwin to a Chinese-owned company is an “unacceptable national security risk” and the Commonwealth should investigate bringing it back into Australian hands.
A parliamentary committee looking into Australia’s trade links with China found there were “serious concerns”, due to the ongoing tensions with the Asian titan, about state-owned enterprises and companies owning or leasing strategic infrastructure like the Port of Darwin.
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The joint standing committee on trade and investment growth, chaired by Queensland LNP MP George Christensen and made up mainly of government members, released a consensus report on Wednesday outlining 21 recommendations.
Among the recommendations was a call for the federal government to look into whether the 99-year-lease of the Port of Darwin for $506m to Chinese-owned Landbridge could fall foul of recently enacted foreign relations laws.
If the port’s lease was “not deemed to be in the national interest”, the committee recommended “taking measures to have the Port of Darwin brought back under Australian ownership”.
The committee also recommended looking into the national security risks associated with other ports and infrastructure in Australia that is owned by, or leased to, foreign corporations under the new foreign relation laws.
A senior DFAT bureaucrat, during a public hearing into those laws last year, said leasing the Port of Darwin would not have been impacted by the changes as the laws weren’t intended to impact corporations operating on a “commercial basis”.
Mr Christensen said “national interest” should mean the interests of Australians and the need for foreign investment to create not displace Australian jobs.
“On top of that a record should be kept of all foreign investment and state-owned companies buying up Australian assets, particularly totalitarian dictatorships, is not in the national interest,” he said.
Labor members of the committee did not provide a dissenting report but made additional criticisms about the deal between the then-CLP government and Landbridge in 2015, describing it as a “catalogue of failures”.
They noted that “by contrast, the NT Labor Party identified the transaction as shortsighted and contrary to the Territory’s long-term interests.”
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Chief Minister Michael Gunner, when he was in Opposition, was against the leasing of the port but in a 2019 Belt and Road Initiative speech in Darwin described the deal as a “very positive investment” for the future of the country.
He also said it was a “win” for both the Australian and Chinese government, as per a report by news outlet Xinhua.
Mr Gunner has also repeatedly said he would not buy back the Port of Darwin even if he had the money to do so.
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