MILITARISM IN THE NT NEWSLETTER
Hello!
Welcome to the first edition of the Militarism in the NT newsletter. I plan to send out a newsletter with updates on US and Australian military plans and presence in the NT, and perhaps in northern Australia more broadly, every 2-4 weeks.
Many people are aware of US and Australian military presence in the NT, but perhaps less people are aware of just how much this military presence is intensifying as a perennially belligerent US prepares for war with China, and how much a new wave of extractivism in the NT is bound up with the US military industrial complex. For the fiscal year 2024/2025, northern Australia is “the top overseas location for U.S. Air Force and Navy construction spending, with more than $300 million set aside under the U.S. congressional defence authorisations for those years”, Reuters reports. Over the next decade, the Australian government will spend $30 billion on “hardening and upgrading” northern military bases, “partly to meet US requirements and partly paid for by the United States”.
The Northern Territory jurisdiction has participated in the US/Israeli holocaust in Gaza via the provision of intelligence gathered at the Pine Gap Joint Defence Facility in Central Australia to Israel’s Signals Intelligence National Unit, and on to the Israeli military. The Northern Territory government is also busy renewing settler dominion at “home” by imprisoning unprecedented numbers of Aboriginal people. Politicians and the media have once again manufactured a racialised crime hysteria that is seeing Aboriginal children being brutalised by the police, prison wardens and an ever-expanding private security and surveillance apparatus. The mayor of Alice Springs has called for the military to be deployed in the town.
The newsletter is motivated by a desire to contribute to activist movements against militarism and extractivism on this continent, and the deprivations of ecological justice and land rights for First Nations they cause. It is conceived as a small contribution to the international fight against imperialism and an effort at solidarity with colonised and subjugated peoples struggling for liberation and justice. It is also intended to precipitate more reporting and investigative journalism on these issues on the part of independent journalists and journalists working within traditional media organisations.
Please feel free to forward this newsletter to anyone you think might be interested and/or forward me their email address and I’ll add it to my mailing list for future newsletters. If you’d rather not receive this newsletter in the future, let me know and I’ll remove your email address from the list.
ALICE SPRINGS MAYOR WORKS FULL TIME FOR US MILITARY CONTRACTOR
Alice Springs mayor Matt Patterson works full-time for the US military contractor Amentum. Matt works as a housing maintenance officer for Amentum – making sure the homes of the ~ 1000 Americans and Australians working at Pine Gap are kept in pristine order. He works from 7am – 2pm daily in the Amentum office, then skips across the road after 2pm to take up his mayoral duties (Amentum offices are conveniently located right across the road from the council chamber).
Amentum is responsible for the day-to-day running of the Pine Gap spy base just outside Mparntwe/ Alice Springs, providing facility management and logistics services, among other things. At the 2024 NT Defence Week event in Alice Springs, an Amentum spokesperson said the company employs 400 people in Alice Springs and 44,000 worldwide.
THAT SAME US MILITARY CONTRACTOR IS WORKING TO PROGRESS A NUCLEAR WASTE DUMP IN CENTRAL AUSTRALIA
US military contractor Amentum is working with a company called Tellus Holdings on the Chandler nuclear waste dump, 15 kms from the Aboriginal community of Titjikala and 120 kms south of Alice Springs. Tellus describes its vision as to build “the world’s first multi-national deep geological repository for hazardous chemical and low-level nuclear waste”. Amentum is conducting a strategic review of the project to assess timelines and feasibility.
While the Chandler dump is billed by Tellus Holdings as “supporting Australia’s green energy transition” by providing a place to hold hazardous byproducts associated with critical minerals mining, the dump could also become a repository for hydrocarbon wastes and byproducts from oil and gas commissioning, as well as radioactive materials derived from oil and gas extraction processes.
With the US and Australia having signed a critical minerals compact in 2023 to “friendshore” critical minerals production and reduce US dependence on China for raw materials such as lithium, Amentum’s involvement in the Chandler waste dump underscores the keen eye the US military industrial complex is keeping on the future of extractivism in the NT, and looking at how they can benefit from it.
TEXAN FRACKING COMPANY WANTS TO USE BEETALOO GAS TO POWER A MILITARY DATA CENTRE AT PINE GAP
The chief executive of Texan fracking company Tamboran, Joel Riddle, flew to Washington last week to pitch a $5 billion USD data centre to Donald Trump. The data centre, in Riddle’s estimation, is to be located at Pine Gap, powered by fracked gas from the company’s Beetaloo operations ~800 kms north of Alice Springs, and used by the US and Australian militaries.
Riddle told the Australian Financial Review that “we think the Northern Territory is well positioned for a substantial data centre investment. There is an abundant energy resource, abundant land, existing infrastructure, and a customer that is the Department of Defence…Pine Gap is crucial and there is the Tindal Air Force Base, where there are now nine B52s on the tarmac. This is a highly strategic part of the world for US interest.”
Riddle’s data centre pitch seems to be a bit of a stunt to put Tamboran’s Beetaloo operations in the spotlight and drum up more financing for the company’s exploratory drilling there. Tamboran is burning through cash in the Beetaloo Basin – each of its exploratory wells costs ~ $39 million AUD to drill. Only one of six wells Tamboran has drilled so far has demonstrated commercially viable quantities of gas, and the prospect of returns is still looking extremely fickle.
Nonetheless, we shouldn’t rest easy. Tamboran Resources is in strategic partnership with fellow US fracking company Liberty Energy, the CEO of which, Chris Wright, was recently appointed US energy secretary under Donald Trump. This presumably gives Joel Riddle a fair bit of access to the new Trump administration.
Riddle’s visit to Washington, however, seems to have been badly timed. During the week Riddle landed in Washington, US tech stocks were crumbling because a one year old Chinese start-up called Deep Seek had apparently built a Chat GPT- like AI model with a tiny fraction of the financing and a tiny fraction of the computing power US companies are relying on. This not only had huge ramifications for the US tech industry (US chipmaker Nvidia lost ~ $600 billion in market value in a day). It also had consequences for US energy companies, which have experienced increases in valuation (and received government support and subsidies) on the back of the massive amounts of energy projected to be required to power AI data centres. As CNN reports:
Energy companies had been traded up significantly higher in recent years because of the massive amounts of electricity needed to power AI data centers. But they all plummeted Monday. Constellation Energy (CEG), the company behind the planned revival of the Three Mile Island nuclear plant for powering AI, fell 21% Monday. Competitors like Vistra (VST) fell 28% and GE Vernova (GEV) was down 21%.
Futures for natural gas, used to power electricity generators, tumbled 5.9%. Oil fell more than 2%.
Since the Australian Financial Review broke the story about Riddle’s Washington visit on January 24, Tamboran’s share price has fallen 12.91% on the New York Stock Exchange.