It is a dangerous and damaging defeat in which the judge said an expert witness and a lawyer for the environmental group had taken part in “a subtle form of coaching” of Indigenous witnesses.
The clear message is that environmental groups need to pick their battles more wisely.
Environmental groups have had a pretty good batting score when seeking to alter or restrict developments,but this precedent won’t do the cause any favours.
Santos,whose plans to develop its Barossa LNG project with a new pipeline now has a green light,is more familiar with losing to environmentalists.
The Tiwi Islander loss risks raising the bar for future cases brought by environmental and Indigenous groups.
The LNG project involves the development of the Barossa gas field offshore from the Northern Territory that involved the construction of a new pipeline west of the Tiwi Islands to connect the field to the existing Bayu-Undan underwater pipeline already taking gas to the Darwin LNG plant.