Traditional owners in the Northern Territory have launched a legal challenge against an “unconscionable” decision to grant the territory’s largest ever groundwater extraction licence to a Chinese-owned agribusiness company, saying the decision failed to consider Aboriginal cultural rights to the water.
The NT government granted Fortune Agribusiness a free 30-year licence to extract up to 40,000 megalitres of groundwater a year from aquifers under Singleton station, about 400km north of Alice Springs.
