April 5, 2025
Saturday 5 April 2025
Geoff Chambers & Ben Packham
The Australian
Peter Dutton will immediately boot out a Chinese-owned company from the strategic Port of Darwin if he wins the May 3 election and appoint an Australian government-approved operator, or take over the lease interest using powerful commonwealth acquisition powers.
The Opposition Leader on Saturday will announce in Darwin that a Coalition government would reverse the controversial decision to hand a 99-year lease to Chinese-controlled Landbridge Group by the Northern Territory Country Liberal Party government in 2015.
Mr Dutton’s decision to secure the critical infrastructure comes as he seeks to shift the election campaign back to national security amid unprecedented geostrategic competition in the Indo-Pacific region fuelled by the high-stakes contest between the US and China.
The major Coalition announcement sets-up a clash with Anthony Albanese over the port, which the Prime Minister says he will have “more to say” about later in the campaign.
Ahead of releasing the Coalition’s election policy promising a sharp lift in defence spending, Mr Dutton said he would act in the national interest to “immediately secure the Port of Darwin”.
“In the current geopolitical environment, it is vital that this piece of critical infrastructure, which is directly opposite to the Larrakeyah Defence Precinct, is operated by a trusted, commonwealth-approved entity,” Mr Dutton said.
The former defence and home affairs minister will announce the Port of Darwin decision in the battleground Labor-held seat of Solomon. Chinese ownership of the port has been a longstanding hurdle to closer military co-operation between Australia and the US in Darwin and across the Top End. Labor has spent years attacking the Coalition over the Turnbull government’s 2015 move to wave through the NT government’s 99-year lease of the port to Landbridge Group for $506m.
In a joint statement with Angus Taylor, James Paterson and Andrew Hastie, Mr Dutton said: “We will appoint a specialist commercial adviser to work with the Northern Territory government and officials from the Departments of Treasury, Finance, Defence and Infrastructure to provide advice and engage with potential new operators of the Port.” If the commonwealth acquired the lease interest, a Coalition government would “compensate Landbridge Group”.
“The Port of Darwin is defined as a critical infrastructure asset under the Security of Critical Infrastructure Act 2018, which was introduced by the Coalition,” the statement said. “As such, any action involving foreign investment requires formal Commonwealth approval.
“A Dutton Coalition government would not permit the lease of the port to any entity that is directly or indirectly controlled by a foreign government, including any state-owned enterprise or sovereign wealth fund.
“If a private lease cannot be facilitated within six months of the process commencing, as a last resort, we will act to acquire the lease interest in the port using the commonwealth’s compulsory acquisition powers.”
The Australian understands that while the Coalition’s preference is for a commercial process to transfer the lease to a government-approved buyer, a Dutton government would be prepared to acquire the lease through equity, which would have a small impact on the underlying cash balance via public debt interest.
Seeking to portray the Prime Minister as a “weak leader”, Mr Dutton said the government had “continued to create uncertainty regarding this important national asset, tiptoeing around the issue while refusing to take concrete action”.
Mr Albanese, who will travel to western Queensland on Saturday to tour flood-ravaged zones, said he was prepared to “directly intervene” to take the Port of Darwin off of Chinese hands and was working to find a private Australian buyer.
In an attempt to spoil Mr Dutton’s policy announcement after being tipped off about the Coalition’s Port of Darwin decision, Mr Albanese called into ABC Darwin on Friday night to claim Labor was going to do something about the port without revealing what the government’s policy was.
Mr Albanese has been attacked for being slow-footed on removing the Chinese-owned company since winning the 2022 election, as his government sought to strengthen economic and diplomatic ties with Xi Jinping’s Chinese Communist government.
After being asked several times to explain what his plan to deal with the port would be, Mr Albanese suggested he was working with buyers to take it back from the Landbridge Group.
“We’ve been working on this for some time,” Mr Albanese said. “We said, when the Port of Darwin was logged off to a Chinese buyer 10 years ago now … we said at the time that was a mistake. What we are doing is we will enter into negotiations to do that.
“That is what we’ve been doing informally through potential buyers up to this point already, and if it reaches a point where the commonwealth needs to directly intervene, then we’d be prepared to do that.”
The federal and territory governments had discussed the potential buyback of the port from Landbridge last month, but the company said it was not for sale. Landbridge dismissed concerns over the company’s financial viability in recent weeks, following a report last November revealing its parent company had a $107m bond that was in default and overdue.
“Landbridge considers the port a long-term investment that has reported record operational performance this year,” Landbridge non-executive director Terry O’Connor said at the time.
“We expect this growth to continue in the future.”
The move by the Coalition comes amid ongoing US concerns over the port arrangement, given its military commitments across the territory including its annual dry season deployment of 2500 marines to Darwin. Those concerns were underscored in recent days when a US Virginia-class submarine, the USS Minnesota, was forced to dock metres away from the East Arm port operated by the Chinese.
Mr Albanese said the Coalition had no credibility on the port issue, because it created an incentive for the sale through its ”asset recycling” policy that encouraged state governments to sell off publicly owned infrastructure to the private sector.
Mr Dutton has said the port sale “was a decision that was made at the time”, but Australia needed the best-possible policies going forward.
Mr Albanese’s department opted against overturning Landbridge’s lease following a review of the arrangement’s impact on the development of Darwin as a major strategic hub.
In an October 2023 statement, the department said it was “not necessary to vary or cancel the lease” because there were sufficient safeguards in place to manage any security risks, and monitoring of the arrangement would continue.