Rescind the Alice Springs Town Council's support for Pine Gap

About the council’s policy:

The policy was formulated in 1987, the year the facility’s original lease to the US government was due to expire, and remains in effect today. The council policy was formulated during the build-up to the largest mobilisations against the base to date, when 1000 anti-war delegates descended on Alice Springs to participate in the “Beyond the Bases” conference and campaign of direct action. 

Despite the council in 1987 declaring that the proposed policy would “as closely as possible, represent… the prevailing community view” on the base, no survey of community perspectives was commissioned, and community members were given just six days to provide written comments on the policy. 

An Alice Springs Peace Group survey of Mparntwe residents undertaken at the time of the policy’s formulation found that 60% of those surveyed did not support the policy. The council’s policy in support of the base has been updated twice since 1987, but the council did not seek public input on either occasion.

Why Pine Gap is no good:

The Pine Gap facility makes beautiful Arrernte country a central site for US/Australian violence perpetrated abroad. Pine Gap provides targeting data for US and allied drone and missile strikes in places such as Gaza, Lebanon, Iran, Yemen, Iraq, Somalia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Nigeria that have killed thousands of civilians. Intelligence-sharing from Pine Gap to the Israeli military throughout its ongoing bombardment of Gaza is one of the key ways the Australian government has participated in the Gaza genocide and failed its obligations under the UN Genocide Convention. The base supports the global climate-wrecking activities of the US military - the world’s largest institutional emitter - in military interventions and wars that are often premised on securing access to oil and other fossil fuels for US corporations. The Alice Springs Town Council’s support for Pine Gap’s operations make residents complicit in the violence the base perpetrates overseas.

Pine Gap makes all Mparntwe/ Alice Springs residents less safe. The facility has long been identified by military analysts and anti-nuclear activists as central to US nuclear war planning and as a high-priority target for US adversaries in the event of conflict erupting. The Australian government has for decades acknowledged the high risk of a nuclear attack on the base. The surveillance capabilities of the facility make nuclear warfare more likely by strengthening US options for a first-strike nuclear attack on its enemies. The military significance of Pine Gap, in turn, makes Central Australia a target. Now, with a new nuclear arms race underway and Pine Gap undergoing its largest-ever expansion in order to hunt and target Chinese missile silos, Mparntwe/ Alice Springs is increasingly in the crosshairs of nuclear confrontation. There is no credible policy for protecting Alice Springs residents from the threat of a nuclear strike on the Pine Gap facility. 

Pine Gap deepens an already systemically unequal local economy in Mparntwe/Alice Springs. When Pine Gap began operating in 1970, Mparntwe locals reported that rental prices doubled almost overnight as a result of the sudden influx of US workers. Now the suburb of Desert Springs, where many Pine Gap workers reside, has median house prices almost double the Alice Springs average. Because many high-salaried Pine Gap workers buy or rent homes on the private housing market in Alice Springs, they drive up housing and rental prices, making housing less affordable for others. This is consistent with research from other places hosting US military bases which shows that foreign bases create inflationary pressures on local economies, making housing more expensive and less available for locals. 

While investor forums celebrate “defence and police housing” in areas like Desert Springs as offering “solid” rental yields for property investors, Arrernte custodians for the land on which Pine Gap is sited live in tin sheds with no running water, limited electricity and insecure legal tenure in the community of Irrkerlantye/ White Gate. 

Furthermore, US citizens working at the base do not pay income tax in Australia.

The presence of the Pine Gap base distorts the Mparntwe/ Alice Springs economy, creating an unhealthy “company town” dependency that has failed to deliver broad-based wellbeing in the town. The base employs few locals relative to the resources it uses up, and inhibits economic diversification into beneficial sectors such as education (what an amazing university town Mparntwe/ Alice Springs could be!) and much-needed climate-adaptive housing and community development.