By Tim E. Stewart

DARWIN -- With Northern Territory elections to be held later this year, the campaign against excessive military aircraft noise has become a hot issue for local politicians.

Recent meetings of the Aircraft Noise Abatement Group (ANAG) have been growing in size, and have hosted candidates from the ALP and the governing Country-Liberal Party.

What has been promised, however, is not prompt action to end the foreign military exercises over Darwin, but bipartisan support for further “studies” into the matter.

Chief Minister Marshall Perron, who until now has ignored the issue, announced he'd been “meeting behind closed doors with senior defence personnel”.

Perron appointed international consultants Air Plan to investigate “the various merits of the [military] operations.” Air Plan were consultants who paid little attention to community opinion on the third runway at Sydney Airport.

Even after commissioning consultants, Perron would not give an undertaking that the results would be available to the public.

What exactly Air Plan will be consulting on has not been made clear. The military air exercises mainly by visiting US aircraft have been confirmed for 10 months of the year. Noise levels have already been recorded louder than jackhammers, and the flight paths of Harrier and F-18 jets are above the most populated suburbs of Darwin.

In fact, Perron announced that in the end, “we” have no authority at all in determining flight operations of the visiting aircraft. This stands in direct contradiction to the NT ALP's official platform of pushing for “flight control restrictions” on the exercises.

Also in the ALP's platform is pressuring the federal ALP to carry out further noise studies. The catch is, the first of these studies has been planned for operation “Pitch Black” in July, with elections rumoured to be in August.

ALP member Ken Parish even went so far as to say, “You have to accept RAAF Darwin is here to stay. It wouldn't be possible to keep the bases open without the exercises.”

Clearly, solving the issue is not on the cards, but it is being used as an exercise in pre-election “community consultation”.

Now that military exercises have entered the political limelight, the public relations officer for the RAAF has stopped attending ANAG meetings. Any official responses by the RAAF or Department of Defence to public inquiries have to be cleared “by Canberra”.

The NT Greens are running Ilana Eldridge as their candidate in the electorate most affected by military air activity. The Greens are opposed to the exercises.

ANAG may be contacted through Kath Midgley on (089) 852 846.

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