NT happy to take federal funds

Paul Bongiorno’s comment that “Eighteen months into the pandemic, the country still has only one purpose-built quarantine facility at Howard Springs in the Northern Territory” is much too generous (“Morrison plays the other race card”, August 7-13). In fact, the Ichthys LNG Project accommodation village at Howard Springs near Darwin, finished in 2014, provided a home for up to 3500 project personnel during peak construction of the INPEX LNG Hub. The village was designed to provide temporary accommodation for fly-in, fly-out construction workers. No doubt subsidised by taxpayers along with all the other sweeteners the NT government used to lure the project away from Western Australia, the “forward-thinking” NT had no bloody idea what to do with it when the project finished. The federally funded quarantine use is manna from heaven for the perennially broke NT government.

– Charlie Carter, Alice Springs, NT