More than 100 years since New South Wales magnanimously handed over Jervis Bay, the ACT’s chief minister, Andrew Barr, has confirmed talks are under way for what would be the biggest shake-up in state-territorial borderlines in living memory.
The ACT has begun discussions with the NSW government to acquire 330 hectares of farmland called Parkwood.
The land lies within a planned housing development called Ginninderry, which covers both the ACT and NSW.
On Friday Barr confirmed the acquisition was all but certain, saying the NSW premier, Dominic Perrottet, had “personally contacted me to give it the green light” over the land swap.
“We’ve crossed the threshold of ‘will it happen?’ – yes it will,” he told the ABC.
“We’re now working through the relevant details to make it happen. Those meetings will be under way in the next few weeks.”
While Barr seemed to believe the annexation was a fait accompli, a spokesperson for the NSW premier said no decision had been made on the border shift.
In a statement, a government spokesperson said NSW was seeking a “common sense approach” delivering services and infrastructure for the future residents of the Parkwood cross-border development.
“To this end, the NSW Premier has approved discussions to take place with the ACT government on a potential border move at Parkwood, with no decision made,” the spokesperson said.
Barr first wrote to Perrottet about the land grab last year seeking to negotiate on the border change after the territory purchased the land. He said that shifting the border would correct “a historic anomaly” whereby the land, which is only accessible from the ACT, was given to NSW.
“For one reason or another, a straight line was drawn through the middle of a paddock here and all we’re seeking to do is … move the border to a river corridor effectively for this parcel of land that the territory owns,” Barr said.
The shift would mark the first time the borders have changed since Jervis Bay was ceded to the commonwealth for what was then known as the Federal Capital Territory on its establishment in 1915, though the federal government has been responsible for the coastal town since 1989.
The Macquarie University lecturer Andrew Burridge, a political geographer, said there had been other minor territorial disputes since then.
It was not until 2006 that NSW and Victoria formally settled on the border along what is known as the Black-Allan Line, 180km of land that runs north-west from Cape Howe to Indi Springs at the source of the Murray River.
“These little disputes tend to bubble along and we don’t pay attention, though that all changed a bit with Covid,” Burridge said.
Burridge, whose expertise is in international borders, said he never thought he would spend time researching Australia’s relatively settled borders, but the pandemic had made cross-border communities an issue like never before.
“In NSW in particular, there are some 600,000 people who live on the border, so it was a particular issue,” he said.
“There was also some discussion in the pandemic about moving the Queensland line south temporarily to allow those border territories to be in Queensland, but NSW shut that down pretty quickly,” he said.
“Countries go to war over territory, but the states were very careful about what they conceded.”
