Four Christian pacifists face charges under a previously-unused law for entering the top secret US-Australian spy satellite base at Pine Gap, some 20 kilometres from Alice Springs. The government is so sensitive to the base’s involvement in the Iraq war that Attorney-General Philip Ruddock personally authorised the prosecution under the 1952 Defence (Special Undertaking) Act.

Donna Mulhearn, 37, Jim Dowling, 50, Adele Goldie, 29, and Bryan Law, 51—members of “Christians Against All Terrorism”—could be jailed for up to seven years for entering a “prohibited area” and another seven years for taking photographs in the area without authority. They also face Commonwealth Crimes Act charges of trespass and damage.

The 1952 Act was introduced by the conservative Menzies government, with the backing of the Labor Party, to prevent protests against British and US nuclear testing in central Australia during the Cold War. It gives the defence minister sweeping powers, including to declare any area of land or water a prohibited zone “if it is necessary for the purposes of the defence of the Commonwealth to do so”. In 1992, the Keating Labor government’s defence minister Robert Ray renewed the declaration of Pine Gap under the Act, in the wake of the first Gulf War.

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