No, Minister, ducking questions about nixed gold mine is not OK
Ducking questions about a nixed gold mine is not OK. Tanya Plibersek should explain why she used a rarely-used mechanism to rip jobs away from a rural community.
Opinion
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Last week, federal Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek delivered a body blow to the communities of Blayney, Orange and the local region, killing off the McPhillamys gold mining project near Blayney that would have delivered around 800 local jobs and close to a billion dollars in investment.
The Minister then hopped on a plane and jetted to the News Corp Bush Summit in Townsville where she claimed to care about regional communities.
Townsville is 1500 kilometres from Orange, where the next Bush Summit will be held on Thursday, and where the Minister should have gone instead.
It would be the perfect opportunity to explain to locals why she killed off 800 local jobs and $1 billion in investment for our state, based on secret information she so far refuses to disclose.
The Minister could explain why she used a rarely used mechanism under the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Cultural Heritage Act to sink the mine and rip jobs away from the local community, based on secret whispers from a dissident local Indigenous group with just 18 members.
The Minister could explain why she claimed the tailings dam of the proposed mine would ‘destroy’ a ‘place of particular significance for local Aboriginal people going back thousands of years.’
This despite the local Aboriginal Land Council submitting the project would not impact any known sites or artefacts of high cultural significance.
The Minister could explain why the views of this obscure dissident group were prioritised over the knowledge of the leaders of the local Aboriginal Land Council.
The Minister could also explain why she chose to ignore the views of the NSW Government, which had undertaken an extensive 3-year assessment of the project, including cultural heritage issues, and issued the project with an approval.
The Minister could explain why she effectively overturned an approval granted to the project by her own department under Commonwealth environmental law more than a year ago.
The Minister could explain whether her decision would have been different if the project had involved a pumped hydro dam instead of a mine tailings dam.
The Minister could explain why she continues to provide taxpayer funds to the Environmental Defenders Office to work on legal challenges against this and other job-generating major projects right around the country.
She could also explain whether this decision was based on winning votes in her inner-city electorate instead of the needs of locals near the proposed mine who were hoping it would proceed.
The entire debacle stinks of an utterly rotten decision-making process.
Local communities like Blayney and Orange have lost a rigorously assessed mining project that had been approved by the NSW Government and would have delivered over 800 local jobs.
Blayney publican Damon Taylor summed it up best in The Daily Telegraph last week: “For a small town of 3000 people, (it) just means there’s jobs here for our kids – they wouldn’t have to move away, and it would make Blayney stronger – the majority of people would love to see it go ahead as soon as possible”.
Clearly this decision has failed to pass the pub test in Blayney, and probably across regional NSW.
Days after cancelling the gold mine, the Minister quickly approved the one of the world’s biggest solar projects south of Darwin, involving 120 square kilometres of solar panels, 800 kilometres of transmission lines, and an undersea cable to the edge of Australian territorial waters.
This monster project would result in solar panels installed across an area roughly the same size as the Sydney, Woollahra, Waverley, Randwick and Inner West local government areas combined.
Apparently, this massive solar project raises no environmental or heritage concerns for the Minister. Such concerns seem only to apply to mining projects.
The Minister made a bad choice in blocking the gold mine. Choosing to go to Townsville instead of Orange was another. How many more bad choices can our regional communities bear?
— Stephen Galilee is CEO, NSW Minerals Council
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