11 September 2024
Topics: McPhillamys gold mine and the Coalition disallowance motion seeking to overturn the section 10 declaration.
E&OE
Stephen Cenatiempo:
I’ve been banging on for the better part of a couple of weeks now about this ridiculous decision to block a gold mine proposal in Blayney in the central West of NSW. And look, it’s been done for purely political reasons. It’s pretty clear the Minister, Tanya Plibersek, the Environment Minister, refuses to actually give any detail on why she’s blocked this gold mine. The Prime Minister, of course, comes out with a merely mouse response saying, oh, we haven’t blocked the gold mine, we’ve only blocked the tailings dam. Of course, you can’t have a gold mine without a tailings dam. The company, Regis Resources, who put forward this proposal, looked at several other tailings dam sites prior to putting their proposal forward and deemed that the only one that was going to work was the one that they put forward. It’s now been blocked under spurious conditions of indigenous cultural heritage etc. Yesterday the Coalition presented a disallowance motion to overturn the Environment Minister’s decision to block the Regis Resources tailings dam. To talk to us about this, Senator Jonno Duniam, the Shadow Minister for Environment, Fisheries and Forestry, he’s with us. Jonno, good morning.
Senator Duniam:
Good morning, Stephen. It’s good to be back with you.
Stephen Cenatiempo:
Indeed. So, what exactly is a disallowance motion? Clarify that for us.
Senator Duniam:
Yeah, sure. Look, it is Parliament House bureau babble, but basically what it is, is a response to what the Minister did. So, she has signed a document, a declaration to ban the placement of the tailings dam. The Senate has the power to overturn the version of the document she has signed. So, we disallow her action as a Minister in signing that document, and it basically overturns her decision. Now if we get a majority-supported disallowance motion, then her action, her legislative action, is overturned and therefore disallowed. Unfortunately, we moved it yesterday and we had a bit of a debate the day before and we didn’t quite get the numbers. It was 31-29. Obviously, the Greens and the Labor Party voted together to block us being able to disallow this, which is a terrible outcome for the people of Blayney and others who believe in common sense.
Stephen Cenatiempo:
Well, there’s a number of things here, and I’ve been talking about this for a couple of weeks as I said. You know, firstly, it’s the economic impact on the NSW and the broader Australian economy. I mean we’re talking billions of dollars ultimately. We’re talking about hundreds of jobs in a town that is screaming out for jobs. I mean, Blayney’s, you know, it’s a thriving little town, but it can’t do without these jobs. We’ve got the local Aboriginal community who actually say, you know what, this will actually benefit us too. And whilst they haven’t explicitly supported the gold mine proposal, they haven’t opposed it either. But then we have some spurious group from somewhere else in NSW or somewhere else in Australia come in and say, well, we are now the authority on this and the Minister curiously says, well, I’m going to ignore the local Aboriginal Land Council and talk to these other people.
Senator Duniam:
Yeah, and this is the problem with the Act, the Aboriginal Torres Strait Islander Heritage Protection Act, Section 10 of that is how the Minister was able to do this. And you can have anyone who claims to be Aboriginal or of Torres Strait Islander descent from anywhere in the country make a claim under this section of the Act, which is how this group, the Wiradjuri people, were able to lodge this claim when the local Aboriginal Land Council had said that they had no issue, as you rightly point out. What’s more, Stephen, the assessor that Tanya Plibersek herself, under this process, she has to go through under law, and she’s been a stickler for the rules, she says she’s been following the law, the adviser that gave her advice on whether or not to uphold this application to stop the tailings dam, I understand, actually told her not to uphold the declaration to allow the tailings dam to be built. There wasn’t sufficient cultural heritage concerns blocking this thing, but she’s gone and done it anyway. And you know it’s not just this mine and the jobs from this mine and the economic activity and revenue from this mine. Think of how many investors elsewhere in the world, or even here in Australia are looking at this going well, you know what? I was going to open up the mine or I was going to build this factory, I was going to do whatever it might be. And they’re thinking now, well, how can I be certain when I put some money down to actually go through a process to get an approval to build something, that it’s not going to have the same outcome? This is the problem – sovereign risk.
Stephen Cenatiempo:
It makes a mockery of the entire process, particularly given that every environmental assessment was passed, and Regis have ticked all the boxes that they need to tick. They’ve been responsible in the way they put their proposal forward. But you know, even things like when you talk to local Aboriginal leaders like Roy Ah See who say that this woman who’s blocked this, we’ve never even heard of her before. We don’t know if she’s a Wiradjuri person. We don’t know who she is. And it now turns out that she previously had tried to have every single river in NSW deemed a culturally sensitive site. I mean, if that was allowed to go ahead. That would be disastrous.
Senator Duniam:
Yeah, if you like to chuck a line in on the weekend or a cray pot or something like that. I mean, you’d have every objection come down upon you like a tonne of bricks. That is the madness of this approach. And it isn’t because of cultural heritage concerns and the Orange Aboriginal Land Council themselves actually did bell the cat on this, and say that we are concerned there are people, and while they didn’t name them, they were pretty direct, that are seeking to hijack this legislation and the provisions under the Act we talked about before, to stop projects like this one. And the word hijack is probably the most fitting one I can think of to describe what’s happened here.
Stephen Cenatiempo:
But even if we put this particular project aside, the precedent this sets for any mining proposal or not only mining proposal, but almost any kind of application right across the country, is now in jeopardy.
Senator Duniam:
That’s correct. Any project anywhere, even ones that have been completed. The Act that the Minister has relied on here is so incredibly broad and there is so much that can happen and be stopped as a result of the application of this Act at any time and I mean this one mine, this one had done, as you said, gone and achieved every single one of its State and Federal environmental approvals over five years. So many projects don’t even get to that stage and to have been able to get through all of that and indeed be backed in by local Aboriginal groups, heritage assessors, 1 700 pages of assessments by experts, to have this happen is the problem. But as I say, it could be any project, it could be a forestry coop, it could be a new housing development, and of course we need new houses. Any of that could go by the way as a result of this.
Stephen Cenatiempo:
Jonno, Regis say they’ve spent in the vicinity of $200 million putting this proposal together. Is there any recourse for that for them to recover any of that?
Senator Duniam:
Well, there would be legal options open to them. I think most of the options available to them would be in relation to being able to have the decision reviewed or appealed, but with the cost, this is the problem. You know, businesses take a punt and a fairly safe one I would have thought, given they’ve received every single State and Federal environmental and planning and even cultural heritage approval until this one. And it’s one of these things that they basically look at as a sunk cost now. They’ve written down the value of the project by that $192 million dollar figure. That’s a huge amount of money just gone. And again it comes back to this issue around sovereign risk. If you’re a multinational or even a small to medium sized business looking at doing something, no one can afford to do in that sort of cash. This is what this government is doing. It’s not only the jobs and the economic activity. You’ve got investors who are burning cash to try and get projects up for the betterment of our country. And we just sit here in Canberra and go, you know what? Oh, well, too bad so sad, move on. That’s terrible.
Stephen Cenatiempo:
Jonno, the Labor and the Greens obviously joined forces to block this disallowance motion. What did the crossbench do?
Senator Duniam:
Well, the crossbench was a bit mixed. Unfortunately, Senator David Pocock went with Labor and the Greens on this one.
Stephen Cenatiempo:
As he usually does.
Senator Duniam:
As he usually does. And this city, Canberra, does rely on royalty revenue from projects like the one that’s just been blocked. Like we can’t pay for these things from the money tree at the bottom of the garden. We’ve got to actually have it come from somewhere like mining royalty. Jacqui Lambie abstained on it, Tammy Tyrrell voted for it. Pauline Hanson, Malcolm Roberts, Gerard Rennick all voted for it. Ralph Babet, David Van voted for it as well. Lydia Thorpe isn’t in Canberra, but I understand she was prepared to vote with Labor and the Greens, as you’d expect. So, there was a mixed bag. But I tell you what, it would have been better to have people like David Pocock, who would have seen the environmentally sustainable approach this mine was taking and the fact that they complied with every rule. It was just this political decision by this Minister and the fact that anyone would back it in even when we haven’t seen the statement of reasons she is legally required to give the proponents and anyone else who needs to see it, I don’t know, like the Parliament, is frankly an obscene outcome.
Stephen Cenatiempo:
Extraordinary. Jonno, good to talk to you this morning. Thanks for your time.
Senator Duniam:
Stephen, thank you very much.