This article is more than 4 years old

This article is more than 4 years old

Adani’s plan for Australia’s largest coalmine faces yet another snag, with a conservation group mounting what is now the eighth legal challenge to the contentious project.

The group, Land Services of Coast and Country, filed an appeal for a judicial review of the Queensland government’s environmental approval of the Carmichael mine in the supreme court on Wednesday.

The group argues the state’s environment department failed in its obligations to ensure the mine planned by the Indian conglomerate was an ecologically sustainable development under the Environmental Protection Act, which it described as “the community’s safety net”.

The Coast and Country spokesman, Derec Davies, said the decision to grant environmental authority to the Galilee basin mine “ignored climate change totally and failed to properly take account of the true jobs figures – 1,464 net jobs not the 10,000 advocated”.

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“What is most concerning is the fact [the department] failed to properly consider and apply the legislation under which it operates,” Davies said.

The department’s decision in February followed a land court recommendation to approve the open-cut mine, which would produce up to 60m tonnes a year of thermal coal to be shipped to Asia over 60 years.

That ruling resulted from another Coast and Country challenge. During the hearing, an Adani economic expert conceded the number of jobs created would be lower than the company had claimed, while the judge recommended added safeguards concerning species and ecological protection.

The string of legal challenges to Adani’s project – which, the Indian conglomerate complained, fed into “regulatory uncertainty” for its $16bn investment – led the federal government to flag moves to curtail “lawfare” by green groups.

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A spokesman for Adani said it had previously factored into its planning the prospect of “additional, politically motivated challenges seeking to delay the project”.

Davies said the principle of sustainable development within the act had been in place since 1994 as “an overarching filter used to assess a proposed development’s environmental harm against its purported benefits”.

“Our appeal to the supreme court is simple,” he said. “We have laws to protect the environment that we rely on for our food, clean water and the air we breathe, and that supports our unique biodiversity.

“In our opinion, the Queensland Department of Environment and Heritage Protection has made an error of law. The department cannot just ignore those laws that will allow the big end of town to develop a huge, polluting coalmine that will create catastrophic environmental harm both now and into the future.”

The Environmental Defenders Office Queensland, which acted for Coast and Country in the land court, is again acting in the appeal.

The federal court is yet to rule on an Australian Conservation Foundation appeal against federal environmental approval of the mine.

Some representatives of the mine site’s traditional owners, the Wangan and Jagalingou people, have several legal actions under way to challenge a land use deal with Adani signed by other representatives.

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Adani, which had spent six years working with various governments on environmental approvals, had “for some time warned of the threat to major, job-creating projects proceeding in Queensland [posed by] endless appeals”, its spokesman said.



“As it relates to Carmichael, the approvals given are the most strict and rigorous of their kind ever given for a single development,” he said.



“When the Queensland government announced their strict, science-based approval had been given to the mine at Carmichael, the company noted that its timelines assumed additional, politically motivated challenges seeking to delay the project and deny the benefits of jobs, taxes and royalties of our state from proceeding as planned.



“Notwithstanding this challenge, Adani stands ready to deliver on its plans to build a long-term future with Queensland.”

