A traditional owner of the site of Australia’s largest proposed coalmine has alleged in court that Indian miner Adani misled a tribunal that cleared the way for the mine.

Adrian Burragubba has asked the federal court to quash a decision by the native title tribunal that Adani’s Carmichael mine should go ahead over the objections of the Wangan and Jagalingou people because it was in the public interest.

Burragubba’s barrister, David Yarrow, told a court hearing in Brisbane on Monday that the tribunal’s decision was invalid because it had been misled by Adani as to the economic benefits of the mine in Queensland’s Galilee basin.

Yarrow said testimony by the company’s own expert in a separate land court case challenging the mine, including its likely creation of 1,200 jobs, differed significantly from the case Adani put to the tribunal, which referred to 7,000 jobs.

He said Adani was obliged to produce information to the tribunal that was not misleading, but that the company “by choosing one expert over another, where there is a material difference between those expert reports, was relevantly misleading”.

“It’s the failure or the selectivity of [Adani] that the applicant points to, resulting in the tribunal being misled, its process being distorted and therefore the decision vitiated,” Yarrow said.

Burragubba, who claims the support of nine of 12 families from the Wangan and Jagalingou clan, was one of three applicants from the group who was party to the native title tribunal hearings, but the only one to oppose the mine.

The tribunal hearing cleared the way for the Queensland government to issue a mining lease to Adani that would extinguish native title over the mine sites.

Yarrow said the tribunal’s decision was also made invalid by its failure to investigate whether the Wangan and Jagalingou required a majority or a unanimous agreement to authorise a decision.

“If this was a unanimous applicant, clearly the applicant was deadlocked as to how to conduct the proceeding,” he told the court.

Yarrow said “the views of the group at large are relevant” and that for the tribunal to consider the views of the individual representatives of the Wangan and Jagalingou alone was “too narrow”.

Burragubba, who crowd-sourced funding for his legal action but is being represented pro bono by barristers, told reporters outside the hearing that his legal action was “sending a message now to state and federal governments that they must put a halt to this Adani mine”.

“We said no back in 2012 and we also said no to a land-use agreement in 2014,” he said.

“The message is still clear, that we will not allow our rights to be overridden and when we say no, we mean no to this mine. It will destroy our homelands, it will displace our people, permanently and definitely from our lands, it will destroy our cultural heritage and decimate the land beyond repair.”

The hearing continues before federal court justice John Reeves.