Traditional owners opposed to Adani’s Carmichael mine have threatened fresh court action unless the company abandons a contentious land access deal that has been thrown into doubt by a landmark federal court case in Western Australia.

Adani’s bid to register an Indigenous land use agreement (ILUA) with the Wangan and Jagalingou people – a crucial step towards building Australia’s largest coalmine in central Queensland – was due to be decided on Friday by the national Native Title Tribunal.

But lawyers for five W&J representatives who opposed the deal wrote to Adani demanding it withdraw its application by 14 February.

Should Adani refuse, the W&J opponents would file a new federal court application to have it struck out, they said.

The federal court ruled last Thursday that an ILUA concerning the Noongar people of south-west WA was invalid because not all their native title applicant group had signed it. The W&J agreement with Adani was signed a year ago by seven of its 12 applicant members.

Guardian Australia has revealed the seven pro-Adani representatives pocketed discreet payments while resurrecting talks with the miner, whose previous overtures for an ILUA had twice been rejected by the W&J.

The current deal comes with a proposed upfront windfall of $550,000, down from $1.5m the miner allegedly offered in 2014.

The land use deal is crucial for Adani. Without it, the Queensland government would need to forcibly acquire the proposed mine site and extinguish W&J native title rights.

This would throw further doubt on Adani’s ability to attract finance, given many international banks have pledged not to back resources projects that don’t have Indigenous traditional owner support, according to energy analyst Tim Buckley.

“Consent of Indigenous owners in Australia is critical to the proposed project proceeding and the securing of finance,” he said.

A key W&J opponent of the Adani mine, Adrian Burragubba, said the group would “defeat this company’s attempts to divide and conquer us and continue our legal battles to remove the leases issued by the Queensland government”.

“We make it plain to the Queensland and federal governments that we will not surrender our ancestral homelands for Adani’s mine of mass destruction,” he said.

The Queensland premier, Annastacia Palaszczuk, has appealed to the federal government to examine changes to native title laws to deal with the Noongar precedent.

“It is imperative that this issue be addressed as soon as possible, given my government’s determination to see the Adani project proceed,” Palaszczuk told the Townsville Bulletin.

The prospect of either federal legislative changes or a high court challenge by the WA government to the federal court ruling has prompted a Noongar representative to flag their own high court action in response.



Mervyn Eades, who was involved in the WA court action, vowed there would be a high court challenge if there was a “an attempt by government to change the native title law again to suit their interests and disregard our people’s interests”.

“If they feel the law got it wrong then they should take their appeal to the high court, but they do not want to do this because they know all too well that the high court will uphold the federal court ruling,” Eades said. “So instead they want to change their own rule book.”

Either legislative changes or high court action would mean further delays for Adani, which has already pushed back its original deadline for producing coal from the central Queensland mine from 2014 to 2020.

The letter from lawyers for the anti-Adani group in the W&J on Tuesday said the ruling on the Noongar was “now authority for the proposition that all persons” in a native title applicant must sign an ILUA to make it valid.

It noted an objection to the Adani ILUA that they previously filed made this argument.

The lawyers claimed material filed with the tribunal showed the meeting which claimed to authorise the ILUA was “a sham and, at the instigation of [Adani], was attended by persons who overwhelmingly were not members of and have never previously asserted to be Wangan and Jagalingou people or to have native title rights in the ILUA area”.

The W&J opponents to the ILUA have also told Adani the company was unable to apply to register the deal as that also required agreement from all members of the applicant group. They would seek that Adani pay their legal costs if they were forced to take federal court action on the ILUA, their lawyers said.

They did “not accept that their native title should be extinguished by the ILUA and have serious concerns regarding the devastation that the Carmichael project will bring to their culture and the environment”, their letter said.

They did not believe that Adani “openly disclosed the financial risks associated with the Carmichael project”, it said.

“They are concerned that the employment opportunities for Indigenous people are illusionary and the contracting proposals are not economically viable.”

Their previous objection filed with the tribunal states that their refusal to sign “cannot be portrayed as an action designed to hold out against the wishes of the claim group of the native title claim”.

“It has been sanctioned by a sizeable section of the claim group at two authorisation meeting[s].”

An Adani spokesman said the company was “considering the federal court judgment which related to another project and surprised many people’s understanding of how the law operated to date”.

He said it was “worth noting” that in the case of Adani’s ILUA with the W&J, an “authorisation meeting voted 294-1 to proceed”.

“It is important that these laws operate to meet the aspirations of the majority of native title holders and can’t be used by minority elements to simply disrupt projects,” he said.