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Tuesday 20 September 2011

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Greens CSG legislation before parliament

Friday, 26 August 2011 James McGrath

FEDERAL Greens Senator Larissa Waters introduced her muchpublicised landowners rights bill into the Senate this week, which would restrict access for coal seam gas explorers to food producing land.
The bill would apply to all land deemed to have produced food any time in the 10 years prior to the first proposed coal seam gas activity on the land. The bill would not be applied retroactively, and it would not infringe upon the ownership rights of the Commonwealth to the resources of the land, something Waters said would safeguard against a landholder unreasonably refusing access authorisation. Under the proposed legislation, any corporation caught engaging in coal seam gas mining without the express written consent of all owners would be slapped with 5000 penalty units, and be forced to pay legal costs if the landowners sought an injunction against it, regardless of the outcome. An action against a corporation exploring for CSG without the written permission of all landowners would be able to be brought at any time within six years of the cause of the action occurring. The written letter to landowners must contain, among other things, an independent assessment of the current and future risks associated with the proposed coal seam gas mining activity on the land in question. The intent of this bill is to allow farmers to say no to coal seam gas mining on their land, Waters said. When Australia has so little good quality agricultural land, only about 1 to 2 per cent, we must protect it from all other inconsistent land use. She also reiterated the Greens position that a moratorium on all coal seam gas approvals should be applied so the environmental effects of hydraulic fracturing can be fully tested. While the bill has now formally been introduced into the Senate, observers are sceptical about it being enshrined in legislation. Tim Hanmore from Queensland-based law firm McCullough Robertson told EnergyNewsBulletin last week he didnt think the legislation would get up or was necessary as there were already significant checks and balances in the environmental and community impact assessment processes which had been in place for years. Landowners need to be involved, landowners need appropriate compensation and landowners need a right of veto in relation to some areas, for example around their homes, he said. But there has to be some balance. To say that they should be able to impose outright conditions on a project and veto access across their land would have the potential to kill resources expansions altogether and I just don't think that would be the balance we need when we've got such great resources out there. Meanwhile, Lock the Gate Alliance chairman Drew Hutton has faced court over his arrest in March at an anti-mining rally on Queensland's western Darling Downs. He was arrested for preventing QGC from entering a property on the Tara residential estate. Hutton said he was only trying to stop the company from entering private land and pled not guilty. That company should not have been coming on to this landowner's property without the approval of the landowner, Hutton was quoted by the ABC as
Larissa Waters

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EnergyNewsBulletin.net - Greens CSG legislation before parliament

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saying. Its just a summary offence but it does carry a maximum $50,000 fine. Its meant to stop people from doing this sort of thing, but I deliberately got arrested so I could test this legislation. Click here to read the rest of today's news stories.

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