Mr AE Stannard’s letter commenting on the current mining issues on the Liverpool Plains (“Land conservation is in Hubbard’s veins”, NDL, February 23) is a very perceptive and necessary contribution to the debate about the Shenhua mining development.
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Mr Stannard emphasises the way that local farmers have been improving and conserving their properties “and the subsequent economic benefits”. He estimates some “$2.4 billion worth of farm products” annually.
This economic performance has not been valued by recent governments. Despite multiple assurances of protection for prime farmland, the water resources, and fairness in all exploration and exploitation agreements, the land and its owners have been demeaned and diminished by government and business.
Landholders minding their own business have been confronted by demands against their own properties that are always very expensive to oppose, through no fault of their own.
Land access agreements have been totally one-sided and are increasingly reprehensible.
Cohorts of highly-paid lawyers have stood over rural people without access to similarly senior legal advisors.
The situation has even forced the government to review its access guidelines and the arbitration conditions that accompany them.
An article in The Land (“Key issues missed in land access draft”, February 19) describes what has been happening in all its disgraceful procedures.
Farmers have been subjected to a biased and unjust procedure which did not give them legal equality, refused to recognise any compensation for “damage done to improvements made by the landholder to the property”.
These are the sorts of very costly improvements that Mr Stannard identifies; we are not talking about tennis courts and swimming pools on farms here.
Damage is caused on-farm by all the mining activities – exploration and exploitation.
At present the “arbitrators who conduct hearings do not need to have legal qualifications” and the process can go on for some time. All of which costs farmers money that they can ill-afford.
The current review suggests “guidelines” that include “baseline reports” about the “current state of the land”. It also suggests that farmers “would have just five days to respond to the report”. Five days in which to try to save something from the expropriation of your land.
A “Sydney legal senior counsel said the guidelines would not just affect procedure, ‘there are substantive matters there relating to compensable loss and significant improvements. The guidelines state pasture improvements are not compensable under arbitration, and the system would mean a much tighter time frame for landholders to work in. Miners employ lawyers and experts which landholders can’t afford’”.
If anybody still thinks that our governments are taking a long-term and broadly equitable view about the costs and benefits of land use changes, and that they are being honest with rural and regional residents, they are deluded.
