Too many cooks in the mining kitchen in Australia

Australia’s rich resources are credited with buffering the nation from the Global Financial Crisis. But as the boom continues, a fractured network of regulators seems ill-equipped to properly check its impact and if Australia can’t regulate its mining industry what hope is there for Papua New Guinea?

By Sarah-Jane Collins

In the tropical northern Australian wet season from December until about March, mining companies are on alert. Water holdings swell, rainwater mixing with used-water storages that must be released in accordance with the environmental guidelines.

Sometimes companies are forced to pump water from pit to pit, making sure it doesn’t break containment and seep out into the surrounding environment. For some operations that can mean weeks of vigilant monitoring and constant pumping from one pit to the next – anything to stop an unauthorised release of the contaminated waste water.

But sometimes the system fails, the wet season is too unrelenting and the waters rise too high, breaking out of their holding wells and disused pits, and flowing freely into water catchments used by local farmers, graziers and towns.

Mining, so often lauded as the solution to Australia’s economic woes, is big business. Across the country, mining operations big and small not only beef up the country’s financial bottom line they draw on natural resources, create waste rock and water, and make a significant contribution to carbon emissions. A 2010 report by the Federal Government’s department of climate change said growth in carbon emissions to 2020 “is dominated by emissions associated with the extraction and processing of energy resources driven by strong export demand.”

As mining becomes a bigger slice of Australian industry, more and more exploration occurs each year. The Australian Bureau of Statistics quarterly reports on mining activity estimate that in the September quarter of 2011, expenditure on exploration rose 6.2 per cent on the previous quarter, totalling more than $919 million. Overall, the report found the amount being spent on exploration had risen 45.4 per cent on the estimate from the September quarter in 2010. Most of this exploration has happened in the two boom states, Queensland and Western Australia.

How the system is regulated is a patchwork of state and federal rules imposed by myriad authorities. The federal government weighs in on treaty issues, world environmental obligations and threats to endangered species. What it does not do is regulate the entire system.

But with such rapid growth, communities and environmental groups have begun to ask more questions about the strength of the current regulatory framework. A key concern, raised over and over again to The Global Mail, is whether government has allowed the politics of the mining boom, and the rhetoric of jobs and national economic needs to overshadow key environmental issues such as water contamination and climate change. They argue not enough is being done to ensure we are not sacrificing the quality of our arable land, air and water for the benefit of an industry that has created, in their disputed view, a mythology that ties Australia’s economic success to its continued expansion and development.

Community advocates, former government regulators and academics in the field all have raised questions about a lack of crucial oversight and what they dub a state of “regulatory capture” where public servants tick boxes without critical analysis — that has lead to environmental problems across a range of mining ventures and a number of states. The recent hearings of the Queensland floods inquiry show there can be flexibility in how regulations are determined and enforced by those monitoring mining sites.

Read the full article: http://www.theglobalmail.org/feature/too-many-cooks-in-the-mining-kitchen/18/