Is widespread anger in the bush over the march of coalmining, the loss of productive farmland, the spread of coal seam gas exploration and its perceived threat to the Great Artesian Basin really a proxy for much deeper political misgivings? If so, who is at fault and who has most to lose?
THE Tyson family has lived on, and loved, the land for six generations.
“We were just living a quiet life as graziers. You have your dramas with seasons and so on, but they are things we understand,” says Mr Tyson, 61.
What they don’t understand is how an international mining company based in a place they’ve never heard of called Zug 16,000km away in Switzerland can suddenly move in and turn a century of family history upside down, along with their hopes and plans.
Alan Jones speaks to Rob McCreath about the impact of coal mining in Queensland.
Durum wheat is going head-to-head with coal seam gas in a battle over the state’s top agricultural region.
The Federal Govt. has been put on notice of a new environmental battlefront, to save our water, agricultural land and urban areas.
Governments — state and federal — have operated under a covert two-speed morality for years and have two separate laws in place. The first insists that the landholder promote the sustainable use of natural resources, while the other allows CSG and coal companies to damage and obliterate natural resources without proper governance or penalty.
The environmental argument is brutal: coalmining moves into fertile farmland and leaves a slag heap behind, while coal seam gas extraction pollutes and poisons the underground water system, the most important natural resource in the world’s most arid nation.
Cotton growers, eco-tourists, crack-of-dawn dairy workers, lifestyle hippies, mango growers, corporate drop-out tree changers and outback cattle runners are speaking with a single voice: “Stop the madness.”
The Environmental Protection Authority is investigating, after a white, frothy liquid was filmed spurting from a coal seam gas mining site in Camden in south-west Sydney, a few hundred metres from an open drinking water channel.
“But a seam of black rock lies nearly a mile beneath the topsoil he has so scrupulously nurtured, and the deposit contains enormous quantities of natural gas. Profit-hungry energy companies — and the politicians that their campaign donations support — are determined to exploit that resource, even though it could destroy the livelihoods of thousands of small farmers like Jaffe.”
A gas well blowout spilled thousands of gallons of hydraulic fracking drilling fluid water in the US state of Pennsylvania, state and local regulators said.
Palmer blasts ‘poisonous’ coal seam gas industry