“We have the largest pure water source in the world. In fact, the Great Artesian Basin covers a vast area of our land mass (almost one quarter in total), and Australia is one of the few countries where it is safe to drink the tap water at home. How can we even consider putting our fresh water supply at risk?”
Coal seam gas (CSG) mining can cause cancer and harm unborn babies, according to a group of medical experts giving evidence to a Senate committee.
The six experts, who include a Queensland government epidemiologist, say the state’s ban on the use of cancer-causing chemicals collectively known as BTEX in CSG mining doesn’t protect the community from health risks.
The plight of Jondaryan and its people has become a metaphor for the deliberate destruction of the Darling Downs by state and federal governments and their lapdogs at the Toowoomba Regional Council.
For them, farmers and communities have become inconsequential in the rush for coal and gas royalties and, with a brand of bureaucratic bullying borrowed from the Soviets, farmers have seen their sovereignty stripped while they are driven off their land.
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.
Durum wheat is going head-to-head with coal seam gas in a battle over the state’s top agricultural region.
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.”
“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.”
THE Great Artesian Basin Co-ordinating Committee has called for tighter regulation of mining and exploration in the area. There has been a dramatic increase in exploration and drilling, particularly for coal-seam gas, in the basin in recent years. The fear is that drilling will break water-bearing seams, causing contamination and water loss.
“We are being told it is all under control, but we don’t have enough evidence to satisfy ourselves that it won’t jeopardise the GAB in certain areas forever.”
Who regulates the regulators?