Mining regulation in Australia

The mining industry has changed significantly over the last 20 years with regulations and the environment playing a key role in the way the sector operates. Mitchell Hooke explains the processes companies must go through to get mining approvals and defends the industry’s environmental credentials.

Twenty years ago mining was rightly or wrongly regarded as the neighbour from hell. We weren’t engaged with the community or appropriately aligned with many of the key principles of sustainable development.

But what a difference two decades have made. In the past 20 years there has been a fundamental change in the minerals resources industry’s approach to the way it operates and a top-to-bottom embrace of the triple bottom line.

Our environmental and social performance is every bit as important as our economic achievements.

This makes claims by author Paul Cleary in his latest book, Too Much Luck: The Mining Boom and Australia’s Future, more than a little hard to fathom. Cleary asserts that the minerals resources industry hides its environmental performance and operates in a “loose” regulatory regime. This is news to us.

As well as a fundamental change in the way we operate, the regulatory environment in Australia has been dramatically strengthened across all jurisdictions in recent years.

The minerals resources sector is now the most heavily regulated industry in Australia, with mining approvals typically requiring consent from all three levels of Government.

Added to that there are extensive periods of public consultation, comprehensive environmental and social impact assessments, lodgement of environmental bonds or securities with governments and ongoing reporting and assessment to ensure that the operation remains entirely consistent with the heavily conditioned approval.

And layered on top of that again, almost all the States and Territories further restrict this process for approvals with additional policies designed to shield certain regions.

Mining approvals in Australia now typically take between five to seven years to complete and comprise a complex array of licences and approvals from a range of different government agencies. This includes mines departments, environmental protection agencies, heritage and native title/land rights authorities, wildlife conservation administrators, water licencing bodies and even departments of consumer and employee protection.

Further, if a project has the potential to impact on a matter of national environmental significance or Indigenous heritage, it is has to be assessed and approved by the Commonwealth.

All of this is undertaken separately to State and Federal Treasury’s considerations of their current and future receipt of taxes and royalties from the minerals sector. If Governments were only interested in revenue, no project would ever be rejected or so heavily environmentally conditioned.

Similarly, approvals are never taken in isolation of the other activities impacting on the environment or communities.

A case in point is the recent Namoi Catchment Water Study initiated by the independent member for New England Tony Windsor. This study found that even with the highest growth scenario for resource development within the catchment, the collective impacts of coal mining and coal seam gas extraction can be effectively managed without negatively affecting agricultural water use across the region.

Indeed, the potential impacts on water draw-down by mining and CSG would be low compared to existing water draw-down from current land uses in the region, largely agricultural.

Once a mine has received approval, which usually includes hundreds of environmental and social caveats, any variation from the approved mining proposal requires a separate approval and public consultation period.

Companies are then required to lodge annual environmental reports outlining any environmental management activity undertaken in the past 12 months and any proposed to be undertaken in the upcoming year. These are all publicly available.

We do not hide our environmental performance.

Nor has the minerals resources industry has ever sought to diminish regulatory standards. A condition of membership of the Minerals Council of Australia includes a commitment to Enduring Value – the Australian Minerals Industry Framework for Sustainable Development.

Recognised by the United Nations as a leading industry framework, Enduring Value provides a suite of community developed performance objectives that exceed regulation, complemented by public disclosure requirements on our environmental and social impacts.

The Minerals Council’s critique of the approvals system has centred on approvals taking too long, being too costly, too bureaucratic and  ‘process driven’ rather than being focussed on good outcomes, and not always representative of the objectives of Government or the community.

Similarly, neither the Government nor the Opposition propose to reduce regulatory oversight, but rather to streamline assessments and approvals, freeing the resources in the approvals system to focus even more strongly on critical risks and to ensure their effective management.

No-one is proposing to deny Government the authority to both review and enforce project conditions.

The evidence of the extent of industry regulation, and the robust nature of government enforcement and compliance approaches, is irrefutable.

Unfortunately, there are still many who operate in a factual vacuum relying on the word of academics and activists whose raison d’etre is to raise funds to campaign against mining developments.