Paul Arrowsmith, Yelgun
The withdrawal of CSG miners from the state of NSW must not be seen as a win. They have merely retreated until a few things change in their favour. The state water ‘sharing’ policy is one of those ‘things’. Underground water is still being threatened.
Miners will soon be able to take water from one catchment and use it in another, where it is in short supply or involves a threatened aquifer. Rights to water may be traded by mining companies or any other corporate entity involved.
Compliance regarding who gets it and how it is being used and abused has been severely compromised by the O’Farrell government’s devious cutbacks to staff who are suitably trained, from a total of six, statewide, to one compliance officer/scientist for the whole state, thus removing internal departmental peer review and facilitating the possibility to rush through approvals at the request of the politically well connected miners and their lobby groups or a government that is using its outdated legislative powers to facilitate the miners’ needs.
CSG mining is rarely if ever mentioned in the Water Sharing Policy detail outlined in NSW government websites; however, ‘industry’ is. Add to this the minister for local government Don Page’s move in state parliament to make local councils answerable to him as opposed to the residents and ratepayers and his new council disqualification regime.
The way is being cleared to throw the gates open to all those who promise the best environmental procedures and deliver few if any as they extract what they want and destroy all that gets in their way.
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
