A private coal mining company has been accused of illegally proceeding with an open cut mine, despite not having the required approvals. The land is home to threatened species including Koalas. The company denies the allegations, saying those approvals aren’t needed.
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00:00Among these trees in central Queensland are creatures threatened with extinction.
00:07Greater gliders, glossy black cockatoos and koalas.
00:12But this valuable habitat is being bulldozed for coal mining.
00:17Whether it's just the clearing of the trees, the fragmenting of the habitat
00:22or whether it's all of the traffic associated with the mine,
00:25there's so many impacts that all come together
00:28and make it really quite a hostile environment for koalas.
00:32This development is an open-cut test pit for a coal mine.
00:35So far, it's cleared an area of native animal habitat the size of about 25 MCGs.
00:42Conservationists say this is illegal coal mining.
00:45Anyone that's going to clear that much land
00:49without all the proper approvals in place,
00:52in our mind, is a completely illegal activity.
00:55To understand the allegation, we need to look at the company's plans.
00:59Vitranite is currently waiting for federal approval to build this coal mine.
01:04These areas are to be open-cut pits.
01:07This here would be a dump and this would be infrastructure.
01:11But already Vitranite has gone ahead and built an open-cut pit here,
01:16a dump here and infrastructure here.
01:19It's describing that work as a coal sampling project.
01:23Vitranite's chief operating officer said
01:25the clearing, mining and construction on the site is a different project,
01:29not associated with the project awaiting approval.
01:32Michael Cowan said the Vulcan South project
01:35has not and will not commence prior to receiving approval.
01:39These activities are not of a scale that require separate referral.
01:44Environmental lawyer Dunya Jacobs thinks that's wrong.
01:48It makes a mockery of our environment laws
01:51to assert that a test pit constructed at the same site as a coal pit
01:57that's undergoing a federal environmental assessment
02:00and doesn't yet have approval
02:03is somehow a separate and unrelated project
02:06that doesn't require that approval in order to commence.
02:11It really worries me that anyone would go ahead without federal approval,
02:16without proper consideration under the EPBC Act,
02:20if they're going to have an impact on a threatened species.
02:23The Federal Environment Department is investigating.