Jason Steele loves showing off the Blackdown Tablelands National Park, a spectacular sandstone plateau that rises abruptly from the plains on Ghungalu country in central Queensland."The vista is an area of natural beauty, but at the base of it, it is pretty much going to be a coal mine," Mr Steele says.
Their dealings with the company go back to 2015, when Magnetic South acquired a pre-existing tenure that sat over their property.Mrs Vaughn said Magnetic South kept them in the loop for the next couple of years, but that all changed when the miner offered to buy Red Rock Park at a sum the couple rejected as too low.In October 2019, Magnetic South lodged its application for an environmental authority with the Department of Environment and Science.
Magnetic South's manager James Xu said the company had not been in contact with the Vaughns since they submitted their objection to the EA because it was now following legal process. "I'm not against coal mining. I am just against how they get to where they want to go without jumping through the hoops," Mr Vaughn said.Retired engineer Trevor Naughton lives next to Taunton National Park, a scientific reserve known as Wallaby Lane that protects theBridled nail-tail wallaby numbers have more than doubled in Taunton National Park in the past five years.
The annual tonnage is just shy of the threshold needed to trigger an EIS – a rigorous assessment of environmental, social and economic impacts. "That's why we've done all the flora and fauna ecology – everything that the EA asks us to do," he said. He was unaware of the Gemini project until contacted by the ABC, and discovered Magnetic South had liaised with the cultural heritage group based in Brisbane.Mr Kemp said no-one locally had been consulted.
just madness They want to rip out the bush for more coal mines QLD Labor is in bed with coal miners They lost Brisbane to Greens but they keep going with coal mines