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By Christopher Kennedy The project is, from an environmental point of view, frightening. In a cluttered back room the reader, an environmentalist, tries to wade through the huge pile of engineering data in the environmental impact statement. The deeper he or she goes, the more hypothetical the work presented by the project developers, the more lost and worried the reader becomes. It can become tricky to keep a coherent view, especially when you are presented with a document that you know was written by intelligent scientists, then vetted by lawyers and public relations experts to get it through the approval process. You cannot help but believe that the combination of freedom of thought and cold hard realities leaves you open to people who are seriously trying to muck with your mind. "Look at it this way", the readers argue to themselves. "They are trying to say that this project is on the cutting edge of technology. They have spent a lot of money to present this as a sophisticated boon to the state economy. But this is not cutting edge; in fact, this is a case of mutton dressed as lamb being served at the table of a wealthy lawyer. And who is going to say it is not lamb?" The problem with arguing against an environmental impact statement, which for a project costing over a hundred million dollars is going to run into thousands of pages, is that it is a hypothetical document. Although we may see the effects of a similar project in other areas, no project of that size is going to have the same design or effect. If, at the end of the reading, the environmentalists simply shake their heads and say, "This is so much like that other project, which is not one that the world needs repeated", then they are working on facts. But the company that wishes to have this project up and going may take the view that such a complex statement as the EIS has no relationship to past projects, and use a mix of raw scientific data and seeming common sense to prove its point. The company simply demands the right to security, and that the law not be changed on a project by project basis. Therefore it has the right to proceed, as it did before. It is into the face of this self-righteousness that the environmentalist must go. There is also the claim of innocent until proven guilty, so the project developers have the right, in the end, to say, "We haven't done anything yet". If, however, a regulation such as SEPP [State Environmental Planning Policy] 45 is brought in, as happened in NSW last year to speed the introduction of the Bengalla mine in the Hunter Valley, then the environmentalist must contend with a policy that its author summarises as meaning, "Where a local environmental plan permits mining, and the mining company goes through the full requisite environmental impact statement legal process, the local councils or others cannot add qualifications". So long as that EIS is written, and the project is placed where mining is allowed — basically not in some downtown area — then the final say on the matter is the state government's. The locals, and concerned groups such as conservationists, farmers, leisure seekers, once the mine has been started, have no recourse to any type of Land and Environment Court. Of course, the Environmental Protection Authority is there to produce a submission to the minister on the desirability of the project. But there are problems with that as well. In the of a $180 million gold project to be based on and within the flood plain of Lake Cowal, NSW's largest inland lake and a major wetland reserve, a commission of inquiry has just received submissions from all interested parties, who now by law have the right to two submissions, an original one and a reply. Two major problems have occurred with this public inquiry. The first is that the Environmental Protection Authority, being a NSW-based organisation, does not, in the words of a senior member of the department, have the expertise to criticise a large gold mining project. In a courtroom or inquiry, where one group of experts tries to find fault with another, EPA does not have the guns. The second problem is that the local West Wyalong Council is being accused by its constituents of not displaying the submissions to committee that are opposed to the project. Of more than 100 submissions, only the handful of positive were left to public display, and the citizens would have had to drive to Sydney to find the full range of submissions. The senior EPA officer is confident that the mine will not go ahead, that too many government departments are already incensed by the fact that it was proposed at all. But there is evidence that the process has already not been enforced to the letter. Back in the room with the conservationists, having read the EIS, the next step is to find the environmental record of the company. This is a common business practice, of course. Should the company involved be one with a long record of confrontation with the environment lobby, then it would seem necessary to find the government's position on the project. If the government has recently brought in a regulation such as SEPP 45, as the Carr government has done, then a certain girding of loins is necessary. Go through the officially approved process and hope the inquiry is not going to be rigged? The decision is made not to bother. Going straight to federal parliament and trying to stop the project via a Senate inquiry or legislation seems more suitable. The state parliament reduces its powers by such legislation, as more people try to avoid such an obviously biased system. The right to protection for the citizen is drastically reduced. As for the environmentalists, they have saved enormous amounts of time, frustration and extremely limited resources by avoiding the state's procedures.