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Woodvale community representatives claim the state government was deliberately misleading during its recent decision to approve the transfer of several mining licenses.
Woodvale Progress Association president Brendan Bartlett provided documents of approval to the Bendigo Advertiser which bear the signature of the then-minister for energy and resources, Lily D'Ambrosio, dated April 7 this year.
Two weeks later Mr Bartlett received an email from the Earth Resources regulatory compliance director which said that no decision had been made on the transfer of the licences from Unity Mining to GBM.
On April 26, a spokesperson for the Minister D'Ambrosio repeated that statement to the Advertiser.
“The proposed transfer of the licence to GBM Gold is still being considered and no decision has been made as yet,” the spokesperson said.
Mr Bartlett said he believed the community was deliberately left in the dark while the transfer occurred “behind closed doors”.
“We’ve been deceived,” he said. “And that deception makes us skeptical about this whole process.”
Groundwater rising though the city’s network of underground mines was pumped to Woodvale evaporation ponds until last June when the practice was stopped due to concerns about arsenic and heavy metals.
Minister D'Ambrosio announced the mining transfer approval on May 9, requiring GBM to assume Unity’s responsibility to rehabilitate several of the evaporation ponds.
The Woodvale Progress Association president has also penned a letter to the editor in tomorrow’s Advertiser in which he said he believed the decision was kept hidden from the public so as to avoid a challenge to the approval.
“The community were not informed of this decision until May 9, which we understand is outside the time period to appeal the decision via conventional means,” Mr Bartlett writes.
The Advertiser attempted to contact Ms D'Ambrosio, asking whether the Woodvale Progress Association was misled.
A spokesperson for Ms D'Ambrosio, now minister for energy, environment and climate change, referred the question to the new minister for resources, Wade Noonan. The spokesperson said there was no mechanism for the community to challenge the minister’s decision and so claimed the premise of the statement was wrong.
Woodvale community representative on the mine’s environmental review committee, Gary Davis, said the community had been failed by regulators.
"I don't have a beef with the mining company,” Mr Davis said. “Like any organisation, they will try and increase their profit margins for their shareholders.
“Our main issue is the fact the government department in place like Earth Resources are the people that should be effectively managing the work plan, in other words, what the mining company should be allowed to do or not to do.
“Earth Resources have once again lied to us, how can we trust them?”
As a condition of this month’s licence transfer, GBM was required to rehabilitate the two largest ponds at the Woodvale site within two years and can only send treated water to the site and for use in dust suppression.
But Mr Bartlett had been advocating for the Woodvale evaporation ponds to be “forcibly removed” from the rest of the mining transfer so that Unity retained the responsibility to rehabilitate the land.
He did so based on transcripts of an ERC meeting in March in which GBM’s chief executive officer John Harrison is recorded as saying he had no interest in taking over the Woodvale site.
“So it was a real kick in the guts when this approval was announced … and worse when we realised it had been approved all along,” he said.