BULGA, Australia — Bulga, a hamlet nestled in the verdant hills of the wine country north of Sydney, is at the center of a legal dispute that could reshape the regulatory environment of a national economy heavily dependent on natural resource extraction.
On Wednesday, a court in the state of New South Wales is set to hear an appeal of a ruling this year that blocked the expansion of a nearby open-pit coal mine.
The ruling was on a lawsuit brought by Bulga residents against the British-Australian mining giant Rio Tinto.
The state is joining Rio in the appeal, which is being heard in the highest court in New South Wales. At stake is not just the fate of the village of 300 people.
The mining industry and other state governments will be watching the outcome closely as slowing growth in China, the chief consumer of Australian commodities, heightens anxieties over the country’s economy.
If the appeal succeeds, the mine expansion will proceed as approved by the state last year. If it fails, it could set a precedent that favors the environmental interests of local communities over the economic interests of state governments.
That would upend a system that has traditionally given primacy to the interests of large mining companies.
“This is a wake-up call,” Leslie Krey, 66, said in an interview at her house near the Bulga town center. “There’s got to be something other than mines,” said Ms. Krey, whose husband, John, is one of the leading opponents of expanding the mine.
In February 2012, the New South Wales planning authorities approved plans intended to extend the life of the Mount Thorley Warkworth Mine by more than a decade, to 2033.
Those plans involved expanding the operation, owned by a subsidiary of Rio Tinto, onto land that Rio Tinto had pledged in 2003 as a permanent conservation zone to shield Bulga from the mine.
Bulga residents feared that the noise and dust from an expanded mine would irrevocably damage the environment and reduce home values that were already low. In addition, Saddle Ridge, a spiny natural buffer between the town and the mine, would be demolished.
Also, a large section of the critically endangered Warkworth Sands Woodland would face eradication, the residents argued.
Many environmental studies were conducted, but no one, not even Rio, is disputing that the expansion would destroy the ridge and the woodland.
Rio is asserting that the economic benefit outweighs the environmental impact and is offering to set aside land elsewhere. Graham Witherspoon, a spokesman for Rio, declined to comment on any environmental or financial impact the mine may have on the community.
A citizens’ group, the Bulga-Milbrodale Progress Association, filed a suit to stop the expansion, and in April, the state’s Land and Environment Court issued a ruling in the group’s favor, citing “negative social impacts on local community” and threats to its “sense of place.”
Now, Rio Tinto has taken the unusual step of asking the New South Wales court to entirely void the ruling, which was handed down by Judge Brian J. Preston.
His ruling in April represented the first time the lower Land and Environment Court had ruled against an approved mining grant of this scope and scale, and it had the potential to significantly expand the court’s authority.
In a 2009 affidavit to the state’s Department of Planning, Rio Tinto argued that an expansion would give it access to an additional 163 million tons of coal over the lifetime of the mine.
The decision to expand the mine, it said, was based on a sharp increase in the long-term average price of coal to $53 per ton in 2009, from $33 per ton when the 2003 grant was approved. The represents more than $8 billion in additional revenue for the company over the life of the mine.
Mining, whether for the high-quality thermal coal around Bulga — the kind used to fuel power plants — or the iron and gold in the country’s vast open west, is woven deeply into the fabric of rural Australia, where it provides many of the best-paying and most stable jobs. It has also been the engine powering a decade of robust economic growth that has largely spared the country from the effects of the global downturn.
Rio Tinto says that if the ruling is upheld, production at the mine will begin to slow next year, with the eventual loss of more than 1,300 jobs across the region, the Hunter Valley.
That prospect has unsettled many mineworkers, including several interviewed during a recent tour of the Mount Thorley complex, which looks like a network of vast dusty shelves scored crudely into the hills, descending in places into deep pits.
Although the mine’s environmental manager said the complex was home to a population of curious kangaroos, there was no sign of life beyond the huge Caterpillar trucks that crawled slowly along the tracks. Jemma Callaghan, 37, drives one of those trucks.
She moved to the Hunter Valley six years ago for a permanent position after the grind of rotating shifts as a driver in other states left her exhausted. Whatever sense of security she gained in the move, she said, has now evaporated.
“You’re thinking about this 24/7 — what am I going to be doing in six months’ time?” she said. Wayne Dark, 54, said he had worked at the mine for more than 26 years and, like many others who are dependent on it, finds its potential shutdown almost impossible to fathom.
“For a range of people to have committees and talk for years and years about this, and then it’s granted, and for one man to come along and go, ‘No, I’ve changed my mind,’ I just find that very hard to swallow,” he said.
But for longtime Bulga residents like Stewart Mitchell, those arguments miss the point. When Mr. Mitchell was young and Bulga was an even smaller town than it is today, the sound of just a single engine echoing around the valley near his family’s farm was enough to stir up excitement, he said.
“We used to run out onto the veranda when we heard a car coming,” Mr. Mitchell, 71, said over the evening din at Bulga’s only pub, the Cockfighter Creek Tavern. “Not anymore, of course.”
Today, a fleet of building-size vehicles rumbles noisily day and night, carting away the pulverized hills one load at a time in the search for coal and, residents say, blanketing the surrounding area with dust. From the vantage of a sloping hill where Melanie Caban’s family has lived for about 80 years, the trucks are clearly visible and audible.
Like the others in town, Mrs. Caban has stories of sleepless nights connected to the mine, but she is hardly a partisan. Her husband works there.
The planned extension stretches in places to within about a mile of the town center — so close that Rio Tinto says it was obliged to buy at least two dozen houses that would have been too close to be inhabited safely. Her choice is perhaps as clear as anyone’s in Bulga. “If they come any closer,” she said, “we’ll have to go.”
nytimes.com
On Wednesday, a court in the state of New South Wales is set to hear an appeal of a ruling this year that blocked the expansion of a nearby open-pit coal mine.
The ruling was on a lawsuit brought by Bulga residents against the British-Australian mining giant Rio Tinto.
The state is joining Rio in the appeal, which is being heard in the highest court in New South Wales. At stake is not just the fate of the village of 300 people.
The mining industry and other state governments will be watching the outcome closely as slowing growth in China, the chief consumer of Australian commodities, heightens anxieties over the country’s economy.
If the appeal succeeds, the mine expansion will proceed as approved by the state last year. If it fails, it could set a precedent that favors the environmental interests of local communities over the economic interests of state governments.
That would upend a system that has traditionally given primacy to the interests of large mining companies.
“This is a wake-up call,” Leslie Krey, 66, said in an interview at her house near the Bulga town center. “There’s got to be something other than mines,” said Ms. Krey, whose husband, John, is one of the leading opponents of expanding the mine.
In February 2012, the New South Wales planning authorities approved plans intended to extend the life of the Mount Thorley Warkworth Mine by more than a decade, to 2033.
Those plans involved expanding the operation, owned by a subsidiary of Rio Tinto, onto land that Rio Tinto had pledged in 2003 as a permanent conservation zone to shield Bulga from the mine.
Bulga residents feared that the noise and dust from an expanded mine would irrevocably damage the environment and reduce home values that were already low. In addition, Saddle Ridge, a spiny natural buffer between the town and the mine, would be demolished.
Also, a large section of the critically endangered Warkworth Sands Woodland would face eradication, the residents argued.
Many environmental studies were conducted, but no one, not even Rio, is disputing that the expansion would destroy the ridge and the woodland.
Rio is asserting that the economic benefit outweighs the environmental impact and is offering to set aside land elsewhere. Graham Witherspoon, a spokesman for Rio, declined to comment on any environmental or financial impact the mine may have on the community.
A citizens’ group, the Bulga-Milbrodale Progress Association, filed a suit to stop the expansion, and in April, the state’s Land and Environment Court issued a ruling in the group’s favor, citing “negative social impacts on local community” and threats to its “sense of place.”
Now, Rio Tinto has taken the unusual step of asking the New South Wales court to entirely void the ruling, which was handed down by Judge Brian J. Preston.
His ruling in April represented the first time the lower Land and Environment Court had ruled against an approved mining grant of this scope and scale, and it had the potential to significantly expand the court’s authority.
In a 2009 affidavit to the state’s Department of Planning, Rio Tinto argued that an expansion would give it access to an additional 163 million tons of coal over the lifetime of the mine.
The decision to expand the mine, it said, was based on a sharp increase in the long-term average price of coal to $53 per ton in 2009, from $33 per ton when the 2003 grant was approved. The represents more than $8 billion in additional revenue for the company over the life of the mine.
Mining, whether for the high-quality thermal coal around Bulga — the kind used to fuel power plants — or the iron and gold in the country’s vast open west, is woven deeply into the fabric of rural Australia, where it provides many of the best-paying and most stable jobs. It has also been the engine powering a decade of robust economic growth that has largely spared the country from the effects of the global downturn.
Rio Tinto says that if the ruling is upheld, production at the mine will begin to slow next year, with the eventual loss of more than 1,300 jobs across the region, the Hunter Valley.
That prospect has unsettled many mineworkers, including several interviewed during a recent tour of the Mount Thorley complex, which looks like a network of vast dusty shelves scored crudely into the hills, descending in places into deep pits.
Although the mine’s environmental manager said the complex was home to a population of curious kangaroos, there was no sign of life beyond the huge Caterpillar trucks that crawled slowly along the tracks. Jemma Callaghan, 37, drives one of those trucks.
She moved to the Hunter Valley six years ago for a permanent position after the grind of rotating shifts as a driver in other states left her exhausted. Whatever sense of security she gained in the move, she said, has now evaporated.
“You’re thinking about this 24/7 — what am I going to be doing in six months’ time?” she said. Wayne Dark, 54, said he had worked at the mine for more than 26 years and, like many others who are dependent on it, finds its potential shutdown almost impossible to fathom.
“For a range of people to have committees and talk for years and years about this, and then it’s granted, and for one man to come along and go, ‘No, I’ve changed my mind,’ I just find that very hard to swallow,” he said.
But for longtime Bulga residents like Stewart Mitchell, those arguments miss the point. When Mr. Mitchell was young and Bulga was an even smaller town than it is today, the sound of just a single engine echoing around the valley near his family’s farm was enough to stir up excitement, he said.
“We used to run out onto the veranda when we heard a car coming,” Mr. Mitchell, 71, said over the evening din at Bulga’s only pub, the Cockfighter Creek Tavern. “Not anymore, of course.”
Today, a fleet of building-size vehicles rumbles noisily day and night, carting away the pulverized hills one load at a time in the search for coal and, residents say, blanketing the surrounding area with dust. From the vantage of a sloping hill where Melanie Caban’s family has lived for about 80 years, the trucks are clearly visible and audible.
Like the others in town, Mrs. Caban has stories of sleepless nights connected to the mine, but she is hardly a partisan. Her husband works there.
The planned extension stretches in places to within about a mile of the town center — so close that Rio Tinto says it was obliged to buy at least two dozen houses that would have been too close to be inhabited safely. Her choice is perhaps as clear as anyone’s in Bulga. “If they come any closer,” she said, “we’ll have to go.”
nytimes.com
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