It is hard to see what earthly difference this latest Planning Assessment Commission (PAC) public meeting into the Shenhua Watermark Coal Project will make.
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There are proponents speaking for the project, but it is largely a case of speaker after speaker pleading for the mine not to go ahead.
Many of them are the same speakers from the last PAC meeting earlier this year, making the same arguments.
It didn’t wash with PAC the first time – why is it likely to be any different now?
Why hold the meeting unless there is something new to say?
There is a real sense of weariness from both sides of this story.
For Shenhua, what might have seemed like a good prospect about six or seven years ago has dragged on and on.
Whatever you might think of the mine, the Chinese company has already invested millions and millions in the project and in the community.
On the other side of the fence (literally), you have farmers. Some of these people have farmed the same patch of the Liverpool Plains for generations.
Their families have learnt how to make the best of the beautiful soil and the ideal farming conditions without stripping it for the next generation.
These people are looking at a huge mine sitting next door and are scared their water, their air and even their soil – their livelihood and their legacy – will be destroyed. All for a mine that will be over and done with in 30 years time.
In the past five years that this project has dragged through the approvals process, no one has been the winner.
The approvals process is most definitely necessary, but is it achieving anything at all?
It appears to have been five long years of passing the buck and shuffling paperwork around in the hope that in the end, someone will give up.
In projects this large, no one is going to give up.
Whatever the decision, there is grief ahead. And the grief will only be exacerbated by five long years of uncertainty and fear.