It had nothing to do with ensuring the survival of the yakka skink and the ornamental snake; they inhabit much of Queensland. And it had even less to do with Green celebrations about blocking a ‘climate disaster and a Reef destroyer’. The Federal Court decision to set aside, on a technicality, Greg Hunt’s year-old federal approval of the massive $16 billion Carmichael Coal development in the Galilee basin was really all about the environment movement’s successful campaign of legal sabotage of Australian mining projects. Largely paid for by Australian taxpayers.

The Federal Court decision (at the government’s own request when it saw how the case was going) rested on the ‘technicality’ of the failure to document the Minister’s consideration of the mine’s impact on the skink and snake – although he had clearly done so, having imposed, as a condition of the approval, that they be protected. But after Hunt corrects this bureaucratic error, no doubt the activist will seek to return to the legal fray to pursue their main destructive purpose. For the Court, in dealing only with the technical error, said nothing whatsoever about the substance of the activists’ legal action which was, inevitably, all about the climate change impact of the project and the allegedly poor environmental record of its owner, the Indian Adami group.

As the Australian Conservation Foundation has proudly asserted, the courts are now an integral part of the strategy to stop projects like Carmichael going ahead, with court challengers serving the purpose of creating uncertainty and so scaring off potential lenders, like banks. This is a real threat to Tony Abbott’s ‘Australia is open for business’, with every proposed project, especially from overseas, being vulnerable to years of delays from a series of legal challenges. Abbott has warned that, while people have the right to take legal action, Australia has a real problem if vital national developments can be endlessly delayed by turning courts into ‘a means of sabotaging projects’.

Labor has now indicated it would be likely to support the government’s amendment removing the risk of a repeat of the Carmichael technical problem (which reflected Labor’s own difficulties when in office with the Tasmanian Shree mine). And the Queensland Labor government is considering putting time limits on objections.

Environmentalists have a strategic interest in Carmichael which it sees as only the first stage of opening up, by building an expensive rail infrastructure, a huge new coal province in the Galilee basin with low operating costs that would ‘act to depress the price of coal internationally and improving its attractiveness relative to lower carbon alternatives for power generation’. The absurdity of this desire to price Australia’s lower-polluting coal out of rapidly expanding regional markets (like India) that otherwise would be consuming massively increasing quantities of highly-polluting, atmosphere-damaging lower-cost Asian coal, represents a curiously irrational approach to the environment.

But as the Australian’s Graham Lloyd commented, the setting aside of the Carmichael approval will add to the momentum of court actions using crowd-sourced funds and public environmental defenders to delay, frustrate and demolish fossil fuels as environment groups use this newly litigious approach to test major projects like the Liverpool Plains. Here the issue is really about possible damage to the water table, which is of vital agricultural importance, by a mine that would be in the hills, at least a kilometre away from the plains. While Governmental approvals are dependent on there being no significant impacts on either groundwater or the black soil plains and there is also a buffer between the key groundwater resources and the mine, the populist anti-mining campaign has created the totally false impression that the mine, ‘in the middle’ of the magnificently fertile black soil plains, would itself destroy this prime agricultural land. While there may be justifiable cynicism about the prospect of bureaucratic oversight effectively protecting the water table (it failed to do so in the now-closed Medway mine in the Southern Highlands of NSW), anti-coal campaigners would be more convincing if they stuck to the truth.