Mining company Adani has admitted to clearing six hectares of bushland to build tracks and drill pads near boreholes on its giant Carmichael mine, without declaring this in its regular reporting to the Queensland government.
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Now conservationists accuse the company of breaching the Oaths Act because lodging the reports include signing a statutory declaration.
Overall, Adani cleared about six hectares of land to access six groundwater test bores and five groundwater bore holes.
The total land cleared was about the size of 10 residential lots in Brisbane.
Those track clearances and the disturbance of vegetation, which are allowed under the company’s stage one approval for the mine, were described by protesters in the Adani borehole dispute last week.
However they were not formally reported to Queensland’s Department of Environment and Science.
Adani Australia on Tuesday admitted the mistake and issued a statement “self-declaring” its actions.
“Areas on the mining lease that were disturbed during the final three and-a-half weeks of the annual return period should have been included, and exploration disturbance prior to the reporting period should have been carried across,” the statement reads.
“We have now provided this information to the regulator and have released it publicly.
“Critically, we can confirm that all physical works that have occurred onsite to date are Stage 1 project activities related to geological sampling and ground water investigations, which are permitted under our environmental authority.
“We identified this reporting error and notified the regulator. We have also made improvements to our procedures to ensure administrative errors of this nature do not occur in the future.”
Adani Australia cleared about 5.8 hectares of land on the Moray Downs pastoral lease, which it owns, between March 9 and April 2.
“For each bore we cleared a narrow vehicle access track to give access to a drill rig and support vehicles and an area less than the size of a tennis court around the drill hole, which is required as a workplace safety precaution," the statement reads.
Environmental Defenders Organisation lawyer Jo Bragg said Adani should have known of the error because lodging the reports are lodged with the Department of Environment and Science, requires Adani to sign a statutory legal declaration that the documents are correct.
"This is not an administrative error; this is in fact a very serious error," she said.
"We will be very interested to see what their assertion is, whether they say it was unintentional.
"But the point is that they ought reasonably to have known this is incorrect and it is pretty clearly, misleading.
"They were saying there is no disturbance when they are now saying it was six hectares.
"We are expecting the Queensland Environment Department will immediately look into this and because of the statutory declaration that has apparently been wrongly made it is potentially a breach of the Oaths Act."
Adani has now cleared a total of 127 hectares of land on its Carmichael Mine site.
