Letter from QLD farmer to local paper: "On the shake of a hand – that is how deals used to be done in rural communities. The shake of a hand and your word was your bond. Then the CSG and mineral resource circus rolled into town and exploited the trust and faith of the rural landholders for their own ends. The first contacts were by landholder liaison officers, who were usually ex-rural based so were considered ‘trustworthy’, and the landholders were blindsided by ‘free money’ for the privilege of ‘exploration’ works undertaken on their land. Seismic surveys, exploratory well drilling, environmental and ecological impact surveys, all explained in non-threatening terms and the landholder had faith and trust that these companies would do the right thing. There were all the ‘presents’ – gravelled roads, grids, new gates so the landholder felt obligated to the resource company. Unfortunately, the information they were presented with didn’t reveal the impact yet to come when vehicles, heavy machinery, and people and phone calls, emails, faxes and meetings became an everyday unwelcome disruption to someone’s life and business. The wells were drilled and then had to be connected to pipelines so more disruption, meetings, phone calls, emails etc. Now compressor stations are needed to be connected to processing hubs and the local roads and residents are being heavily impacted by the thousands of heavy vehicle movements required to build these projects. This entire infrastructure now has to be powered so the substations and high voltage transmission lines solely being constructed for the CSG companies are moving in. The rural community had absolutely no comprehension of what was to come when the first landholder liaison officer showed up to chat about the ‘low impact’ CSG wells. No wonder landholders are feeling duped and embarrassed by the conduct and compensation agreements they naively signed at the beginning.."
Posted on: Fri, 27 Sep 2013 04:15:25 +0000
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