Coast and Country Association of Queensland Inc v Minister for Environment and Heritage Protection

Mining law and its close relative environment and planning law tend to resonate in the public imagination as intimately connected with land. Yet as creatures of statute, these fields of law are largely procedural. Their operation falls within the realm of executive discretion, to be exercised in accordance with a complex statutory framework. Integral to the framework is provision for objections to mining activity, requiring adjudication between the miner, the decision-maker, and the objectors. Arising from the statutory framework, litigation concerning the carrying out of mining activities tends to be framed as judicial review of the executive decision. This draws the parties and the judges into the statutory framework, and the legal exercise is one of statutory interpretation rather than anything approaching an intuitive examination of the land, of nature, or of human experience. Ecology, often intrinsic to objections, is extrinsic to the decision-making process and its revision by the Court.