00:00Among these trees in central Queensland are creatures threatened with extinction.
00:07Greater gliders, glossy black cockatoos and koalas.
00:12But this valuable habitat is being bulldozed for coal mining.
00:17Whether it's just the clearing of the trees, the fragmenting of the habitat
00:22or whether it's all of the traffic associated with the mine,
00:25there's so many impacts that all come together
00:28and make it really quite a hostile environment for koalas.
00:32This development is an open-cut test pit for a coal mine.
00:35So far, it's cleared an area of native animal habitat the size of about 25 MCGs.
00:42Conservationists say this is illegal coal mining.
00:45Anyone that's going to clear that much land
00:49without all the proper approvals in place,
00:52in our mind, is a completely illegal activity.
00:55To understand the allegation, we need to look at the company's plans.
00:59Vitranite is currently waiting for federal approval to build this coal mine.
01:04These areas are to be open-cut pits.
01:07This here would be a dump and this would be infrastructure.
01:11But already Vitranite has gone ahead and built an open-cut pit here,
01:16a dump here and infrastructure here.
01:19It's describing that work as a coal sampling project.
01:23Vitranite's chief operating officer said
01:25the clearing, mining and construction on the site is a different project,
01:29not associated with the project awaiting approval.
01:32Michael Cowan said the Vulcan South project
01:35has not and will not commence prior to receiving approval.
01:39These activities are not of a scale that require separate referral.
01:44Environmental lawyer Dunya Jacobs thinks that's wrong.
01:48It makes a mockery of our environment laws
01:51to assert that a test pit constructed at the same site as a coal pit
01:57that's undergoing a federal environmental assessment
02:00and doesn't yet have approval
02:03is somehow a separate and unrelated project
02:06that doesn't require that approval in order to commence.
02:11It really worries me that anyone would go ahead without federal approval,
02:16without proper consideration under the EPBC Act,
02:20if they're going to have an impact on a threatened species.
02:23The Federal Environment Department is investigating.
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