This was raised at the AGM Mitchy.
I don't remember PB's complete answer, however it went along the lines of:
- EIS should be MUCH more straight forward than mine site EIS (much less environmental impact ie. - we're not digging anything up or extracting bulk water)
- Even though we are neighbors to Inpex, we still need to address items covered off by neighbors including Inpex ie. ducks flying across site, but I would assume that there is a pretty good precedent set there with the agreed impact and mitigation measures.
I think that the company learnt a LOT from the Mt. Peake EIS (#1 learning - just because you have a tier 1 environmental consultant on the job there is no guarantee that they won't balls it up!).
From the Mt. Peake EIS I think the consultant misunderstood what was required regarding proving that our water extraction wasn't going to cause a problem to the water table. This should have been spelt out in the terms of reference. The delays were caused because the Government needed quite a lot of work to gather evidence in the supplement to EIS.
Here is a link to a flow chart of the process: https://ntepa.nt.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0004/286753/eiaFlowchart.pdf