interesting article, page-22

Bunya, always appreciate the posts from someone close on the ground.

Two points:
DERM and its successors (AFAIK and I have been told this verbally) knows full well about the legacy pollution problems such as the Kingaroy depot, old dip sites and leakage from petrol stations. They also are aware of adding more problems from new landuses in future.
So, the regulatory approach is to prevent new contamination developing (recent commentary about methane leakage from gasfields, coaldust blowing from ports and trains suggests this rule is not uniformly applied, which would be a political decision from the government of the day)
and to have old contamination remediated progressively, often by requiring remediation before sale or a formal acceptance by the buyer that the land is contaminated and expensive remediation will be required at some point in the future (lenders don't like).
Secondly, KCCG seems happy to accept that in 20 years a massive new open cut coal mine will be venting dust, fumes, noise and lights to within a couple of hundred meters of the CXY operation site. No problems with the complete destruction of an environment their mate.

I don't understand which way Facty was going with his 'chickenfeed' comment. (Hello Factfinder, happy New Year!)