PHIL apparently did the research about the NTT's form, made a risk assessment based on what he had discovered and put his money where his mouth was. Moreover he was willing to share the findings of his analysis on hc. True he got the NTT call wrong. But I would rather see input of the type offered by PHIL than the nonsense chook entrails analysis so prevalent on hc.
And the legislation that Mr Sumner was acting under is commonwealth law, not state law. The WA Government was a party to the proceedings and I assume that they would have appeal rights to the decision, just like Reward and the Martu.
As PHIL has pointed out, the decision by Sumner to give total control of the LD potash prospect to the native title party is without precedent. The ruling is an obvious problem for state governments and mining companies going forward. Sumner could have decided to allow the "act" to proceed subject to stringent conditions to protect the concerns of the Martu. But this would have required the Martu, as well as Reward, to act within certain constraints. With Sumner's decision however the Martu can keep saying the LD is culturally significant until they think they have drained off all of the profits from the project (for them, no risk but maximum reward).
An interesting sidebar to this is that Sumner, who is an ex-Labor pollie from SA, was content never to apply the "must not act" ruling when all the state governments were Labor. With this decision and with a Liberal government now in WA he has however decided to give the native title party total discretion in whether to develop their land. One read could be that there is no such thing as an ex-Labor politican.
RWD Price at posting:
45.0¢ Sentiment: Hold Disclosure: Held
