Good Gods! Are you suggesting that MEL management should have...

Good Gods!

Are you suggesting that MEL management should have adopted a strategy which might have resulted in the company having a Social Licence to Operate? Is this a tacit acknowledgement that attempting to ride roughshod over the local communities, refusing to engage with them and the attempted imposition of Mining by Martial Law was a bad strategy?

Of course what you propose would have been a better prospect than that adopted - it MAY have represented the only chance of moving MEL's resource into the Reserve category - BUT it is fifteen years too late. I don't believe such an abrupt change of strategy would be accepted by locals who have been exposed to more than a decade of contempt from MEL, culminating in the blood-crazed proposal to break the community and its spirit by imposing Mining by Martial Law at Bentley.

Moreover, it obviously represents an attempt at industrialization by stealth - for this company to be "successful" there needs to be a return to shareholders and the only way (apart from the current compensation strategy) that can happen is the industrialised gas mining precinct proposal. As such, your "we'll just have 5/ 10/ 20 wells" approach represents little more than a "foot-in-the-door" for that industrial scale project, and I don't think the people of the Northern Rivers are that stupid they would fall for it.

Finally, it addresses neither the issue of aquifer and ecosystem damage which will inevitable follow unconventional gas mining nor the health aspects raised in the document I posted a link to recently (and which, as an "inconvenient truth" everyone here has ignored).

Do you honestly think that the first victims of your "industrialization by stealth" strategy wouldn't be screaming about the damage to their farms/valley? Do you think the rest of the community would abandon them?

Sorry but this company is too much "on the nose" and the science is in - the time for your prosed strategy was 10/15 years ago - now it has no chance.