Unfortunate. Not going to pretend I know the legal arguments,...

Unfortunate. Not going to pretend I know the legal arguments, but on a common sense basis:
- They had a judge shown to be biased against them in the Land Court dismiss all arguments against the mine bar two.
- The two grounds that were used by the biased judge to not recommend approval were overturned in a higher court, and not even on the basis of bias, but on a legal basis, and this was not contested (my understanding anyway).
- Yet despite this, nhc have to go through the whole costly and time consuming process again. Not only that, nhc have to pay ocaa costs of appeal in the high court (I really don't understand why that is the case, when the high court are ruling go back to square one, why would either party have to pay the other party's costs). Something seems very wrong with this. A little farcical that a bankrupt party was able to proceed with the appeal, with a costs judgement against them that they admitted they could not pay, again something seems wrong with that.

Despite all this, I actually still think that ultimately the mine will go ahead. NHC have now had a trial run and seen all the arguments that ocaa would use against them in the land court and had a judge's ruling on them, from which they can have a very sound basis to proceed the second time round. Any new judge in the land court would be unlikely to be biased in their rulings, as nhc have shown a willingness to fight any unjust ruling and generally be successful. In fact, nhc have not really been unsuccessful in any of their cases, just that the high court has said the initial land court ruling can not be taken to be valid due to bias and must therefore take place again. Ocaa's state government funded lawyers may be less likely to put in as much resources second time round as most of their previous arguments have been dismissed, although I wouldn't want to underestimate how much resources they will put in, there has been no limit to the costs they have been willing to put into it so far. I do feel though that the politics of it are a little less favourable for ocaa than they were a couple of years ago, but could be wrong. I would put the odds of an ultimate approval at around 70 - 80%, however we're now probably looking at another 1.5 - 2 years before we're close to the second round decision of the land court here. I think nhc will seek and probably gain assurance from the state government that a favourable ruling from the Land court can't be held up in appeals.