Ms BADGER – Minister, I’m just interested in mine rehabilitation. How many mining leases have expired or otherwise ended in the past year, and how many of those have submitted a rehabilitation plan?
Mr ELLIS – Thank you, Ms Badger, I’ll pass to Mr Morton shortly, but one of the interesting elements is this year, the government has delivered an important new initiative, Bolstering the Rehabilitation Trust. Under this initiative, an additional $100,000 per year over two years will be provided to allow Mineral Resources Tasmania (MRT) to expand its work in rehabilitating abandoned mine sites.
This funding is in addition to the $150,000 per annum already provided to MRT for its abandoned mine site rehabilitation program. This additional funding reflects both the rising costs of rehabilitation work and evolving community expectations around legacy mining areas on Crown land. I’ll pass to Mr Morton to talk to some of the specifics.
Ms BADGER – Before you do, minister, can I just bother you to repeat what that initiative was called?
Mr ELLIS – It’s the ‘Bolstering the Rehabilitation Trust’, which is a sentence that doesn’t make sense, except ‘trust’, in that case, is the Rehabilitation Trust.
Mr MORTON – Through you, minister, I’ll give figures for the 2024-25 financial year, because they’re complete.
Mining leases that effectively ceased, we had 27 in total. Of that, some were consolidated with other mining leases, some were refused or lapsed, some expired, and some were surrendered or withdrawn. So, there’s a range of things and, as the minister was saying, it is a requirement that all companies provide a security deposit against their mine lease, and that we have an approved decommission and rehabilitation plan that the EPA ticks off on.
Depending on the way in which it happens ‑ if companies close out because they’ve mined out the resource and they’ve let the mine lease go and they rehabilitate according to the plan, then they get their security deposit or bond back. If they, in some way, disappear from the site, then we have the security deposit sitting against that. So, if they don’t do the decommission and rehabilitation plan as they’re required, then we’ve got the bond against the site that we can use as noted.
Ms BADGER – If possible ‑ and I’m happy to take that on notice, it was part of the initial question ‑ how many of the mining leases have expired, or might be in care or maintenance? As you explained, they’re not all necessarily expired, and there are a few categories on that. If that data is available, that would be great.
In addition, the second part of that question, but it’s on very much the same topic ‑ how many former mine sites remain that aren’t rehabilitated or under-rehabilitated, or not in accordance with the plan, and what cost is associated ongoing with that at the moment?
Mr ELLIS – It’s probably worth mentioning that there is a very large number of mines, historical workings, over a couple of hundred years right across Tasmania, so some of that may be difficult to quantify. I’ll just look to Mr. Morton.
Mr MORTON – Thank you, minister, and through you. The number I gave was 27 in total for the 2024-25 financial year, and that was where the mining lease had ceased.
As to your comment before in regard to care and maintenance, companies can have a mine lease in place but put the mine into care and maintenance, but they haven’t closed out the site, so to speak ‑ it’s still active, because often they can come out of care and maintenance. We’ve got a number of sites in that situation. This 27 was specifically where the mine lease was no longer in existence. As I said, there was a number of reasons. Sometimes it was consolidated, so consolidation is where you might have a company that’s got two mine leases next to each other and it wants to make them one; consolidates them. There are also some where the application’s expired, or a couple where we refused the application, or a couple where they withdrew or surrendered the application. So, they just, you know, didn’t proceed.
Sorry, was there a second part?
Ms BADGER – On rehabilitation, but I probably don’t need data on mines from the 1800s or anything like that, more contemporary would be great, thanks.
Mr MORTON – Through you, minister. The MRT does manage a number of abandoned mine sites. As I said, the current situation is, contemporary mining has tight regulation. They need a rehabilitation plan and security deposit.
Then going back in time, there’s quite a large number of abandoned mine sites. We do manage the abandoned mine sites on Crown lands. We do that with $150,000 appropriation and we’ve got that recent bolstering the rehab trust fund initiative ‑ so an additional $100,000 over two years, which we’re very appreciative of. We are managing a large number. Some of them are very small, almost diggings or scrapings sort of thing, but there are some in there that are more complex to manage.
We work closely, so as part of the rehabilitation trust, we’ve got a steering committee which has got the peak bodies, but it’s also got the land management agencies on it, such as Parks, Sustainable Timber and obviously the EPA. We’ve got an annual work program; we obviously try and prioritise and go for the sites with the most issues first.
Mr ELLIS – Chair, before you go to the next one, I think Mr Limkin had an answer to a previous question.
Mr LIMKIN – Through you, minister. The September quarterly report for the TDR is imminently to go up. It was considered by the board recently and it will go up. We will also just double-check the website, because when I looked there were a couple of historic ones not there, so we will just double-check that.
