GOLD miner Neville Perry has been told to pay $1.25 million to the Victorian Government to remove 60 trees from his bush block.
Mr Perry has now abandoned his mine project near Talbot in disbelief after fighting the Government for four years.
Mr Perry said he was shocked to be asked for the $1.25 million compensation by environment department officials, who would not allow him to plant other trees to offset any vegetation loss.
“The state’s native vegetation laws are out of control, there is no fixed formula for it. It changes depending on who you talk to,” he said.
He said Government officials told him driving an excavator, tractor or even a car near a tree on the block would be counted as a “loss”.
“They say the tree’s roots have been crushed and it will die — what a lot of nonsense,” Mr Perry said.
“I said, ‘If you come back in five years and the trees are still alive, which of course they will be, will you pay me back?’ They said ‘no’.”
Individual branches growing out of tree stumps were also counted as single trees by authorities, so one tree with three branches was officially three trees.
“I know lots of miners who won’t invest in Victoria any more. They’ve gone to other states, and these biodiversity laws are just out of control,” he said.
Mr Perry wants to look for gold on what was called the Mia Mia Swamp in central Victoria, an area dotted with mullock heaps and diggers’ holes created during a gold rush in the 1850s when 15,000 prospectors crowded the site.
The site was picked over by desperate men during the Great Depression in the 1930s and has progressively become chopped up, choked by brambles and noxious weeds and infested by rabbits.
Mr Perry said he made a “reasonable living” using excavators and detectors to look for what old-timers missed and has a 25-year track record of “cleaning up” old mine sites that he is proud of.
Because of a salinity planning overlay he needed a permit for the work, which triggered the biodiversity laws.
“They shut down my mining operation. Now I can’t even take out the weeds — it is bullying,” he said.
The Weekly Times Now reports, an Environment, Land, Water and Planning Department spokesman said the department had been in contact with Mr Perry for several years over his mining project.
The spokesman said Mr Perry had been advised on the native vegetation and biodiversity information he needed to submit so his work plan could be further assessed.
The DELWP would then give more advice on the likely cost of Mr Perry’s offsets, the spokesman said.
Mr Perry said he now faced even tougher environmental restrictions to remove noxious weeds from the site.
A clean-up on the weed-infested 14ha block has become further bogged down in red tape in the past year despite support for the rehabilitation project from Landcare and the local council.
CHRIS McLENNAN, The Weekly Times
