Safety protocols

Scott Neill raises some interesting points on mineral sands mining in his letter in The Weekly Advertiser, April 1, and can be assured the safety of communities is directly addressed as part of mining approvals and monitoring processes.

The mining of mineral sands has occurred safely for decades in Australia. 

Radiation occurs naturally in soil, water, food  and vegetation.  

The ore mineral sand miners extract contains naturally occurring radioactive material, NORM, with the levels well below regulatory limits.

Mineral sands projects go through a rigorous environmental approvals process – Environmental Effects Statements, or EES – before mining can start. 

EES documents are available to the public on the Victorian government planning website.

Companies must continuously monitor and report radiation levels throughout the life of the project, including dust. 

Heavy minerals like monazite and zircon are dense and less likely to become airborne. 

Operators also implement dust controls, such as wet processing and progressive revegetation.

As a heavily regulated industry that cares about our local communities, mining is committed to the highest standards of scrutiny.

James Sorahan

Mineral Councils of Australia, MCA,
Victoria executive director

Plenty of blame to go around

Anne Webster in The Weekly Advertiser April 1 edition, blames Labor for Australia’s fuel supply problem. 

But there is plenty of blame to go around. 

I agree with her that we need a national dashboard of fuel outages, which would show which individual service stations were out of fuel. 

The Nationals are proposing more oil and gas drilling, but this won’t help in the current crisis because new projects take between three and 10 years to develop, and take a long time to come up to scale production. 

So, it could help somewhat in the medium term. 

But renewables are cheaper and quicker to deploy to reduce fuel dependence in the medium term – five to 15 years. 

Webster asserts the Coalition increased diesel storage by 40 percent when in government, but I have not been able to find any evidence to support this. 

She is correct in asserting they created the Minimum Stockholding Obligation, but Angus Taylor as Energy Minister had that in Texas USA, not Australia. 

It would take weeks to get here and would have been useless in the present circumstances. 

Moreover, four out of the six oil refineries in Australia were closed under the LNP watch. 

Labor did better by making sure the stockholding was in Australia, but the amount of 30 to 40 days was well under the international standard of three months. 

In terms of government policy between Labor and the LNP, there is plenty of blame to go around.

Robert Blakeley

Horsham

The entire April 15, 2026 edition of The Weekly Advertiser is available online. READ IT HERE!