Opal mining & native title ILUA update
December 2007, By Colin Duff, President of the Queensland Boulder Opal Association
The Winton Small Miners' Opal ILUA within the Winton opal mining district is working well and running smoothly for the smaller opal miners with the granting of mining leases, claims and exploration permits, without any major hold-ups or lasting unreconcilable problems occuring.
Problems of gaining granted mining and exploration tenure outside the ILUA's areas are of the most concern to all opal miners and to opal production. Many well known historic opal mines and fields like the Kynuna opal area in Western Queensland have lain idle for years because of the costs and complexity of the right to negotiate process.
Only larger miners and companies have the capital and resources to proceed through the right to negotiate process, and it has been the smaller miners that have lost access to an affordable process to gain tenure on ground adjacent to their existing granted tenures. It has caused added hardships to previously opal producing miners and made it nearly impossible for any to enter the industry in these once productive opal areas.
For nearly a decade this has affected and held back productive areas. This is a major factor in causing the lowest Australian opal production in forty years.
Solutions to these tenure access problems outside the opal ILUA areas still appear years away with no rights for mediation or compensation available to the effected opal miners in these areas. This IS the major hurdle still confronting small miners in many areas unable to facilitate an ILUA or areas without land claimants. As it currently stands, even when no claimants have come forward, we must again go through this process every time new tenure is applied for. A mining tenure that previously cost hundreds of dollars, and was granted in a month, now costs thousands of dollars and takes years to be granted.
A better mechanism to release unclaimed mining ground from these constraints would be applauded widely as would a better process to obtain an ILUA with defined time frames.
Within the ILUA bounds, opal mining, prospecting and exploration are taking place and tenures are being granted in a reasonable amount of time, but still, more than half the paddock is still out of bounds or in the hard basket, beyond the means of most in the industry to gain granted tenure.
I truly hope it does not take another decade to solve or ease these problems of unattainable opal mining access, to once previously productive opal mining fields.
Thank you,
Colin Duff
President, Queensland Boulder Opal Association
Winton Qld 4735
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