A certain insidiousness has accompanied our mineral addiction, argues Paul Cleary in Mine-field, as he ponders the conduct of the mining industry and the full extent of the costs borne by communities and the environment. It is Cleary’s second book on the industry. Too Much Luck: The Mining Boom and Australia’s Future, published in 2011, warned of the dangers of the resources curse – how a heady windfall could be easily wasted, due to the far-reaching myopia of state and federal governments keen for an investment rush but not primed to tax it. Cleary’s sequel delves into the mining industry, and unearths some unsettling truths about how high-risk projects are rubber-stamped with little regulatory oversight, and how the consequences for the environment and citizens are seen as nothing more than a nebulous contractual obligation.

The book canvasses the experiences of local communities in mining towns in Queensland, Western Australia, and New South Wales. It draws heavily from case studies in Cleary’s field-work in the Darling Downs and the Hunter region, where coal-seam gas projects are staking their claim to prime farmland. The battle waged between farmers and mining companies makes for a compelling narrative, and Cleary makes his case with expository flair, while also giving the reader clear-headed explanations of the requisite terminology: coal-seam gas, fracking, and so on.

It is on the issue of regulatory capture that Cleary really shines. In his interviews with local farmers in Darling Downs and the Hunter Valley, the government’s wilful capitulation to mining interests is exposed. Members of rural communities and politicians alike are depicted as live specimens of powerlessness in the face of big money. Cleary’s interview with Graham Clapham, a farmer from the Western Downs, is particularly unsettling. Clapham’s livelihood is challenged by Shell–PetroChina’s proposed CSG project. Clapham alleges that Shell has incised the coal seam underneath his land to aquifer level, which poses serious risks to water resources in the area, including contamination by methane gas, fracking chemicals, and salination. Cleary notes that the state government has ‘steadfastly denied a connection between the Condamine Alluvium and the coal seams … but state government officials quietly urged Clapham’s group to seek advice from John Hillier, an expert consultant and a former senior hydrologist with the Queensland government’. It turns out that Hillier was able to prove that drawing water from coal seams would drain the aquifer, yet the state government has given the project the green light.

As Cleary’s meticulous research illustrates, these incidents are not isolated. Cleary cites the approval of another contentious coal-seam gas project undertaken by the consortium Gladstone LNG, which is headed by Santos. The consortium and the government struck an unusual agreement: reports on the management of the CSG project and the environmental impact only had to be provided after the project had been approved. Two years after its approval, Gladstone LNG’s impact assessment reports have yet to materialise. When Cleary asks the federal department of environment if Santos has filed the necessary documentation, it responds with a statement that makes bureaucratic buck-passing look like an unedifying parlour game:

The cumulative impact report is to be provided to the Federal Government when it is provided to the Queensland Government. The timeframe for Santos to provide the report to the Queensland Government is a matter for the Queensland Government.

So far, so frustrating. But Cleary is firm in drawing fault lines: he persuasively argues that it is political pragmatism that allows these mining multinationals to steamroll the opposition. These sorts of bargains – where documentation of a project’s impact can be released after approval has been granted – are therefore commonplace. Even Peter Garrett, once the ALP’s show pony and a fervent environmentalist, approved the expansion of a lead and zinc mine at McArthur River in Borroloola, in the Northern Territory, a mine that Cleary says is one of the ‘most contentious and potentially damaging projects of the past two decades’. The expansion of the mine, which involved the diversion of the McArthur River into a man-made channel that would enable Xstrata to mine the riverbed, was first rejected by the Northern Territory government in 2006. The state government made that decision on the basis of research conducted by the state’s Environment Protection Authority, which warned of an ‘adverse impact on the river and … concern[s] about long-term management of sediment and contaminants’. Six months later, at the request of the then Chief Minister Clare Martin, a second review was conducted; the mine was subsequently approved. Aboriginal elders recount to Cleary how fish ‘have been dying in the water’, and attribute a spate of deaths in the community to the diversion of the river. Yet the federal government has stated that there are no plans for another audit of Xstrata’s compliance record, and have not released details of this record to the public.

The McArthur River fiasco is what Cleary calls ‘worst-case shoddiness’. It’s even more astonishing when the reader discovers that Australia was the second country in the world to require mining companies to assess the impact of their projects on the environment as a necessary precondition for project approval. And yet the statistics tell the story: in the past ten years, ‘as few as one or two percent of projects at any time ever get knocked back’.

Cleary proposes that the road to redemption lies in significant reforms to taxation and project regulation. These are sensible proposals, but the real difficulty lies in their implementation. Political compromise has left us with an ineffectual mineral resources rent tax that barely dents the profits of multinationals and unfairly burdens local iron ore miners; state governments remain tethered to an ‘archaic system of royalty payments’ that provides inadequate capture of resources profits.

Project regulation, he argues, is left to ‘weak state governments that are prejudiced in favour of development’. A review of the taxation system is indeed necessary, because state governments have few sources of revenue, as the federal government has denied them broad-based taxes. Cleary proposes a federal ‘super regulator’ run in tandem with state authorities, instead of the current ad hoc regulatory régime. It is in his proposals for reform that Cleary finds himself in weaker territory: not because his solutions are outrageous in and of themselves, though it is hard to see them as remotely fathomable given the current political and economic climate.

As well as being a research scholar at the Australian National University, Cleary, it is worth noting, is a journalist with The Australian. Considering the convulsive editorial line that this masthead has taken on climate change and the carbon tax, one wonders how Cleary’s calm and considered approach gels with The Australian, which has become little more than a hysterical paroxysm of climate-change denialists. Cleary’s sharp and timely reportage should provoke – if not lead – an urgent, informed discussion about the mining industry’s role in our society. One can’t help having the sense that Cleary, more than anyone, knows that the prospect of merely having that debate is a battle that has yet to be won. To some extent, all parties – governments, mining companies, and even Cleary himself – are guilty of indulging in their own fictions.