The LNP’s new pro-mining law is an assault on First Nations rights

Crystal water flows from beneath a horizontal disc of sandstone, pulsing from the heart of the earth.

From time immemorial to the present moment, the Doongmabulla Springs give life to Wangan and Jagalingou Country. Our obligations as Custodians to care for those Springs and all that depends on them derive from our First Law, Aboriginal Law, which is ancient and predates the Queensland Parliament, the Australian Constitution, and the colonial legal order by thousands of years.

In recent times, Queensland’s Parliament has recognised those obligations. Section 28 of the Human Rights Act 2019 protects the right of Aboriginal peoples to maintain and strengthen their distinctive spiritual relationship with Country, to conserve and protect the environment of their lands, territories and waters.

That recognition does not create our rights; it acknowledges them.

The Doongmabulla Springs are already under threat from coal mining. We are fighting to protect them from further harm from Bravus’ Carmichael coal mine in the Supreme Court, using Queensland’s human rights and environmental protection laws. There are other coal projects proposed across our Country. Wangan and Jagalingou homelands encompass much of the Galilee Basin, one of the world’s largest untapped coal frontiers, and our Country remains firmly in the sights of the Government and the resources industry.

Last month, Queensland’s Crisafulli Government passed new laws that gut our rights and our ability to protect Wangan and Jagalingou Country from the unfettered ambitions of extractive industries.

Under the State Development and Public Works Organisation (Critical Minerals) and Other Legislation Amendment Act 2026, projects can be declared ‘state significant projects’ and fast-tracked through modified approval processes. It removes important avenues through which we can challenge projects that impact our Country, land and waters.

Despite its title, this law is not simply about critical minerals. It can apply to coal, gas, cableways, dams, weapons facilities, or any other private development project. The criteria for a declaration are undefined and the decision unreviewable, opening the way for extraordinary powers for the Minister to override Acts of Parliament, remove community consultation rights, strip third-party appeal rights, exclude judicial review, compulsorily acquire land for private developers, and deny Aboriginal people their rights. This is an old-fashioned power grab by the heirs of Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s National Party.

Nearly 90% of the 90 submissions to the parliamentary committee asked the Government to withdraw the Bill. Farmers, legal bodies, environmental organisations, First Nations peoples and regional communities all raised the alarm.

The Nagana Yarrbayn Wangan and Jagalingou Cultural Custodians told the committee the Bill was “incompatible with the human rights of First Nations peoples and with Queensland’s obligations under the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.”

The parliamentary committee, controlled by the LNP majority, recommended the Bill be passed regardless of its impact on rights. And so it was. The Opposition and all crossbenchers voted against the law. It was passed by the LNP alone.

The Government made last-minute amendments, excluding data centres and renewables, but these concessions gave nothing to First Nations peoples.

This is nothing new. Queensland has always found ways to push First Nations people aside when there is money to be made from Country and powerful interests to be served. For most of Australian history, that required no justification at all. It was simply how things were done, often violently. It was only in recent decades, as land rights, native title and human rights frameworks slowly emerged, that the brakes were applied and governments were required to at least acknowledge what they were doing and why. But true to their character, this LNP Government has abandoned even that.

This is state developmentalism, Queensland-style. It rests on the assumption that the State’s interest in directing and accelerating resource extraction is self-evidently superior to the rights of First Nations peoples, landholders and communities, and that rights, consent and democratic accountability are not values to be protected but impediments to be managed or removed.

The Crisafulli Government has not invented this approach. It has shaped Queensland governance since the colonial era. Crisafulli and his deputy Jarrod Bleijie have simply stopped bothering to justify it.

No executive government should be able to override laws passed by Parliament, seize land and property for the financial benefit of private companies, and remove the right to challenge those decisions in court, without demonstrated public interest and democratic accountability. But that is exactly what this law does.

The bulldozers now clearing the parkland at Victoria Park – Barrambin, on Turrbal Country, and for millennia a gathering place around the springs and watercourses for many First Nations peoples – tell the same story. The Queensland Government suspended 15 pieces of planning and appeal legislation, overriding the public’s rights, to make way for an Olympic edifice.

The new state development law is a gift to the mining and resources industry. Commercial lawyers are already briefing their mining clients on how to use the new powers: the streamlined approvals, removal of challenge rights, access to land, compulsory acquisition for private benefit.

The Government calls it competitive advantage, the industry calls it opportunity, First Nations peoples call it for what it is — dispossession.

For First Nations peoples, this cuts deep. This law does not merely threaten rights that exist in statute. It threatens the cultural rights of Aboriginal peoples wherever a state development project is declared. These are rights that Queensland’s Court of Appeal, in the Doongmabulla Springs environment and human rights case brought by the Nagana Yarrbayn Cultural Custodians, recognised as existing prior to and independently of any statute. By removing legal avenues of appeal, any decision made under this law strips away every practical mechanism through which those rights can be asserted and protected.

The Human Rights Act remains. The Government’s own Statement of Compatibility in relation to the Act acknowledged that the law’s impacts on cultural rights cannot be assessed in the abstract. But the means of enforcing those protections have been removed. A right usurped is no longer a right.

The Queensland Law Society has warned that the law removes the trigger for companies to sit down with Traditional Owners before projects begin and land is taken. The Environmental Defenders Office has warned that while Cultural Heritage Management Plans cannot be removed by modification orders, other provisions of the Cultural Heritage Act can be modified or excluded. The law does not formally repeal the Cultural Heritage Act. But it guts its function, leaving a shell of protection in place.

In 2022, Youth Verdict had a landmark win against Clive Palmer’s proposed Waratah coal mine. The Land Court of Queensland found that the human, climate and environmental impacts were too great to ignore. That win depended entirely on the existence of third-party challenge rights. Under this law, the Minister could declare a project like Waratah Coal significant, and that case could not have been brought. The legal pathway through which First Nations peoples and communities hold billion-dollar mining companies to account is being closed.

Queensland produces nearly a third of Australia’s emissions. Resources Minister Dale Last told the 2026 Coal Industry Event he wants to halve the time it takes to get a new coal mine from application to production. Now that the Deputy Premier can fast-track any fossil fuel project that he deems significant, the consequences could be felt far beyond Queensland’s borders.

Youth Verdict established in the Waratah Coal case that the climate and environmental impacts of fossil fuel extraction, the human rights of communities, and specifically the cultural rights of First Nations peoples, are inseparable. Strengthening these cultural rights is Australia’s signatory status to the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples including the right to “Free, Prior and Informed Consent” in decisions affecting their lands, territories and resources. Nothing like that happened here.

 

This state development law was conceived, drafted and proposed without any consultation with First Nations peoples, much less our consent. That’s not an oversight, but the structural logic of state developmentalism in practice. First Nations rights are not a consideration. They are an obstacle to be managed away.

Yet there are federal laws that Queensland cannot displace, and that may offer First Nations peoples protection. The Racial Discrimination Act 1975 applies regardless of what Queensland’s Parliament enacts. Legislation whose practical operation disproportionately impairs the rights of First Nations peoples to enjoy, exercise and protect their cultural rights and relationship to Country raises serious

questions under that Act. For those with claims and determinations, the Native Title Act 1993 establishes requirements for future acts affecting native title rights. The state cannot legislate federal laws away.

The passage of this law is not the end of resistance to its effects. We will be watching every declaration, every modification order, every compulsory acquisition, and where there are legal avenues to challenge them, we will be ready to act.

We expect the same commitment from every political party that believes in the rule of law, the Parliament and the people they serve, and the rights of First Nations peoples. This law must be repealed.

We are not asking anyone for our rights. We are telling this Government that we have them, and that we will defend them.

Adrian Burragubba is Nagana Yarrbayn Wangan and Jagalingou Senior Cultural Custodian and spokesperson.

Murrawah Johnson is the CEO of Youth Verdict and a Wirdi woman from the Birri Gubba Nation with direct connection to Wangan Country. She is a 2024 recipient of the Goldman Environmental Prize.