Neville Sneddon: "There’s been something that people called lawfare going on, and that is that you have groups of people who can use the laws of the country, not to stop things at times but to certainly slow them down and to use wrinkles in the law to actually drag developments through court, and at the end of the day achieve very little except delay and expense for the developer, and it does create difficulties for our competitiveness in terms of attracting the investment dollar to Australia. And the best examples are the procedural challenges to mining developments where in fact you have government approval to do things and then challenges as to process that take a long time to go through the courts, don’t achieve much, and generally speaking cost the developer significant amounts of money. Now I think governments are getting wise to that now and I think there’s probably a little … there’s a refining of some of these processes to make sure that all of the boxes are ticked to make sure that some of those challenges have less credence and take up less time.  But there are a couple current right now that are not doing anything for our image in the world investment community and it’s making things tough, as I say, for developers."

Categories: Activism
Author: Neville Sneddon