Residents from a tiny Victorian town have been ordered to pay $90,000 in legal costs after they launched a failed bid to prevent a farmer from extracting and selling groundwater as bottled springwater to a subsidiary of the Japanese beverage giant Asahi.
The supreme court of Victoria made the costs ruling last week, four months after a residents association in the town of Stanley, which has a population of 400, was denied leave to appeal previous decisions allowing the water extraction.
The Stanley Rural Community Inc, which had 41 people attend its last meeting, objected to a licence that allowed Tim Carey, trading as Stanley Pastoral Pty Ltd, to extract 19GL of groundwater a year from a bore on his property and truck the filtered water to the Mountain H2O plant in Albury to be bottled as springwater.
Australia gets UN to delete criticism of Murray-Darling basin plan from report Read more The latest court ruling comes as a second farmer, Boyd Collins, has threatened to take a similar case to the Victorian civil appeals tribunal (VCAT) after he was denied planning permission by Indigo shire council to run a similar 19ML water mining operation on his property, also in Stanley.
The permit application specified that the water would be extracted then filtered, stored in tanks and on-sold in bulk using water tankers.
He successfully challenged that refusal in VCAT, which granted the planning permission in 2015.
Stanley residents appealed that decision to a single judge in the supreme court, who also found in favour of Carey, before applying for leave to appeal the decision in January 2017, raising $20,000 through crowdfunding as a surety to cover Carey’s costs.
Indigenous group ‘offered $10m in water’ to help pass Murray-Darling plan Read more Residents had argued that allowing water mining would deplete the local groundwater resource, an argument that was supported by expert witness, hydrologist Peter Dahlhaus.
Unlike surface water irrigation licences in the Ovens river catchment, which are subject to strict rostering during the summer months, the holders of groundwater licences are allowed to extract their full allocation year-round.
Drawing the full allocation from the bore over the summer months, Dahlhaus said, “will almost certainly result in a reduction in the irrigation water available for agriculture, since there is clear connection between the groundwater and surface water in the Cue Springs area”.