Not too sure about this, as I saw the details many years ago.

The story was the great artesian basin is filled from the highlands of New Guinea. If so the whole thing is pretty damn deep by the time it gets to Oz.

If this is still current research, it is not likely to be effected by a few hundred feet deep hole in the ground.

The bigger worry is what a very big hole might do to the much shallower underground water table. Surely the effect on this would have been studied deeply in the EIS long before any approvals were given.

Am I being a naïve to see this as a political bit of garbage, or could the approvals have been achieved with a bit of political payola in the first place? Surely with our Green brethren running off to court with all kinds of red herrings, they could not have missed any real fault in the impact statement.