Once upon a time, judges were the people who were old-fuddy duddies, holding society back, saying “would you want your wives and servants to read this?”
Now, however, everywhere you turn they seem to be champions of what the Green Party slogan labels as “real progress” – defending human rights, and in a dramatic case in Australia, the planet’s rights.
Nicola Pain handed down her decision on the Anvil Hill coalmine on Monday … found the NSW Government failed to consider the impact that burning coal from the project would have on global warming….
Two …principles were ignored by planning authorities when they accepted an environmental assessment of the Anvil Hill mine – an omission used by Justice Pain to declare that approval flawed.
They were the precautionary principle – that serious environmental threats should be mitigated even in the absence of full scientific certainty – and the intergenerational equity principle, which says the present generation should maintain or improve the environment for future users.
About