Mineral Mining

This bill establishes Resources Safety and Health Queensland (RSHQ) as an independent statutory body to regulate safety and health across Queensland's coal mining, mineral mining, quarrying, explosives, and petroleum and gas industries. It separates the safety regulator from the department that promotes industry growth, responding to the coal workers' pneumoconiosis (black lung disease) inquiry that found the regulator lacked independence. The bill also creates an independent Commissioner for Resources Safety and Health and gives the Work Health and Safety prosecutor responsibility for prosecuting serious safety offences.

This bill makes wide-ranging changes to Queensland's resources, energy, and water laws. It introduces industrial manslaughter offences for the mining and resources sector, reforms how the State manages mine rehabilitation and abandoned mines, tightens scrutiny of who can hold resource authorities, extends energy consumer protections, and increases transparency of water infrastructure charges in South East Queensland.

This bill reforms the governance of Queensland's resources safety and health regulator, expands the Land Access Ombudsman's dispute resolution role, and modernises mining tenement administration. It responds to a 2025 independent review that found weaknesses in RSHQ's oversight, accountability and enforcement.

This bill strengthens safety and health protections for workers in Queensland's coal mining, quarrying, and metalliferous mining sectors. Prompted by the re-identification of coal workers' pneumoconiosis (black lung disease), it increases penalties for safety breaches, introduces civil penalties for corporations, requires company directors to proactively ensure safety compliance, and improves disease reporting and health surveillance for current and former mine workers.

This bill creates a new Rehabilitation Commissioner to independently oversee mine site rehabilitation in Queensland, strengthens the residual risk framework for managing former resource sites after mining companies hand back their environmental authorities, and establishes a dedicated fund to manage the payments mining companies make towards the long-term costs of looking after those sites.

This bill overhauls Queensland's framework for managing the coexistence of resources, renewable energy and agricultural industries. It creates a new system for assessing and compensating CSG-induced subsidence damage to farmland, broadens Queensland's coexistence institutions to cover renewable energy, modernises the Financial Provisioning Scheme for mine rehabilitation, and streamlines regulatory processes across more than a dozen resources-related Acts.

This bill overhauls safety and health laws for Queensland's mining, quarrying, petroleum and gas, and explosives industries. It responds to the Brady Review of fatal mining accidents and the Coal Mining Board of Inquiry by introducing critical control requirements, mandatory professional development for safety roles, stronger enforcement tools, and clearer industrial manslaughter liability for labour hire and contractor arrangements.

This bill overhauls how Queensland charges royalties on petroleum production, replacing the old wellhead value method with a simpler volume-based model from 1 October 2020. It also brings mineral and petroleum royalty administration under the Taxation Administration Act 2001, creating a consistent framework with state taxes.

This bill makes changes across five unrelated areas of law: validating historically granted mining leases, clarifying petroleum lease renewal rules, strengthening water restriction enforcement in South East Queensland, protecting water providers' cybersecurity information from mandatory public disclosure, and repealing the never-commenced Personalised Transport Ombudsman Act 2019.

This bill updates Queensland's rules for when businesses can access major infrastructure like rail networks, coal terminals, and ports. It aligns the state's access regime with national competition standards following reviews by the Productivity Commission and the federal Competition Policy Review, and makes the Queensland Competition Authority more accountable when processing applications.

This bill creates a new Financial Provisioning Scheme for Queensland's mining and energy sector, replacing the old financial assurance system. It establishes a pooled fund where companies pay risk-based contributions, and introduces enforceable Progressive Rehabilitation and Closure Plans to ensure mined land is progressively restored during and after mining operations.

This bill modernises the management of Queensland's state land, place naming, and resource authority obligations. It streamlines how reserves and trust lands are administered, gives trustees more autonomy, overhauls the place naming process to allow faster removal of offensive names, and requires resource companies to pay local government rates as a condition of their authority.

This bill strengthens Queensland's environmental protection laws by making regulation more proactive rather than reactive. It introduces the precautionary principle and polluter pays principle as core guiding principles, creates new offences for breaching environmental duties, establishes a duty to restore the environment after contamination, and streamlines enforcement tools into a single environmental enforcement order.

This bill creates a dedicated Mining and Resources Coroner who must investigate and hold mandatory public inquests into all accidental deaths at coal mines, mines, quarries, and petroleum and gas sites in Queensland. It implements the government's election commitment to increase oversight of mining-related fatalities and ensure families receive answers about how their loved ones died.

This bill makes changes across several Queensland revenue laws to implement 2017 election commitments and 2018-19 Budget measures. It increases duties on foreign property buyers and luxury vehicles, extends the boosted First Home Owner Grant, raises land tax on large landholdings, extends the payroll tax rebate for apprentice and trainee wages, modernises the primary production land tax exemption, validates historical mining royalty assessments, and enables electronic delivery of land tax documents.

This bill amends coal mining safety laws and several resources Acts. It provides practical exceptions to the requirement that safety-critical position holders at coal mines must be directly employed by the mine operator, and creates a rent deferral scheme for critical minerals mining leases.

This bill modernises Queensland's environmental protection laws by reforming the environmental impact statement process, strengthening enforcement powers against repeat offenders, creating temporary authorities for emergencies, and banning mining in the Wet Tropics World Heritage Area. It also updates contaminated land management, waste regulation, and mine rehabilitation frameworks.

This bill lapsed and did not become law. It was a private member's bill introduced by Mr R Katter MP in response to Glencore's announcement that it would close the Mount Isa copper mine, cutting around 1,200 jobs. The bill sought to amend the 1985 agreement between Queensland and Mount Isa Mines Limited to prevent the company from ceasing copper mining without government approval.

This bill sought to create three new criminal offences targeting trespass on business premises and transport infrastructure. It was a private member's bill introduced by Mr D Last MP that lapsed at the end of the 56th Parliament and did not become law.