It said the company had worked hard to meet stakeholders to ensure the project “would benefit the entire community”.
Guardian Australia has previously reported that Walker Corporation, which has been a major political donor, lobbied the federal government to remove protections from an area of the wetlands as a matter of “urgent national interest”.
In August 2017, the former environment minister, Josh Frydenberg wrote to Steven Miles, who was then the Queensland environment minister, to suggest the two governments create a proposal to delist part of the Moreton Bay Ramsar wetland.
In May of that year, the Ramsar secretariat wrote to the federal government warning that the loss of wetlands for the development would “set a precedent for other developments in future”, not only for Ramsar sites within Australia but “also elsewhere in the world”.
An audit of Australia’s “dysfunctional” freedom of information system has called for an independent investigation into the way the prime minister and ministers treat requests for government documents. The Australian Conservation Foundation audited FOI outcomes for environment-related information over five years, and found the system is increasingly opaque, slow and costly. The audit’s preliminary findings, previously reported by the Guardian,.