Lock the Gate Alliance Queensland’s Ellie Smith thanked the department for following the scientific advice. “It was frankly difficult to believe a company could even think such a mine so close to the reef would ever be accepted by the Queensland public,” she said. The Australian Marine Conservation Society’s great barrier reef campaigner, David Cazzulino, said hundreds had attended rallies in Mackay, Yeppoon and Brisbane to protest the mine. Building an open-cut coal mine would cause “serious and irreversible damage to a variety of important habitats, including important turtle and dugong strongholds” and was too close to the reef, he said.