More data doesn’t fix community concern. In fact, it can often make it worse.

In many projects across QLD and NSW, the instinctive response to community resistance is to provide more information. We release more studies, more technical detail, more reports. On paper, this makes sense. If people are concerned, surely better data will resolve the issue.

The identification and implementation of mitigation is an essential part of the process of impact assessment and decision-making for projects. Often there are challenges in defining mitigation to be applied in future phases of a project, and there can be a disconnect between project teams involved in the approvals phase, and post-approvals phase of a project.