Sparks: Court overturns Tanya Plibersek’s protection order which company says blocked controversial NSW goldmine

If a law meant to protect heritage can be set aside whenever gold lies beneath it, then the protection was never protection, only a longer word for permission.

Having followed the required process, the minister issued the order; the court, following its own required process, dissolved it; both procedures were correct, and the hill was dug up either way.

Gone already is the minister who signed; enduring is the company; indifferent is the gold - dig or do not dig, the hill keeps no record of our arguments.

A minister's signature proves a weaker safeguard than a statute's structure; so long as heritage protection rests on one office-holder's discretion, every future decision can be purchased at the courthouse for the price of a challenge.

That a corporation may summon a court to dissolve an order protecting what no legislature has granted it leave to take, and prevail, is a principle no generation should accept as settled without examination.

Observe the case file: a protection ordered, a protection challenged, a protection dissolved, and the physician pronouncing the patient was never sick at all.

The claim is that an order protected the land; trace its conditions - a minister's signature, a statute, a court's reversal - and the protection dissolves into the conditions that made and unmade it, leaving no fixed thing called protection to defend.

With impeccable courtesy the company regretted that the minister's little order had been so terribly inconvenient, and the court, ever obliging, removed it before anyone with an actual claim to the hill was heard.

Down where the machinery starts, the paper order falls, the diesel coughs alive, and the men swinging the picks are paid by the shift, never by the argument.

Note what the judgment's language will not say - that the protection was inconvenient, the gold was wanted, and the objection was cured by simply declining to hear it.

They have torn down a fence because a judge agreed it stood in the way; I should like to hear, before the first charge is laid, why anyone bothered to build a fence around sacred ground at all.

What the judgment never asks is what manner of people we have become when a signature meant to honour the dead yields, upon appeal, to the price of the metal beneath them.

On the statute's letter the ruling is sound; but the dispute was never about a section number - it concerns whose reading of the land counts, and that question no court has been asked to answer.

They tell the traditional owners to trust the process, then overturn the process the moment it protects them; the lesson stands written plainly: for some the law is a shield, for others only a delay.

From inside, where the women gather beside the water the dam will take, the protection was never paper; it was the river and the bush, and both now appear in court only as exhibits.

One year the protection lasted; the gold has been wanted longer; in such arithmetic the heavier weight always wins, and the clerks call it law.

It is proposed, with perfect reasonableness, that any protection lasting longer than one mining cycle be reclassified as an obstruction, since a barrier to gold is, by every commercial measure, a barrier to prosperity itself.

Described as an obstruction to enterprise, the order was in truth a cost entered by parties never invited to the negotiation, and markets cannot price what the powerful strike from the ledger.

"The court overturned a decision by the former minister" - observe the grammar: the court overturns, the order blocked; nowhere a subject who wanted the gold, only verbs performing themselves while the hill remains grammatically unowned.