CHINCHILLA grazier Toby Trebilco is adamant. The truth is out.
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He says despite years of intensive testing no contamination has ever been detected in the water, soil, crops or livestock as a result of alleged contamination caused by the Linc Energy underground coal gasification facility at Chinchilla.
"There's nothing, not a thing, and never has been because there never has been any contamination," Mr Trebilco said, who owns and lives on the adjoining property Ewerleigh.
There's nothing, not a thing, and never has been because there never has been any contamination.
- Toby Trebilco, Ewerleigh, Chinchilla
"If there ever was any contamination we would have been out of business long ago.
"Contamination would have shown up in everything we do here."
The alleged contamination caused by Linc saw the Queensland Government declare 32,000 hectares of Queensland's top agricultural land as a 'no excavation zone', affecting 130 landholders centred on the highly productive Hopeland farming district.
That zoning was lifted in early 2018. However, the Queensland Government more recently placed a ban on coal seam gas drilling in a 10km radius zone around the former Linc site.
The now liquidated Linc Energy was fined $4.5 million after its was charged with five counts of wilfully and unlawfully causing environmental harm between 2007 and 2013.
Partly why Mr Trebilco is so sure of his ground is that the Queensland Government recently gifted him a 140m deep test bore.
That bore sits about 1km from Linc's now mothballed facility. That bore has been constantly monitored and tested since it was sunk in 2001.
"If there was any risk of contamination they would never have given me the bore," Mr Trebilco said.
"The only thing the past 18 years has shown is there has never been a change in the quality of the water.
"Every time the result has been the same. There is absolutely no contamination."
Mr Trebilco said he was particularly horrified on March 16, 2015 when he watched ABC TV news reports falsely reporting the underground water table was contaminated and thousands of tonnes of soil would have to be shifted.
"I thought it was all over then, even though our family had been here since selection in the early 1900s and have other landholdings in the Hopeland district," Mr Trebilco said.
"I immediately rang our meatworks because we were having cattle killed the next day.
"Fortunately our water tests showed there was never a problem and the cattle were processed without any issue."
Mr Trebilco said while he understood some landholders held genuine fears, others were driven by greed, hoping to secure a financial windfall.
"The truth will always comes out clean and you don't have to do anything else," Mr Trebilco said.
"This is the most wicked business I have ever been through in my life."
