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“The site is not suitable for a greenfield coal mine given the rural-residential and small-scale agricultural land use of the area, along with the growing tourism and heritage landscape focus, and the predicted impacts on these land uses,” it said.

Hume Coal project manager Rod Doyle said they had been pushing the government to release its final assessment report for about eight months and are pleased it is finally with the IPC, with the hope the consent authority reviews the case and projects on its merits and gives it the green light.

He said Hume Coal strongly objects to comments regarding the project impacts outweighing the benefits, and disputes what has been said about its environmental credentials.

“We are an exceptionally low-impact proposal,” Mr Doyle said on Wednesday. “We believe we are a new-aged coal mine that has very low emissions.

“We’re going to extra lengths to minimise impacts on people, [such as] proposing to put covers on train wagons to minimise any dust emissions.”

Mr Doyle said the southern coal field is rich in metallurgical coal, or coking coal, which he considers a “critical resource for constructing steel” and in demand from local and international suppliers.

“You must have steel to produce the windmills,” he said. “If we’re ever going to transition away from our reliance on fossil fuels, we need to put the infrastructure in place ... to allow Australia to make its transition from its current position to a lower carbon economy.”

The DPIE received 12,666 submissions following a public exhibition of the Environmental Impact Statement in 2017, and 97 per cent of more than 5000 submissions from locals were objections, raising issues such as noise and air quality and groundwater/surface water impacts.

In its preliminary assessment, released in December 2018, the department said the combined projects “are not in the public interest and should not be approved”.

A DPIE spokesperson on Wednesday said the proposed project had remained “largely unchanged”, even after years of extensive consultation.

“Given the unacceptable impacts on the environment and water supply, the inappropriateness of the site and its flawed design, we have once again recommended its refusal,” the spokesperson said.

Hume Coal’s applications have been referred to the IPC for another public hearing, expected to take place in the near future, with determination to be made within 12 weeks of receipt of the report.

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