There is almost no point debating wether dredging is harmful to the environment or not?
It is totally finished in Australia and not likely to return.
The main fear of now legalising it is that there would be hoards of prospectors wanting to do it.
I was a legal dredger in Victoria for the last 3 years it was legal and it was very hard to find payable quantities of gold back then as most places had been heavily worked, floods since then have not renewed the deposits like many of todays prospectors think, we had tons of trouble with greenies, land owners, campers and fisherman and that was with say 300 full time dredgers and 500 part time, just imagine if it were legal today we would have 10 to 15 thousand operators and very few streams would be opened.
Operators would be fighting over ground etc, there were gun battles over ground in the 80s.
Best to just stick with our current laws and restrictions and try and educate those leaving the unfilled holes and hacking into stream banks before we try and ask for things we won,t get?
One only has to to look and the disaster the VEAC review into prospecting in National Parks has gone?
The Prospectors of Victoria and the PMAV should have asked for something achievable like getting detecting access to Paddy,s ranges State Park for detecting and low impact hand tool prospecting.