mbasko said:
That's still mechanical. So is a yabee pump. A lever is a machine, and mechanical force is output when you lift a bucket. Our laws are stupidly worded, and poorly thought out. You cannot process more than 1 cubic meter of material and you have to put it back where you found it too. The reality I have observed from a lifetime of watching older and wiser people than I will ever be boils down to: do as you please, just don't ***** up the environment, don't flog a place out, and don't get caught.
Most of us are out there to fart about anyway, we will never break even to the costs we've put in or even our petrol money. It's not about that for us. But at the same time I don't want to see a bloke go down for using a bloody water pump. Using a water pump from a creek theoretically would do LESS harm to the creek than an in-river sluice would do as you can dump your tailings where you're extracting it from. Whereas if you use a river sluice you're taking material sometimes from the side of the river sometimes even from further away inland and then pumping that material INTO the watercourse. So I don't understand their reasoning with half these laws.
I always put it down to the fact legislators never have a clue about the subject they're legislating about. Like that time NSW banned every factory manufactured motorcycle that wasn't a sports bike for 4 days (anything whose handlebars were more than 150mm above their seat, i.e. every cruiser, naked, scooter, etc, etc) and unfortunately the average punter SUPPORTED these laws (probably because they didn't ride) because they punished people they didn't like like dirt bikers, or heck the gun laws that only affect law abiding citizens, are the harshest in the world, but 86% of people think they 'aren't tough enough' yet have saved 0 lives and done nothing but turn law abiding citizens into outlaws.
