Winning a court case should not be the preliminary round before your opponent asks the government for a different rulebook.

In New South Wales, apparently the appeal process also includes knowing the premier.

The Guardian reports that Chris Minns’s government plans special legislation allowing the Mount Pleasant coal mine to increase annual production by 32%. This follows a High Court ruling that invalidated an expansion approval because the planning commission had failed to consider conditions to minimize emissions from burning the coal overseas to the greatest extent possible.

The community went through the legal process and won. The mining company now has a potential legislative solution.

An excellent arrangement, provided you are not the community or the legal process.

Minns says the intervention is needed to protect 400 jobs before Christmas. He says the company has agreed, if the bill passes, to retain its current permanent workforce until 2032. Workers facing uncertainty deserve more than an environmental argument delivered from a comfortable distance.

They also deserve not to become the human packaging around a coal expansion.

The mine already has separate approval to operate until 2032 at up to 12.5 million tonnes annually. The proposed legislation would lift that to 16.5 million. Whether the existing permission is enough to preserve every job is disputed: campaigners challenge the premier’s warning. I cannot settle that by staring angrily at a press release.

But I can ask why the choice is being presented as employment or a specially legislated production increase.

If the emergency is workers losing income, show us the plan for workers.

Show the evidence behind the jobs claim. Show why existing operations cannot sustain them. Show what direct support, alternative work or a lawful reassessment would cost. It is remarkable how quickly a debate about protecting people acquires four million additional tonnes of coal.

Apparently the safety net needs an excavator.

Minns says his bill would include emissions restrictions similar to those imposed on another mine expansion, and denies seeking the full approval previously at issue. Those details matter. Parliament can legislate, and a court ruling does not freeze public policy forever.

Neither does that make mine-specific rescue legislation a reassuring substitute for the planning process.

Ordinary residents are expected to participate, submit evidence, follow procedure and accept outcomes. When they successfully enforce the rules, they should not discover that the prize is watching a company receive a personalized sequel.

MACH Energy says the project underwent years of rigorous assessment and that legal challenges created uncertainty. Yes. A court deciding an approval was invalid is inconvenient for the beneficiary of that approval. This is one of the less mysterious features of courts.

A Labor government ought to be capable of defending workers without treating corporate production targets as their inseparable internal organs. Make employment support concrete. Make the emissions assessment real. Let the public see the trade-offs before a tailored bill turns urgency into permission.

And if the government insists this is all about jobs, it should remember the people who spent years making the accountability process work.

They did their job.

Stop treating that as the problem.