The permit queues, this week

Kestrel Economics forecasts when a mining permit application will be decided. Every range on this site was published before the decision, is frozen in version control on the date it was made, and is graded against the public register when the decision lands. Nothing is revised after the fact, and nothing is removed for scoring badly.

Every queue we forecast

Each range is an 80% credible interval: the model puts an eight-in-ten chance on the decision landing between those two dates. Whether that has actually happened is on the Track record tab, and today the answer there is that the record is six files old.

Two clocks, and why the numbers below differ

A file has been waiting since the day it was applied for. A forecast measures from the Friday the file entered our coverage. Both appear above and they are not the same number: a file that has been pending for four years can still be forecast to be decided next month.

Everything on this page is generated from the forecast record when the weekly forecast runs. Nothing is written by hand except one sentence per missed forecast on the track record page.

What these forecasts are, and are not

They are about timing, not about whether a permit is deserved or will be refused. Outright refusals are rare in these registers, so the question worth forecasting is when a decision lands, not which way it goes.

They cover the permit types listed above and nothing else. The Coverage tab states the full universe we measure ourselves against, including the permits companies are waiting on that we do not forecast.

We publish every live forecast, and we publish every miss. The register pages are indexed by permit only: there is no company or project index on this site.

They are not legal, financial or investment advice, and they are not a prediction about any consultation with an Indigenous nation, its adequacy, or how it should resolve. Where a permit's clock is paused for consultation, the model forecasts the timing consequences and says nothing about the consultation itself.