Federal Environment Minister Tony Burke has rejected a bid by conservationists to lock out mining from Tasmania's Tarkine region.
Mr Burke has rejected the Australian Heritage Council's advice to list more than 400,000 hectares of the Tarkine on the National Heritage Register.
Mr Burke says it would have been "disastrous" for potential mining jobs in the area if he had followed the council's advice.
"From purely environmental terms, it would have been something that would have been a wonderful thing to be able to do but you have to take into account the impact on people and taking that impact into account meant that I simply couldn't go with the Heritage Council's recommendations," he said.
"To do heritage listing you have to truly represent the values and, politically, there may well have been an option of my putting a bigger area on the heritage list and claiming 'there you go, I've done it', but it would have been an abuse of the system."
A two-kilometre stretch of coast in the far north-west has been placed on the list, due to Indigenous heritage values.
Environmentalists had wanted heritage protection for 433,000 hectares of the state's north-west, which is covered with temperate rainforest which provides a habitat for endangered species.
Mr Burke has already approved a magnetite mine, but has applied conditions aimed at protecting Tasmanian devils and quolls from being killed by traffic on new roads through the area.
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