Mr Smith is the secretary of the Friends of the Great Western Tiers group, and raised the issue as a question without notice at the Meander Valley Council's September meeting.

The proposal was approved by the council at the July meeting, based on documents in the development application dated 2012 - a year before the land was added to Tasmania's World Heritage area.

The scheme would require the construction of six 1.2MW hydro power stations, with an infrastructure of 15 kilometres of network that would connect the turbines to the Aurora grid.

Mr Smith asked councillors whether they realised when they voted to approve the application that the land was inside the World Heritage area.

Mr Smith said he did not believe the application should quietly slip through the approvals process.

"I believe world heritage is world heritage, and once an area has been declared as such it's up to the government, whoever it is, state or federal or both, to recognise that it's been declared internationally as world heritage and it's up to them to protect it," he said.

"Therefore, they don't just allow industrial development, no matter how good they might sound as renewable energy."

The council's decision has been appealed by a local resident on a number of grounds, including that the decision provided for two alignment options, which was too ambiguous.

The appeal also argued that there had been no consideration of the water flows in the Fish River, and that there had been no visual assessment provided to demonstrate how the proposal would impact on the World Heritage area.

Meander Valley mayor Craig Perkins said the council had made the decision acting as a planning authority.

"I would be reluctant to make any comment that might prejudice any of the parties in that appeals process," he said.