Acland coal miners left pondering a jobless future

Direct descendants of Bob Menzies’ “Forgotten People,’’ first cousins to Richard Nixon’s “Silent Majority,’’ the Quiet Australians always seems to find employment somewhere.  

In the unlikely event you are ever sent off in search of that mythical tribe “The Quiet Australians’’ then leave Brisbane, take the Warrego Highway exit at the top of the M2 Ipswich Motorway, pass through Toowoomba, find the New Acland Coal Mine and pull up at the wash plant.

There’ll you find Andy Scouller, wash plant manager, fitter and turner by trade and perhaps the living embodiment of the term “The Quiet Australian’’.

New Acland Coal Mine.

The phrase was used by Prime Minister Scott Morrison on May 18 after Australian voters flummoxed the professional pollsters and voted the Coalition back into office and is now so entrenched in the vernacular it has its own Wikipedia page.

Direct descendants of Bob Menzies’ “Forgotten People,’’ first cousins to Richard Nixon’s “Silent Majority,’’ the Quiet Australians always seems to find employment somewhere.

They pay tax, do a bit of volunteer work to help others out, don’t routinely engage in street protest and rarely insist on having the loudest voice either mainstream or social media.

Andy is a Quiet Australian, married to a special needs schoolteacher, captain of a volunteer auxiliary fire brigade in Pittsworth, father of six, model employee, great bloke and possibly unemployed as of next month.

Andy Scouller is a wash plant manager at New Acland Coal Mine. Picture: Annette Dew

The decision (or, more to the point, the absence of a decision) by the State Government on the mining licence required for the expansion of the New Acland Coal Mine this week has left Andy and 300 other co-workers in limbo.

A lot of these people working in this “thin seam’’ coalmine operating for more than a century, and featuring thin ribbons of coal threaded through the earth as little as one metre high, don’t have too many options.

Many are specialised in this area of work, and there are not a lot of coal mines in the south east to migrate to.

They can’t just go off to another mine, as workers might in Queensland’s Bowen Basin where massive thick seam operations which can tower over 60 metres are common, and hundreds of workers required.

Mine manager Dave O’Dwyer had the unenviable role of telling a large portion of them who started work at the 6am shift Monday that 150 out of the mine’s 300 jobs had to be cut by

October.

Dave O'Dwyer is a manager at New Acland Coal Mine. Picture: Annette Dew

O’Dwyer, who in recent months believed he had good reason to think the planned mine expansion was on track for approval, was clearly shaken by the experience.

“I was really looking forward to getting up in front of them and talking about how our future was bright and prosperous and we would just move forward,’’ he said.

Instead, he was greeted with a sea of blank faces as he told of the cuts, and workers began going through the mental arithmetic of how to celebrate Christmas minus a pay cheque.

“As you look around the room there is just deadly silence,’’ O’Dwyer said.

The expansion was expected to be given the green light by midnight Saturday and was the fulfilment of a process which began before the iPhone came out.

New Hope began jumping through the hoops to expand the mine somewhere in 2007 and have altered the application several times.

Objectors have taken them to the Land Court, won, then lost to a New Hope (owners of the mine) appeal when a Judicial Review ruled against the objectors’s case and found the mining lease should be granted without delay.

Meanwhile objectors went back and appealed New Hope’s successful appeal of the first decision, and the State Government won’t grant the mining lease and associated water licence until that decision is finalised.

The State Government can, quite legally, green light the mining company’s expansion plans and let it sort out its legal problems down the track while also bearing the associated costs.

But it won’t, and that reluctance to get behind the expansion of proven mining project utterly baffles O’Dwyer.

New Acland Coal Mine.

If Federal Labor had won the May federal election under Bill Shorten, New Hope might at least be able to point to a new political climate and tailor their expectations and ambitions to suit a new electoral mood which would have been clearly read as ‘’anti coal.’’

But Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk swiftly began changing the atmospherics in Queensland immediately after the election which, in Queensland, was clearly fought over the Adani Mine proposal in Central Queensland.

The Premier jetted off to Mackay just days after the election and announced she would direct the Co-ordinator-General to sit down with the Environment Department and Adani to get thing moving.

Labor then doubled down, putting the resources industry front and centre at its State Conference last month as party president John Battams declared that, while the party supported a strong environmental platform including renewable energy, it also supported mining:

“We support coal jobs,’’ Battams said.

O’Dwyer was getting what he felt were favourable vibes from both the offices of the Premier and the Mines Minister Dr Anthony Lynham, right up until the Saturday midnight deadline.

“We felt we were moving in the right direction but when crunch time came they were just not there,’’ he said.

“We tried to contact them to find out what was going on but ultimately, we got a deafening silence.”

New Acland Coal Mine.

All that Dr Lynham, and the Premier, will now say on the matter is that:

“The Government is awaiting the decision of the Court of Appeal before deciding on matters relating to the New Acland mine expansion.’’

For Andy, bumping about the mine in a four-wheel drive last Monday afternoon and gazing on with some pride as those massive Caterpillar 793F haul trucks roared past doing their work, it’s a mystery.

That New Hope is a good corporate citizen is not really a matter of contention.

Even though it is permitted to access water under its present agreement, New Hope actually pipes in recycled water from a plant near Toowoomba via a pipeline it built, while all the while paying the Toowoomba Regional Council $10 million a year for the privilege.

New Hope backs community projects, provides 300 jobs and, when Andy calls in and says he will be a bit late because he’s been fighting fires with the auxiliary fire brigade, the bosses say “no problem.’’

“We don’t make a lot of things any more here in Australia,’’ Andy muses while eyeing off a massive pile of coal awaiting export to Asia.

“But we do dig things up.’’

Helping to dig up this high energy, low ash coal that both international and domestic customers pay good money for is what underwrites our state budget each year.

Mining accounts for about eight per cent of Australia’s Gross Domestic Product and 60 per cent of our export income.

New Acland Coal Mine.

That money pouring into our lives creates new hospitals and roads and environmental faculties in our universities which (quite rightly) produce the research which tells us that we should not be mining in the first place.

But, unless New Hope gets a green light on its expansion, it will soon cease contributing to those cash flows.

An operation that size operates on long range out year forecasts and has to deal with financial realities, and that means 150 jobs must now go by October.

“We would love to get a late call from the Premier or the Minister (approving the expansion,’’ says O’Dwyer.

“But unfortunately for our work force it is too late, because we have to give them a certain amount of notice.’’

“Even getting a call now, it would be almost impossible to change the course.’’

If there is no expansion, within as little as 18 months there is no mine.

And then Andy and 300 other “Quiet Australians,’’ through no fault of their own, will be out looking for work.

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