Do coal-hating hipsters realise their hypocrisy?

The Adani mine saga should make us weep in frustration at the ability of Green activists to sabotage good projects that are in Australia’s national interest, writes Peta Credlin.

If you care about our future, then you really need to ponder this question: How long can we go on, as a country, spending the money that coal mining gives us, while simultaneously trying to shut down the industry and destroy the livelihoods of the 50,000 Australian coal workers (and their dependants) right across the country?

Coal is Australia’s biggest export. Our thermal coal exports — that’s the coal that’s burned in power stations to produce electricity — are at record levels. Coal revenues have never been higher and a good part of the upcoming Budget surplus comes on the back of the resource industry. So much for the myth that the world is turning away from coal.

In countries like ours there are some who want to treat coal like kryptonite; but in lots of other countries, people just want the cheapest and most reliable form of power — so they’re driving coal production up and up. Australia is meeting this demand — as we should — but while we’re happy to export the stuff, we’re becoming ever more reluctant to use it here; or even, it now seems, to open any new mines.

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There’s no better example of this double standard and hypocrisy, than the Queensland Labor government.

The Queensland budget is being propped up by a one-billion-dollar coal royalty windfall, but the Queensland government is finding excuse after excuse to block the development of the Adani mine, even though that mine ultimately means a $20 billion investment in Queensland, 10,000 new local jobs, and electric power for 50 million plus people in India who currently cook their food and heat their homes through burning wood, and animal dung. Amazing isn’t it, that activists ignore this abject poverty when it clashes with the religion of climate change?

Yes, coal produces carbon dioxide emissions but it continues to be the world’s biggest source of electricity. Developing countries that need more power are continuing to build hundreds of new High Efficiency-Low Emission (HELE) coal-fired power stations; and even some developed countries (such as Japan) are building them too. Continuing to export high quality Australian coal means lower global emissions than using coal shipped from alternative sources such as Indonesia.

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The Adani mine saga should make us weep in frustration at the ability of green activists to sabotage good projects that are in Australia’s national interest.

For seven years now, Adani have been trying to open their mine — that will also kick-off a whole new coal province in the Galilee Basin — but they’ve been frustrated at every turn by activists using the courts; and now, the Queensland Labor government. You might think the Premier would be desperate for the jobs, and billion-dollar tax revenues, that this mine will deliver but because she survives via inner-city Green preferences, she’s clearly willing to trade the livelihood of the old working-class Labor supporter, for the coal-hating hipster.

But she’s not alone.

While Bill Shorten is in favour of the Adani mine when he’s in north Queensland, he’s against it when he’s in Melbourne chasing those same Greens preferences too. As are many of the so-called independents because GetUp!’s price for election support is absolute adherence to the anti-resources, anti-coal, dogma.

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Last November, Adani thought that it had finally cleared all the federal and state environmental hurdles after seven long years of legal-leg work. It had spent 18 months working closely with the Queensland environment department to successfully develop a management plan for the endangered black-throated finch — yes, a bird. Then in December, the Queensland minister commissioned an anti-coal Melbourne academic to review the plan and — surprise, surprise — the mine gets held up, yet again.

The Adani coal mine will put an endangered finch on a fast track to extinction, experts trying to save it have warned the federal government. Picture: AAP/Birdlife Australia, Eric Vanderduys

As a nation, we cannot continue to say that we want the jobs and the revenue that the Adani mine will bring, while always putting more hurdles in the way of it actually going ahead.

Either we want the jobs, and are prepared to accept the mine. Or we don’t want the mine and are prepared to forego the jobs. But we can’t have it both ways.

Nor can we keep trashing our international reputation as a country that welcomes, indeed needs, foreign investment. If we want overseas investors to put their hard-earned cash into Australia, as opposed to plenty of other countries courting their investment, then we can never again treat them like we’ve treated Adani; which has already had to spend more than a billion dollars in this country just to gain a licence to spend more, and to give thousands of Australians more jobs.

When it is handed down in April, take a close look at the Federal Budget. There’s hundreds of billions of dollars of social welfare spending locked in that no party will ever wind back because no voter seems prepared to do without less from government. And with resources

(minerals, metals and petroleum) accounting for 72 per cent of Australia’s export goods ($248 billion), are we now so

complacent about our ability to maintain our living standards that we treat such economic opportunity with contempt?