Peta Credlin: Left-wing activists fail to see the light on Adani

Funny how left-wing activists claim to support the underprivileged, yet by protesting the Adani mine, they’re denying a bright future for many poor people, writes Peta Credlin. I want to tell their story.

To be born in Australia is to have won the lottery of life.

Living here is about as good as it gets. Yet consumed with our First World problems, we Australians often forget the smallness of our worries relative to the battles that so many elsewhere have just to keep warm, dry, safe and fed.

I might bemoan Sydney’s traffic yet I have a car to drive and enough money to keep fuel in the tank.

I have a wardrobe full of clothes yet still complain I have nothing to wear.

And my latest worry is how can I manage to store all my books when I move house even though I have more than most schools in the developing world; and, despite being born a girl, can read them!

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All of this raced through my mind as I sat on a stone step, in a makeshift open-sided kitchen covered by a scrap metal roof so low I could reach up and touch it, as a young woman called Riva with not much more than primary school education, warmed the water for her little boy’s bath, over a smoky flame.

Peta Credlin with some of the children living in Mumbai, India, who will benefit from power generated by Queensland’s Adani mine. Picture: Supplied

Despite the red clay and monsoonal rain, her earthen floor was brushed clean and she had dressed with pride.

Here, on the outskirts of Mumbai, in a village accessed by little more than a goat track, she told me how getting reliable power in March had transformed her life.

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As our translator explained, she could afford not much more than a couple of bulbs inside her two-room home, hence the wood fire, (and no television, although her neighbour had one).

Her joy was so real you could almost touch it.

Peta Credlin reports from the village, Navsacha Pada, in central Mumbai, where children study by the light of kerosene lamps. Picture: Supplied

But beyond the household gains, electricity made her feel safe at night and that was the real prize.

This time last week, I flew to India as Adani’s guest because I wanted to tell the story of the mine from the perspective of the people there, rather than the activists here.

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To me, an Indian-owned company that wanted to spend billions here, and employ Australians, so they could help some 200 million of their own people join the 21st century had a moral dimension that was missing from the debate at home.

Left-wing activists tend to crow that they’re all for helping the poor, even though depriving them of baseload power denies them a future.

Left-wing activists protesting Adani are depriving the poor of a future. Picture: Tara Croser/News Corp Australia

And it has to be baseload: the sort of reliable, affordable power that can only come from coal and gas, and in India’s case, nuclear energy, too.

There is a growing use of renewables (indeed for all the hate that’s heaped on Adani, it operates one of the world’s largest solar farms).

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But solar power can’t keep the lights on 24/7.

I saw the single solar street lamp this village had in action.

It gave enough glow to light about two metres around and lasted about four hours.

Just long enough for dozens of village kids to open up their books after doing all the chores needed to survive in a poverty-battered community only to close them again when it petered out.

It’s no surprise that most of them never make it into secondary school.

I’ve written about the issue of energy as long as I’ve had this column.

Mumbai’s open laundry where workers handwash clothes with no electricity. Picture: Supplied

But it wasn’t until I asked Adani to take me to India and show me where our coal would go and who it would help, that I was really able to grasp the scale of their energy deficit.

It’s not just bringing power to the remaining one fifth of the country’s population without it, it’s the ever-increasing demand for electricity as industries grow.

As the chairman of Adani said to me, don’t forget that burning Australia’s thermal coal is far better for cutting emissions and helping the environment than local coal.

Yet this barely gets a mention.

Nor does the story of my friend, Riva. Funny about that.

Peta Credlin is a columnist and Sky News presenter.

Originally published as Peta Credlin: Left-wing activists fail to see the light on Adani