PM, Queensland business urge govt to back Adani mine to help revive Townsville
Adani has joined the PM in rejecting a controversial report that has a rare bird threatening the future of its giant Queensland mine project.
Miner Adani has hit back at a controversial environmental report which threatens to derail its giant Carmichael coal project in Queensland, saying it won’t be going anywhere.
The report means the endangered black-throated finch is on the verge of halting the controversial mine, after a review by a Melbourne academic, commissioned by the Queensland government at the 11th hour, found the multibillion-dollar project’s plan to protect the rare bird was inadequate.
In a defiant statement on Friday, Adani said it would not abandon Queenslanders who wanted jobs at its mine.
“We are not going anywhere,” it said.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison also weighed in on the issue on Friday, saying
Queensland’s Labor government shouldn’t be “playing games about jobs” in the state’s hard-hit north.
“We support the mining industry. We want to see mining jobs. We want to be able to see projects stand on their two feet and be given a go on the basis of their commercial realities,” the prime minister said.
Speaking today in Julia Creek, the epicentre of a disaster for the beef industry involving the death of up to 500,000 cattle as a result of monsoonal floods, the prime minister said the government supported mining and mining jobs.
“We don’t think they should get special legs up or subsidies or anything like this. But I think the people of Queensland are dealing with enough at the moment without decisions to take away their jobs.”
His comments came after Queensland’s business community urged the state’s Labor government to back its own scientists over the external report, warning the project is “critical” to reviving the economy of flood-ravaged Townsville.
Indian conglomerate Adani, which has won state and federal environmental approvals over more than seven years of assessments, had earlier criticised the draft report by University of Melbourne ecologist Brendan Wintle, who was accused of bias over his associations with anti-coal activism.
Professor Wintle’s criticisms came despite Adani developing its management plan over 18 months of close consultation with Queensland’s Environment Department — a process which included seven revisions — and obtaining the approval of federal environment officials.
Following The Australian’s report, the Chamber of Commerce and Industry Queensland urged the government to follow Canberra’s example and approve the management plan.
“The Adani Carmichael mine project has satisfied countless environmental conditions and the state government has its own advice on this matter,” CCIQ spokesman Daniel Petrie said on Friday.
“This project is critical for the economic prospects of the Townsville region and needs to proceed without any further obstruction.”
CCIQ last month warned unemployment data showed the city’s economy had reached a “tipping point” and faced structural decline unless new projects – chiefly Adani’s coalmine – were pushed ahead.
A copy of Professor Wintle’s draft report, obtained by The Australian, recommended the Carmichael coalmine face a tough new monitoring scheme that would shut down mining if the finch population reduced over the project’s first five years.
Adani attacked the report by Professor Wintle — who tweeted a photograph last November of two children holding a placard that read “I’ll stop farting if you stop burning burn coal” — as a “shopping list of ideas” that went far beyond reviewing the management plan.
BIG crowd at #ClimateStrike ! Kid power! 💥 â¦@UNFCCCâ© â¦@DanielAndrewsMPâ© â¦@ellensandellâ© pic.twitter.com/rN8rs4JyHy
— Brendan Wintle (@BrenWintle) November 30, 2018
“As we anticipated, this draft report reads like an anti-coal, anti-mining, anti-Adani lobbying brochure,” an Adani spokeswoman said.
Environmental management plans are rarely controversial as the state government, by that stage, has already cleared the proponent’s broad strategy and issued an environmental authority.
Amid pressure to scuttle the mine, Environment Minister Leeanne Enoch’s department commissioned Professor Wintle last December to re-examine the finch plan, just weeks after Adani announced it had funding for the mine. The review’s findings are set to delay construction of the mine, which cannot begin without state approval of the plan to protect the endangered bird.
The Carmichael mine is critical to opening up the Galilee Basin, a massive, untapped coal province geologists say could yield more than 27 billion tonnes of coal, employ 15,000 coalminers across six projects and bring broader economic benefits to the region.
A departmental spokesman said it would consider the final report and any submissions by Adani in making a decision on the black-throated finch management plan.
Adani’s spokeswoman criticised the draft report for raising questions about how the finches would cope with climate change, and for citing research by an academic who had been “actively campaigning against the Carmichael project for years”.
“If the Queensland government accepts any part of this report, it means their own Department of Environment’s work over the past 18 months is at best incompetent, and at worst using purposeful delay tactics to slow down the delivery of the Carmichael project and the thousands of jobs it will provide,” she said.
With AAP
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