Seeking to bridge the great coal divide

Susan McDonald is the new hope of the Nationals to bridge the great divide between city and country, the bush and ’burbs.

LNP senate candidate Susan McDonald at her home in Brisbane. Picture: Glenn Hunt.

She grew up with the dust of Cloncurry on her boots and earned a seat at the table at the top end of town. Senator-in-waiting Susan McDonald is the new hope of the Nationals to bridge the great Australian divide between city and country, the bush and ’burbs.

The schism has never yawned so wide, the faultlines etched deep in the polarising debate on climate change and the future of coal in this country. Voters and politicians alike are split by geography, ideology and naked self-interest.

“I’m really concerned that there is a narrative around that talks down what we do, which in Queensland is mining and agriculture,” Ms McDonald said.

“We all have a shared desire to live the best life that we can and to be secure … and I want to take the experience I have had and bring a sense of that bridge between ­regional and city, between ­employee and employer, and try to talk the two languages.”

The man she will replace in parliament, outgoing Queensland senator Barry O’Sullivan, yesterday ramped up pressure on Scott Morrison and Deputy Prime Minister Michael McCormack, the Nationals’ embattled leader, to ease power prices by underwriting a coal-fired power station and bring out the “big stick” of divestment legislation the government has threatened against energy companies.

With an eye to the likely May federal election, Senator O’Sullivan said: “The challenge is to let our constituents … know we are fighting for this and have committed to deliver this. That is code for: if we come back in a marginal environment we won’t support the ­Coalition government until we ­deliver these things.

“That’s a big statement. My colleagues have told me privately that they agree with that proposition.”

The tension between the ­Coalition partners underlines the conundrum of coal. What plays to affluent, progressive voters in inner-city electorates such as Kooyong in Melbourne — where Josh Frydenberg faces a challenge by Labor, high-profile Greens candidate Julian Burnside and climate-orientated independent Oliver Yates — is anathema in the mining belt of central and north Queensland, a Nationals heartland.

There, communities have been hard hit by drought, the end of the mine construction boom and a bitter sense that their real-world needs place second to appeasing “latte Liberals” and progressive voters in the southern capitals, where thousands of students took to the streets yesterday to demand more action on climate change.

Nationals MP ­George Christensen, who will go to the polls in Mackay-based Dawson on a margin of 3.4 per cent, said the northern rebels would not back down. “There is a divide going on, sadly, in the nation between city areas and bush areas around our traditional industries and … from what I can see from people on the street, they are jack of their livelihoods being under ­attack by people who live nowhere near where we are,” he said.

Our reporters this week clocked up hundreds of kilometres to take the pulse of regional voters in Dawson, Flynn, Capricornia and Hinkler, as well as blue-ribbon Kooyong and neighbouring Higgins, the Liberal stronghold being vacated by Industrial Relations, Jobs and Women’s Minister Kelly O’Dwyer. Their views on coal couldn’t be further apart.

In Bowen, two hours’ drive north of Mackay, publican and LNP branch president Bruce Hedditch, 73, grinds his teeth in frustration at what he pays for electricity — up from $2800 a month in 2014 to nearly $5000 to cool the Larrikin Hotel over summer. “We need cheaper power,” he said. “If this continues, the economy is going to crash.”

In Hawthorn’s Central Gardens, swinging voter Lois Martin, 66, said she liked the job Mr Frydenberg did on the national ­energy guarantee under Malcolm Turnbull before the policy was dumped. But she wasn’t sure she would vote for the Treasurer this time around in Kooyong. “He seems to be blowing with the wind a bit,” she said.

In Queensland, Ms McDonald, 49, is Nationals royalty. Her ­father, Don McDonald, was federal president from 1996-99. She grew up on Devoncourt Station outside Cloncurry, one of 11 cattle properties owned by the family company, MDH, a vast enterprise that spans 3.8 million hectares.

A single mother of three teenage children, she is managing ­director of MDH’s retail arm, Super Butcher, a five-store and online business that employs 80 people. She was approached to run for the Senate in 2004, for the spot Barnaby Joyce subsequently took, but begged off because the kids were her priority. Having joined the then Queensland National Party at 19, she became state secretary and was a founding trustee of the Liberal ­National Party when the merger happened in 2008.

She believes “absolutely” that climate change is real and needs to be addressed. “But I think direct action on practical outcomes is the way that we ensure that Australians aren’t made to suffer, aren’t punished for something we are not creating,” she said from the family home in Clayfield in Brisbane’s inner north, which she is packing up to move to Townsville in anticipation of her election. Given that she is No 2 on the LNP Senate ticket in Queensland, this is assured.

The change of scene was mandated by the LNP after Toowoomba-based Senator O’Sullivan and north Queenslander Ian Macdonald, the veteran Liberal who was No 1 on the ticket, were shown the door in favour of Ms McDonald and mining executive Paul Scarr, also Brisbane-based. As she sees it, it’s another example of having “a foot in the two parts of Queensland, the region and the city”.

Avowedly pro-coal, Ms McDonald has an ­answer for those who would kill the industry: “There is a huge demand for coal in the rest of the world and we have to decide if Australia wants to be part of the solution of providing lower-emission coal to those coal-fired power stations that will operate regardless of our decision.

“I would say to those people to consider what is in the best interest of the world and what is in the best interest of Australia. Once they have considered that reality, that there is not a structural decline in coal use, in fact it’s quite the ­opposite, we are either part of the solution or we’re not.”

Additional reporting: Remy Varga