As Australia prepares for its next Federal election, Hogsback is aghast at the way the coal mining has become a political football with all parties.
The Greens have for a long time used coal as a source of garnering electoral support.
In a funny twist of fate they are appealing to farmers, who have traditionally been National party voters.
Greens Candidate for Groom Antonia van Geuns said this week that New Hope Corporation’s Acland coal mine expansion on the Darling Downs of Queensland threatens to eat up more prime farmland.
“We have viable job-rich alternatives in clean energy that don't cost agricultural jobs. Our plan for at least 90% clean energy by 2030 would create thousands of new jobs, mostly in regional areas,” she said.
“We've also put forward a $1 billion Clean Energy Transition fund to help workers and communities adjust to the transition with training for new jobs and plans to attract new investment to affected regions.”
Green senator Larissa Waters said the Greens have introduced three separate bills to give landholders including traditional owners the right to say “no” to coal and gas, and to ban fracking but the old parties have failed to support us each time.
“We Greens will always put farmers ahead of the big mining companies' profits, which mostly flow offshore, and unlike the Liberal, National and Labor parties, we don't take donations from coal and gas companies,” Waters said.
“We Greens stand firmly on the side of landholders, who appallingly still don't have a legal right to refuse mining companies' access to explore and, then later, mine their land in Queensland.”
The Greens have also blamed the coal mining industry for the damage to the coral in the Great Barrier Reef. They have been very silent on the major effect on coral of fertilizer chemicals and other run off from the agricultural industry.
The Labor Party, for its part, has committed to provide $10.8 million in public funds to Environmental Defender’s Offices with a record of helping green activists committed to sabotaging Australia’s export coal sector that delivers $38 billion in exports, $6 billion in wages and salaries and 43,000 jobs.
Over the course of the past several years in Queensland, there are numerous examples of EDOs working in conjunction with radical environmental and anti-coal groups to initiate vexatious legal procedures against coal mining projects, according to Minerals Council of Australia executive director of coal Greg Evans.
These include EDO Queensland representing Coast and Country Qld in the Land Court against Adani’s Carmichael coal project, delaying $20 billion worth of investment and EDO Queensland representing the Australian Conservation Foundation’s legal challenge of the federal government’s approval of Adani’s Carmichael project.
These actions have been part of a coordinated strategy by these anti-coal groups to shut down Australia’s coal industry and threaten Bowen Basin jobs and families, according to Evans.
“The participation of the QLD and NSW EDOs in helping to formulate ‘Stopping Australia’s Coal Export Boom’ document proves that they are more interested in pursuing an ideological agenda rather than an environmental one,” he said.
The LNP, while ostensibly in favour of coal mining, can not always be relied upon to be consistent.
The Hog vividly recalls with horror the way the former New South Wales LNP premier Barry O’Farrell’s decided to retrospectively rescind the exploration license for NuCoal Resources’ Doyles Creek.
In the seat of New England, the current deputy prime minister and leader of the National party Barnaby Joyce, is fighting to hang on to his seat with a challenge from independent Tony Windsor.
With the Gunnedah Basin in the New England electorate emerging as the next major mining province of NSW, Hogsback thinks that coal mining will remain a political football in this election and many more to come.
