When the Coalition was elected in 2013, unemployment in Townsville was just over 5%. Last December, it was three percentage points higher. In Burdekin Shire to the south, it’s gone from 4.7% to 7%. Inland, in the Charters Towers local government area, it’s gone from 7% to 11%. In Hinchinbrook Shire to the north, from 6.3% to 8.5%.
Other areas to the north and the south have benefited from the jobs boom of the Turnbull years and seen unemployment fall or stay the same. But for Townsville and the region most affected by Adani’s proposed Carmichael coal mine and its rail line, the last five years have been ones of failure for the government, years that have left the region and its communities behind. Youth unemployment in Townsville is over 17%, up from 11% in early 2014.
The Coalition had promised much for the region. There was to be a parliamentary secretary for northern Australia — although the occupant of the role, Queensland buffoon Ian Macdonald, was dumped by Abbott after the 2013 election. In 2015, a “Northern Australia Infrastructure Fund” was established to spend $5 billion, and Josh Frydenberg was named minister for northern Australia by Malcolm Turnbull. He was later replaced by coal zealot Matt Canavan. Meantime, unemployment around Townsville got worse and worse. In late 2016 it reached over 10%. And years went by without the NAIF ever spending any of its money.
The only thing the LNP has to show for five wasted years for the region is Adani’s scaled-back Carmichael coal mine in the Galilee Basin to the south, and its rail line to Abbot Point 150 kilometres down the coast from Townsville. That’s why, literally on the eve of the election being called, LNP MPs and senators are pulling out all stops to get the project’s environmental approvals signed off before the caretaker period commences.
LNP Senator James McGrath — who despite being in the senate for nearly five years is still best known for having to resign from Boris Johnson’s staff a decade ago — even threatened the government’s bumbling Environment Minister Melissa Price if she didn’t approve it immediately (Price duly announced that she had signed off on all approvals this morning). It’s hard to recall a government so bitterly divided that MPs issued written threats against one another, but this government has written a whole new chapter on political chaos that’s impressive even by the terrible standards of the last decade.
Bear in mind that the LNP are doing this for a project that in the scaled-down form will deliver just 1500 jobs — at least according to Adani. Remember Adani claimed the much larger original project would create 10,000 jobs but was forced to admit the actual number was 1464.
LNP MPs and senators believe that Price is slow-walking the approval of the project because hostility to Adani is so intense in southern metropolitan areas that Liberal MPs want the issue to be ditched until after the election. There’s a culture war aspect to that as well: the image of well-heeled residents of the leafy suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne –in seats like Wentworth in Sydney, or Frydenberg’s own seat of Kooyong in Melbourne — who can afford to demand climate action without worrying about a job or the cost of living, in contrast to the residents of Townsville, who are doing it tough.
In fact, that framing is perverse. It is the wealthy residents of urban Australia who don’t need to worry about climate change. They and their children will have the financial resources, the skills, the education and the social capital to deal with the economic impacts of climate change. They will prosper no matter how much damage climate change does to the Australian economy. The struggling residents of regional Queensland, however, have fewer skills, poorer education, less wealth and fewer economic opportunities to rely on. They are more marginal, and therefore more vulnerable to the economic impacts of climate change — especially given a major source of employment in the regional tourism industry, the Great Barrier Reef, is being destroyed.
The Coalition’s failure to accept and address climate change will ultimately hurt the residents of regional Queensland far more than it will hurt the good burghers of Wentworth or Kooyong.
The Carmichael project itself also represents the characteristics of modern economic policy that so alienate voters. Adani is mired in multiple corruption scandals around the world and is a prominent tax dodger. It has had privileged access to Australia’s Prime Minister. It has repeatedly breached licence conditions for its existing Abbot Point facility. The Commonwealth’s superannuation corporation has dumped its stake in the company out of governance concerns. And both major political parties have been paralysed on the project, trying to avoid the issue of support for the project out of concern for alienating key constituencies.
The Carmichael project is a failure in literally every sense possible. LNP politicians have failed the region over the last five years. They are failing the same community on climate change. Now they are trying to hijack approval processes within the government in the interests of a company that displays every flaw of the neoliberal model of economic policy making, for a project that will offer few jobs.
Big deal, they’re gonna get returned because they’ve embarked on a fear campaign about EVs, and those with the least skills, social capital, wealth, and education will fall for it.
I doubt they will be returned. For every bogan who is having his prejudices stoked there is a thinking person from the post Woodstock generation waiting to nail these cretins.
All domestic and international banks have refused to support Adani. The finance sector has delivered its assessment.
Without taxpayer funded govt support, this project goes nowhere. Should The ALP be elected, government/ tax payer funding seems highly unlikely.
Desperately rabid Qld LNP politicians seek the window dressing of their Minister for Mates, Money & Environment to approve current environmental approvals….before the election would be lovely!
This allows them to tell their electorate of the progress they are making for those 1500, or golly gee, maybe even 10,000 jobs.
If memory serves, the Adani consultant that declared in court the lower than 10,000 jobs figure, that is still breathlessly promoted by LNP and media, involved contractors and short term work requirements, NOT permanent ongoing positions.
And now a nonentity of a QLD LNP Senator calls for the Minister to be sacked if no environmental approval is announced! What a rabble.
Ummmm… make that “approve current environmental conditions”
The old joke about the rich man, the poor man and the packet of biscuits springs to mind.
The Coalition has hollowed out opportunities in the regions, assisted the poisoning of the sea and land the people need to earn a living, gutted the innovation needed to build new industries and ways of living and venally propped up the dying industries that prevent any sustainable jobs and investment.
Now their whole election pitch is just: “Look out! The socialists are coming for your biscuit.”
“They will prosper no matter how much damage climate change does to the Australian economy.”
– which shows you don’t get global warming (to give is it’s more accurate moniker), like most of the political mainstream.
What if there IS no recognisable economy, because of a series of collapses starting with the financial system, then the global trade network, then our political system (such as it is), then our own food production because half the arable land has burnt and the rest is in drought or flood, then … ? Apocalyptic? You bet. No-one knows if that future is already unavoidable, but we can only keep hoping it’s not.
Meanwhile stop imagining it won’t really affect you and yours.
Well said, Geoff…I nearly fell off my chair when I read what Bernard had written! How is money/wealth going to save the privileged few when our planet goes into melt down? Isn’t that exactly why the residents of Wentworth and Kooyong are not listening to their usual party members…at least those who understand what global warming is all about?
The sooner we realise that we are ALL going to be affected, the better!
Yes, Geoff, you are utterly right. In an apocalyptic scenario, of a kind that a rise beyond 1.5 degrees increase in temperature implies, everybody will be caught up. So many Hollywood films made over the last four decades have portrayed this dystopia perfectly. It is time the MSM took its (their) head out of the sand and took the likely effects of climate change seriously. The future scenario is terrifying.
Some years ago, when all and sundry were quacking about the “10,000 jobs” Adani’s Carmichael mine would produce, resulting in manna for all ad infinitum, one of Adani’s own consultants issued a report that the mature mine(s) would result in 1,464 “job-years”, whatever that means.
All and sundry then said “Oh, well, that’s 1464 new long term jobs, then. Isn’t that great?”
However, one dissenter reckoned that 1,464 job-years translated into 48 jobs. His reasoning:
1464 job years divided by projected life of 30 years = 48.3
I wonder who is right.
To the editor:
“It is the wealthy residents of urban Australia who don’t need to worry about climate change. They and their children will have the financial resources, the skills, the education and the social capital to deal with the economic impacts of climate change. They will prosper no matter how much damage climate change does to the Australian economy. ”
should read:
“It is every resident of Australia who needs to worry about climate change. They and their children will have to deal with the impacts of climate change. They will not prosper.”
I think it was the Murdoch press auto correct at work again. So I have fixed it for you. You will thank me in the future for pointing this out.
Yes agree Geoff. My first thoughts on reading those words were not that the rich can decompartmentalise themselves from the chaos happening around the poor. My doomsday scenario of the effects of 2 to 3 degrees warming and associated sea level rise, drought, flood etc is millions of people on the move in Asia and elsewhere. And guess what our usual response to that is? We usually start shooting at each other. We elect ever more extreme dumb strongmen who will reach for the gun first. For the worst case scenario I suggest you watch the movie Doctor Strangelove.
Thank goodness so many others picked up on this nonsense. You can’t insulate yourself from the long term effects of climate change.
No, you can’t but if you have the money and the education you can relocate yourselves and you assets over time to be in a survivable circumstances.
As I was raised in north Queensland, I have watched the climate changes manifesting, while the people (relatives) who live there think I’m a little bit strange when I point them out, because to them it has happened over 10 or 20 years..
The cyclone that hit Townsville merely pointed out the obvious, the older part of town, built on the foothills, was unaffected, whilst the new suburbs were inundated.
I have relatives from further west, who are relocating their grazing activities to areas that are likely to receive increased rain, others having bought alternate properties to hedge their long term viability.
Thank you Geoff, I couldn’t agree more. How wide of the mark BK is on this assumption is perhaps a measure of how far past the tipping point we’ve already strayed.
FFS. Bugger mythical ‘sovereign risk’ which has been created by politicians of all ilk (but mostly the LNP) cowtowing to the greedy coal industry. 1500 jobs from a mine that will poison the future for decades will not solve unemployment in NQ. How many clean energy projects could be built with 1500 jobs? When Labor get in, surely it must urgently devise a credible energy transition plan to get Australia out of coal within 2 decades and start being candid about that. Yes it will be difficult in all sorts of ways (royalty and tax revenues, skills transitions, alternative sources of employment etc), but that is what the overwhelming majority of Australian want. We have to get out of this ridiculous synthetic choice between jobs OR destroying the planet.