Adani’s Australia Story: A Battle Over the Politics of Coal and Jobs. By Kabir Agarwal
Note: This is the
fifth story in a five-part series that examines
how the Adani and Carmichael coal mine has divided the Australian public and in
the process, sparked fierce debate on issues such as coal-based energy, energy
financing, jobs and the rights of indigenous people. Read the first, second, third and fourth parts.
In May 2010, Kevin
Rudd, the then prime minister of Australia, announced a new tax of 40% to
be levied on mining activity. A little over a month later, Rudd had lost his
job. The mining industry
had come together to launch a fierce campaign in television and print media
against the tax. Between May and June, $22 million (AUD) was spent on the
campaign, at the end of which Rudd found himself losing popularity and was
felled by his party colleague, Julia Gillard. Within a week of being sworn in
as prime minister, Gillard reached an agreement with mining companies on a
lower tax rate.
“Mining is vital to
Australian politics. No government in Australia can survive if it is hostile to
mining,” Paul Williams, senior lecturer in politics at Griffith University in
Queensland, told me.
That would probably
explain why the Adani group’s coal mine has received the backing of almost all
political parties in Australia. The only opposition from a political party has
come – unsurprisingly – from the Australian Greens party, a party with
environmentalism at its core. Since the mine was
first proposed in 2010, the Adani project has faced considerable headwinds
owing to large-scale protests due to potential severe negative climate impacts,
refusal of the traditional owners to part with the land on which the mine is to
be built and progressively complicated financial scenarios. But the political
support for the mine has been dauntless.
As the protests
against the mine were gathering momentum, in August 2016, Matthew Canavan, the
minister for resources and northern Australia in the Australian federal
government, wrote an opinion piece in The Australian, the country’s
largest selling national newspaper, titled ‘Mining
is central to Australian history and has a strong future’. He argued
strongly for further investment in the mining sector and earmarked the Adani
coal mine as having the potential to contribute significantly to the
development of northern Australia. “If the mine goes ahead, it will help
develop a genuine frontier of our nation,” Canavan wrote.
The ‘frontier’ Canavan
wrote about is the Galilee basin – one of the largest untapped reserves of coal
in the world estimated to contain 20 billion tonnes of coal –
covering an area of 247,000 square kilometres in Central Queensland… read more:
https://thewire.in/197246/adanis-australia-story-crucial-ideological-battle-politics-coal-jobs/