“If the Treasury were to fill old bottles with banknotes, bury them at suitable depths in disused coalmines which are then filled up to the surface with town rubbish, and leave it to private enterprise on well-tried principles of laissez-faire to dig the notes up again (the right to do so being obtained, of course, by tendering for leases of the note-bearing territory), there need be no more unemployment and, with the help of the repercussions, the real income of the community, and its capital wealth also, would probably become a good deal greater than it actually is. It would, indeed, be more sensible to build houses and the like; but if there are political and practical difficulties in the way of this, the above would be better than nothing.”
Analysis by Wood Mackenzie commissioned by investment group The Infrastructure Fund estimates the railway could unlock north Queensland mines capable of producing more than 200 million tonnes of coal per year.
…”While Minister Canavan has previously stated that he is unconcerned with the impact of North Queensland coal expansion on NSW coal miners, our modelling also makes clear that Queensland’s Bowen and Surat Basins will also be hit hard by any flood of subsidised competition,” Mr Van Rooyen says.
“Minister Canavan’s billion dollar support for the Galilee coal basin is not just playing state against state, its mate against mate.”
That’s before you calculate the externalities of damage to the reef, tourism and climate change. Let me reiterate that this analysis is commissioned by Gardior, a heavy coal industry infrastructure investor.
David Llewellyn-Smith is Chief Strategist at the MB Fund and MB Super. David is the founding publisher and editor of MacroBusiness and was the founding publisher and global economy editor of The Diplomat, the Asia Pacific’s leading geo-politics and economics portal.
He is also a former gold trader and economic commentator at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the ABC and Business Spectator. He is the co-author of The Great Crash of 2008 with Ross Garnaut and was the editor of the second Garnaut Climate Change Review.
