Greens declare war on Adani

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A bit of ticker finally from the The Greens, via The Australian:

Greens leader Richard Di Natale says he’s prepared to stand in front of bulldozers and get arrested to stop Queensland’s Adani mine, and expects to be joined by many thousands of Australians.

Predicting the protest action would be bigger than that which stopped the Franklin Dam going ahead in Tasmania in the 1980s, Senator Di Natale accused the Labor Party of hypocrisy over its support for the mine.

“You can’t position yourself as a party that supports renewables and believes that climate change is a problem, that says that you want to tackle climate change, and then support that great big polluting Adani coal mine,” Senator Di Natale told Sky News.

“You’ve got Queensland Labor who are throwing money good after bad to ensure that jobs-killing, climate-destroying mine goes ahead, and you’ve got federal Labor who are right behind it who won’t come out and say that they won’t support it and that Bill Shorten would review the project.”

Senator Di Natale said that contrary to messaging from Adani, the Coalition and Queensland Labor, the Adani mine would destroy jobs because it was destroy the Great Barrier Reef.

Bravo. I might add that it will also destroy jobs in NSW by flooding an oversupplied global market with coal it does not need that will close marginal cost operations further south. This is why one of the world’s great blood-sucking mining firms, Glencore, is also against Adani. As are private operators in the Hunter and the Australia Institute, previously from Domainfax:

The fairness of a proposed Commonwealth government loan of nearly $1 billion to fund a rail link to the giant Adani coal mine in Queensland’s Galilee Basin has been called into question by economic modelling showing it may cost NSW hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

Adani’s Carmichael mine will increase the global supply of coal by about 6 per cent, putting downward pressure on prices received by NSW coal exporters and slashing mining royalties paid to the state government, the report by the Australia Institute says.

The government using taxpayers’ dollars to support the Adani coal mine is the kind of policy that will see it “smashed in an election”, says 2GB’s Alan Jones.

NSW coal royalties will be reduced by nearly $50 million year and possibly by as much as $70 million once the Adani mine is fully operational, the analysis shows.

Some NSW coal mines “would likely close” while others would be forced to reduce costs in response to the additional supply, the report said. The coal-rich Hunter Valley region would be especially vulnerable.
Should all the coal mines proposed in the Galilee Basin go ahead, it could reduce NSW coal royalties by up to $349 million a year, with a central estimate of $240 million a year, the Australia Institute analysis said.

Adani’s Carmichael coal mine is destined to be one of the biggest in the world should it go ahead.

The company has applied to the federal government’s Northern Australia Infrastructure Fund (NAIF) for a confessional loan of almost $1 billion to help fund the construction of a railway line to transport coal more than 300 kilometres from the Galilee Basin to the Adani-owned coal port at Abbot Point.

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There is only one reason that taxpayers are being forced to subsidise the Adani white elephant. The Galilee sits right on top of the One Nation power base.

Adani is National Party pork.

About the author
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.