It’s a question I have often pondered.
With the Turnbull Government confirming that the Adani Carmichael coal mine will not receive NAIF funding, Australia’s largest rail freight company – Aurizon – stating that it will withdraw its application for a federal government loan to build the rail corridor, as well as deep public opposition, the project should have been abandoned long ago.
And yet, like a zombie from the Walking Dead, it continues to stumble along, with Adani still claiming that it is “100 per cent committed to the Carmichael project”.
Writing in The Monthly, The Australia Institute’s chief economist, Richard Denniss, explains why the Adani project is still standing, arguing that its zombie-like existence “is as much about symbols and interests as it is about jobs and money”:
While some environmentalists and bankers have been saying for years that the Adani coalmine will never be built, the project just won’t die. There is a simple reason for this seeming resilience, and it is inextricably linked to the Monash Forum’s recent calls for a new era of coal-fired power construction: with enough public subsidies, any project can be rendered profitable.
The fact that world coal demand has fallen three years in a row won’t stop it being built. The fact that the cost of renewables has fallen by 80 per cent in the past 10 years won’t stop it. The outrage over the fact that the mine would take an unlimited amount of water from the Great Artesian Basin, for free, won’t stop it. And nor will the fact that it will never employ anything like 10,000 workers. None of these things will stop the mine for the simple reason that, contrary to most of what passes for commentary on the issue, it’s not just about jobs or money. As always in Australian politics, it revolves around symbols and interests…
While it’s widely known that Adani wants a billion dollars from Australian taxpayers, few people realise that Australian taxpayers spend billions of dollars each year subsidising resource companies. And the mining industry knows that if environment and community groups can win a fight about the Adani subsidies, then it won’t stop there…
So here we are, watching an enormous political fight over a mine that no bank thinks we need and few voters could place on a map. At collectively 40 kilometres long and 10 kilometres wide, the Adani coal pits are enormous, but the size of the political fight about the mine has far more to do with power and money than it has to do with planning laws or the need to create jobs…
Coal from the Galilee Basin is far higher in ash and sulphur than even coal from the Hunter Valley in New South Wales. Meanwhile, the Indian government has declared that it intends to cease all coal imports in the near future. And of course it’s far cheaper to install renewable energy with batteries in small remote villages, because doing so doesn’t require billions of dollars worth of transmission lines to be built to communities without power…
But while the importance of jobs and tax revenues associated with the Adani mine are often exaggerated, it is hard to exaggerate the symbolic importance that the mine now has in Australian politics…
Resources Minister Matt Canavan and the rest of his Coalition colleagues went out of their way to pick a symbolic fight about coal. Throwing public money at Adani, throwing public money at coal-fired power stations and literally handing lumps of coal around the parliament are all symbolic acts designed to make clear to the public whose side the government is on and who its opponents are.
Surprisingly, and unlike most things the Turnbull government has tried, the Coalition has succeeded in making its support for coal and its hostility to renewable energy crystal clear. Unsurprisingly, it has completely misread the moods of the business community and the public…
[Adani] has become a symbol of the hubris and hypocrisy of the last generation of climate-sceptic fiscal conservatives to fill our parliament. And no matter what happens to the world demand for coal, the Adani mine isn’t going away until they do.
Well said. MB has opposed the Adani Carmichael coal mine from day 1 because we believe that it is both economically inept and environmentally destructive.
But we will probably have to wait until Labor takes office before it finally puts a bullet into its brain.
