by Cheryl Adam
The Federal Government, under Turnbull’s leadership, is also considering financing new coal-fired power plants. Like the other G20 nations, Australia is pursuing fossil fuel with a vengeance. Around $88 billion a year’s worth of subsidies worldwide is being thrown at fossil fuel companies by 44 governments for the exploration of new oil, gas, and coal reserves with Australia providing $3.5 billion for the development of offshore and inland fossil fuel resources ahead of the United Kingdom and Russia according to a 2014 report ‘The Fossil Fuel Bailout’28 on G20 nations. Australia has cut the emissions intensity of its electricity sector by 15% since 2005, but it has still the highest emissions of any International Energy Agency (IEA) member country and double the average of any other member country according to an Australian Associated Press (AAP) account in The Guardian in February 2018.
The IEA was set up in 1974 in the wake of the oil crisis with the aim of ensuring reliable, affordable, renewable energy. In spite of pledging to cut emissions under the Paris climate agreement, citing the four-yearly review of IEA countries’ energy policies, the IEA found that Australia had “not yet come forward with durable climate change policies after 2020,” nor had it named a long-term goal. The IEA29 also noted that wind and solar power still only represented 1% of total primary energy for the country as a whole.30
It concluded that: “Climate change is an area where government leadership is critical to guide the transition from coal use in power generation to the integration of renewable energy.”
In late 2017, the Turnbull Government came up with an energy and climate change policy entitled the National Energy Guarantee (NEG), which, Turnbull claimed, was to ensure Australia meets its Paris agreement obligations. The Finkel Review into Australia’s National Electricity market from Chief Scientist Alan Finkel was released in June 2017 with a key recommendation31 for the adoption of a Clean Energy Target (CET) that mandates that energy retailers provide a certain amount of their electricity from ‘low-emissions’ generators: sources that produce emissions below a threshold level of carbon dioxide.
Under the proposed NEG – which is not adopting the CET recommended in the Finkel Review – renewable energy will account for 28–36% of total energy generation by 2030. The old energy sources coal and gas, however, are still included under the banner of ‘reliable’ energy. The NEG has two pillars: ‘a reliability guarantee’ to ensure energy is always available and ‘an emissions guarantee’ to address international concerns about emissions. The NEG is yet to be implemented, as the policy has still to be approved by all of the States and Territories at the time of writing (June 2018). But even that step towards cutting emissions and developing an energy policy which focuses on climate change was undermined by Turnbull’s own party.
In April 2018, former Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, and backbencher Kevin Andrews as well as Tasmanian Senator Eric Abetz joined the Monash Forum, a new internal lobby group challenging the NEG. The rogue MPs demanded new coal-fired power stations be built or they would boycott the NEG. The ‘Monash’ was named after General Sir John Monash, an Australian World War I military commander who was a pioneer of brown coal generation in Victoria. However, the idea backfired. In an article in The Australian on 4 April, Monash’s descendants were scathing in the choice of name saying that their ancestor would have been a proponent of green energy including wind and solar power.
Chris Dunstan, a research director at the Institute for Sustainable Futures at the University of Technology in Sydney is heavily critical of the Australian Government’s ineptitude at dealing with climate change. He wrote in The Sydney Morning Herald on 8 November 2017: “Apart from in matters of race relations, has Australia never managed to cock up an issue of major national importance as comprehensively and over a longer period of time than it has for energy and climate change? For more than a decade, our politicians, and to be fair a good share of the rest of us, have bitched and moaned but achieved little more than higher electricity and gas prices and rising carbon pollution.”
He did concede, however, that an NEG’s emissions cap from the electricity sector was “major reform.”
Meanwhile, the approval of new coal mines continues. As already mentioned, it is not just Adani who is waiting in the wings for the Galilee Basin to open. Other mining companies have escaped scrutiny while the focus has been on Adani. Clive Palmer is one of the mining magnates lining up with proposed mines for the Galilee Basin. In May 2018, the mining magnate was on the Financial Review Rich List as Queensland’s wealthiest man, which estimated his wealth at AU$2.84 billion. As recently as March 2018, he had stated that his $6.5 billion Alpha North mine proposed by Palmer’s Waratah coal company in the Galilee Basin would go ahead even if the Adani mine does not.
In May 2018, Peter Hannam from The Sydney Morning Herald reported that Palmer was seeking approval to develop a monster coal mine twice the size of the Adani mine and that it was separate from Palmer’s proposal to develop the China First mine also in the region. The proposed mine would be about 27 times the size of Sydney Harbour, Hannam quoted Greenpeace stating, which had lodged a submission against the mine. The $6.4 billion GVK/Hancock Coal’s Alpha and Kevin’s Corner projects by Gina Rinehart and the wealthy Indian company, G.V. Krishna Reddy, has three proposed mines with the capability of producing 60 million tonnes of coal in full production annually for 30 years. In 2017, the project received environmental authority approval from the Queensland Land Court. The project was still working its way through the approvals process at the time of writing (June 2018), which, if granted, will guarantee the opening of the Galilee Basin whether the Adani mine goes ahead or not.
Little wonder that Fiji’s Prime Minister, Josaia Voreqe Bainimarama, the leader of one of Australia’s closest neighbours, in an article in The Australian in May 2015 has labelled Australia a prominent member of the ‘coalition of the selfish’ describing a group of industrialised nations who put the welfare of their carbon-polluting industries before the environment – actions which, he says, directly threaten the survival of Pacific Island countries because of rising sea levels caused by climate change. This fact too was recognised by Malcolm Turnbull in his speech in 2011 when he talked about the ‘intensely moral’ issues of climate change that by now, he appears to have forgotten.
Australia’s continued promotion of coal is also clearly at odds with the 2015 Paris Agreement. The agreement, signed by 195 parties, aims to limit global ocean warming to well below 2°C above the pre-industrial average and indeed to limit temperature increases even further to 1.5°C. The reputable journal Nature32 in January 2015 states that to have a reasonable chance of achieving that goal, there’s little doubt that the vast majority of the world’s coal reserves must stay in the ground. It states that a third of all oil reserves, half of gas reserves and over 80% of current coal reserves, need to remain in the ground to give us a 50% chance of avoiding a maximum 2°C global average temperature rise through the twenty-first century. Greenhouse gas emissions in fossil fuel reserves, notes the article, are around three times higher than should be burnt if the world is to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.
In 1997, Australia and the United States remained the only industrialised nations not to have ratified the Kyoto Protocol, a landmark treaty requiring a cut in greenhouse gas emissions. It was only ratified ten years later by a Labor Government under then Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, who also, in 2008, introduced the idea of a carbon pollution reduction scheme penalising those who released too much carbon into the atmosphere saying Australia would cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 5% by 2020. But the scheme was rejected by the Senate in 2009 whereupon Rudd revised the scheme in the hope of appealing to the opposition to accept it.33 Rudd did manage to convince then opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull to accept the revised scheme but on 1 December 2009, Turnbull was toppled and replaced by Tony Abbott.
Julia Gillard, Australia’s first female Prime Minister and Rudd’s successor in June 2010, introduced legislation for a carbon pr
ice scheme through the Clean Energy Act 2011 aimed at the big polluters. In July 2010, she had announced she would rule out a carbon tax as an interim measure but later Gillard did unveil plans for a carbon tax and in November 2011 the bill was passed by the Senate. From July 1, 2012 the tax raised $3.8 billion in six months. After a carbon price collapse in Europe, however, the Gillard Government deferred a $2.8 billion tax cut planned for 2015.
When he returned as Prime Minister in 2013, Rudd terminated the carbon tax saying his government was moving to an emissions trading scheme. But less than two months later, Abbott claimed victory in the federal election and all these plans evaporated.
A carbon tax is designed to create incentives for companies, businesses and individuals to change their behaviours, consumption patterns and products from being carbon intensive to low carbon alternatives. On 17 July 2014, a report by the Australian National University estimated that the Australian scheme, while in operation, had cut carbon emissions by as much as 17 million tonnes. It was the biggest annual reduction in greenhouse gas emissions in 24 years of records by 2013 as the carbon tax had helped drive a large drop in pollution from the electricity sector.
Rudd and Gillard’s main opponent, apart from conservative politicians, was the mining industry. Opposition to the tax, especially by the Minerals Council, the industry’s national body in Australia, focused predictably on job losses. Figures revealed by the Australian Electoral Commission on political spending were quoted in The Sydney Morning Herald34 in February 2011 where Mark Davis posed the question: “How much does it cost to get rid of a prime minister?” He revealed that the industry spent a total of $22.2 million on the campaign which ran from the start of May until late June 2010 when Julia Gillard took over from Kevin Rudd and negotiated a compromise on the tax.
The amount of advertising dollars thrown at the debate was staggering: $17.2 million primarily on TV ads: BHP Billiton spent $4.2 million, Rio Tinto just over $537,000, and a smaller lobby group, the Association of Mining and Exploration Companies, just under $274,000.
Malcolm Turnbull, who in 2009 campaigned with Labor for a reduction of carbon emissions, lost his leadership bid that same year to Liberal Tony Abbott who is on the record as describing climate change as ‘crap’. The message was clear: that Turnbull would never gain the prime ministership if he continued to promote climate change. In his 2017 book Climate Wars,35 Mark Butler, Shadow Minister for Climate Change and Energy, writes that the Greens also helped destroy Rudd’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme by voting with Abbott against it on Abbott’s first full day as Liberal leader. Upon becoming Prime Minister, Abbott immediately withdrew support for the carbon pricing scheme. When Turnbull later succeeded Abbott in 2015 without an election after being elevated to Prime Minister by his own party, his political rhetoric had drastically changed to promoting the mining industry at the expense of climate change. His ministers, many of them National Party MPs, did everything they could to ensure he stayed on track.
Comparing Australia’s attempts at redressing the climate change issues with the approach taken by UK politicians, Mark Butler writes that in the lead up to the UK 2015 general election, the leaders of the three major political parties sat down and signed a statement on climate change policy. These politicians undertook to work across party lines and to agree on carbon budgets pledging “to accelerate the transition to a competitive, energy-efficient, low-carbon economy and to end the use of unabated coal for power generation.” The last coal-fired power station will be closed by 2025 at the latest. There were no battles and when the Committee on Climate Change recommended an ambitious carbon reduction target for the five-year period 2028–32, the budget was “quietly endorsed by both political parties shortly afterwards.”36
How can a country like Australia, known for its pristine beaches and tracts of wilderness and distinctive marsupials, reptiles and insects, Gondwana-descended flora and fauna have such a treacherous heart? How can its leaders, elected by the Australian public, wilfully jeopardise these natural assets?
The answer lies in the way Australian politicians pay homage to the clout of the mining industry and its vocal workforce. The history of the country’s white settlers runs parallel with white mining history: silver, copper, lead, gold, coal, diamonds, opals and natural gas. Slick campaigns of male working-class heroes in hard hats, promoting the larrikin national characteristic we enjoy, portray the mining sector as the backbone of the economy. The myth is that mining creates jobs and provides a foundation of prosperity – particularly for rural and regional Australia.
This prosperity rewards the individual over the nation; a get-rich-quick tagline used by advertising gurus and promoted by the media in prominent stories profiling our richest who own the mining leases. It’s a licence to print money. We, apparently, will give leases to anyone who has the dosh. But mining, in reality, employs fewer than 2% of the Australian workforce according to a 2011 Report by the Institute, ‘Mining the truth: the rhetoric and reality of the commodities boom’37 by David Richardson and Richard Denniss. This has remained the case today with Australian Bureau of Statistics38 figures for 2018 showing 1.8% of the total population is employed either full- or part-time in the mining industry.
Even in the USA, according to an article in Investopedia,39 a US website focusing on investment and financial news, figures from March 2017 pointed to coal mining employment as representing 0.03% of the 160 million strong civilian workforce. How can that be when ‘jobs’ have been the main justification for soliciting the Adani coal mine?
Focusing on Australia, the Richardson and Denniss Report notes that the mining industry routinely includes figures for indirect employment in its mining employment figures, making the figures appear substantially larger than Australian Bureau of Statistics figures. Back in 2013, Lee Rhiannon, a Greens Senator from New South Wales, citing the Richardson and Denniss report, told parliament: “The mining industry practises deception – paying economists and consultants to estimate the size of their industry’s multiplier estimating the number of indirect jobs mining will bring.” The Australia Institute Report estimates that if the number of indirect jobs associated with every industry were totalled, then the number of jobs in the economy would exceed 30 million – almost three times the size of the Australian labour market. Interestingly, this multiplier effect is the same trick used by Adani to manipulate proposed benefits from the Carmichael mine for our nation through providing jobs.
Once the multiplier is applied to all other industries, mining returns to being a very small employer in Australia, Richardson and Denniss point out. Over the past seven years, the increase in jobs in the mining sector accounts for only 7% of the total employment creation over that period.
The coal industry has been the subject of this great myth. At the end of 2012, out of a national workforce of 11 million it only employed just over 45,700 workers. To put this in perspective, Rhiannon told parliament, employees in the coal industry represented a quarter of the number of those working in the tertiary education sector and a few thousand more than in the printing and publishing industry and the dairy sector.
Richardson and Denniss also pointed out that pre-tax profits from the mining industry amounted to $51 billion in 2009–10 and that in the next ten years they would be likely to exceed $600 billion. Citing an Australian Institute survey conducted in 2011, also quoted in the Richardson and Denniss report, out of 1370, the average response was that around 16% of workers were employed in the mining industry – instead of fewer than 2%. The same survey found on average respondents believed that 53% of Australian mining activity was foreign owned whereas the figure was 83% at that time. Out of the $51 billion mining profits from 2009–10, 83%, or $42 billion, accrued to foreign investors.
Expensive advertising campaigns, Rhiannon told parliament back in 2013, were “petty cash” for big mining giants and helped bolster the myth. In 2013, she said BHP Billiton brought in a profit of $12 billion. Rio Tinto’s half-yearly profit fo
r 2013 was $1.7 billion. Glencore Xstrata’s underlying profit was $2.04 billion. Rhiannon raged that with 83% of mining companies being foreign-owned, the idea that they are all part of our national interest is an absolute myth. They already pay 7.1% less tax than the industry average, so the economy is not even gaining the benefit that many people expect comes from the mining industry, she said. Typically, the Adani Group is fully foreign owned. Since Rhiannon’s impassioned speech, the number of jobs in the mining industry has slumped further. In 2013 at least 26,000 people had lost their jobs in the coal mining industry. Apart from a slump in the industry, technology has played a major role in future job prospects by creating the ‘digital mine’. Driverless trains can now be a kilometre long and driverless trucks are commonplace in the West Australian Pilbara region with Rio Tinto planning to run one mine by mid-2019 entirely with autonomous trucks.
In 2017, the ABC reported that mining accounted for nearly $9 billion of the $13 billion increase in profits over the December quarter.40 The five big companies: BHP Billiton, Rio Tinto, together with West Australian companies Fortescue, Newcrest Mining and South32, reported a combined 13% increase in revenue and a 426% increase in profits as commodity prices and production picked up in November 2017.
Ironically, the first story ever printed under my own byline was about coal miners long before anyone dreamt of driverless trucks and an automated industry. Published back in August 1982 in The Sydney Morning Herald’s Good Weekend, it was entitled: ‘A coal miner’s life: big money, small savings and dust, dust, dust’. I was a third-year journalism undergraduate at Mitchell College of Advanced Education, now Charles Sturt University, in the inland town of Bathurst in Central Western New South Wales. My South African lecturer, the late Peter Temple, famous author of crime fiction, winner of the Miles Franklin award whose books led to the television series Jack Irish, handed me a snippet out of The Sydney Morning Herald. Citing the Joint Coal Board, the brief proclaimed that Australian coal miners were the highest paid workers in Australia, higher paid even than doctors and architects, due, no doubt to the danger involved in their profession.