Queensland Labor commits itself to the state’s coal industry, but says new projects need to ‘stack up environmentally’

This article is more than 5 years old

This article is more than 5 years old

Queensland’s Labor opposition has renewed its commitment to the coal industry for the “foreseeable future” despite a new study warning most of the state’s coal must stay in the ground to avoid dangerous climate change.



Responding to research quantifying for the first time the scale of disruption faced by Australia’s coal industry to avoid a 2C warming, the outgoing deputy Labor leader, Tim Mulherin, said coal remained “an important and vital energy source for Queensland and the rest of the world”.

However Mulherin, who is about to relinquish his seat in the mining boom town of Mackay, said new projects “can’t come at any cost” and needed to “stack up environmentally”.

He criticised the government’s multimillion-dollar commitments to help Indian miner Adani open up the massive Galilee basin coalfields in central Queensland.

Australia needs to forgo 90% of its coal reserves to play its part in cutting CO2 emissions by 2050 to avoid more than 2C warming, according to the study by the UCL institute for sustainable resources.

Thermal coal from nine proposed projects in the Galilee, when burned in export markets such as China and India, would produce an estimated 705m tonnes of CO2, more than Australia’s total greenhouse gas emissions of 542m tonnes a year.

Mulherin said the Newman government had “put the cart before the horse and already committed millions in taxpayer money to fund a development that would normally be funded by the private sector before and all this before the necessary approvals have been gained”.

“There always need to be a balance between commercial development and environmental considerations and the LNP have never been able to get that balance right,” he said.

“Given the current unemployment rate of 6.9%, projects that lead to job development are absolutely essential but they can’t come at any cost.

“Any project needs to stack up environmentally and Queensland has a long history of being able to make that happen.”

Rather than renewable energy sources, Mulherin pointed to gas-fired power as an example of a lower emission source the state was moving towards.

“However, for the foreseeable future, coal will remain an important energy source especially for base load power,” he said.

The premier, Campbell Newman, was joined on the election trail on Friday by Adani’s Australian chief executive, Jeyakumar Janakaraj, telling reporters that the company’s mine would bring 10,000 local jobs.

Janakaraj, who vowed the mine would proceed, despite controversies including the boycott of the project by a number of major financiers, said Adani “welcomed” government assistance but did not need it.

Newman said his government would work with miners to create up to 28,000 jobs.

Just weeks before calling the election, the government approved another controversial project: a $900m expansion of a coalmine owned by one of the LNP largest donors.

The government announced approval of New Hope’s Acland mine, west of Toowoomba, the week on the Friday evening before Christmas.

The attention of the state’s media that day was focused on the murder of 8 children in Cairns, and separately, the arrest of Clive Palmer’s publicist over an alleged criminal conspiracy.

New Hope and its parent company Washington H Soul Pattinson gave more than $720,000 to the state LNP and the federal Liberal party between 2010 and 2013.

New Hope’s chairman, Robert Millner, was called before the Independent Commission Against Corruption (Icac) in New South Wales last year over a donations controversy involving another Washington H Soul Pattinson subsidiary of which he was chairman, Brickworks.

Icac is due to complete its report this month on whether Brickworks’ donations to the Liberal party in NSW broke laws banning political contributions from developers.

Activists have accused the Newman government of further burying the New Hope approval with a snap summer holiday election announcement.

A Stop Brisbane Coal Trains spokesman, John Gordon, said the government had “opted to cut and run” from accusations of favouring a donor by timing its announcement “in school holidays with the media in hibernation”.

A spokeswoman for the deputy premier, Jeff Seeney, has said donations were “a matter entirely for” state and federal party organisations.

“They have nothing to do with the state government and nothing to do with the independent coordinator general’s approval with conditions of the New Acland stage three project,” she said.

The government approval dictated the footprint of the mine – which would provide 700 new jobs – be reduced by 60%, its life cut by 13 years to 2029, and its throughput by 2.5m tonnes to 7.5m tonnes.