Campbell Newman’s government and mining company Adani have made grand claims about job creation in the state, yet the source of their statements appears shrouded in mystery

Australian voters have been learning the hard way that it pays to look at the fine print of promises made during election campaigns. But sometimes that fine print is hard to find.



Campbell Newman, for example, is telling Queensland voters the hundreds of millions of dollars he is promising to spend on Indian company Adani’s coalmine infrastructure will help create 10,000 jobs.

Adani’s Australian chief executive, Jeyakumar Janakaraj, who joined the premier on the campaign trail, makes the same claim in his extensive advertising campaign.

But its source is elusive. A spokesman for Adani said the 10,000 “direct and indirect” jobs figure was based on a study “undertaken recently by a top-tier international accounting and advisory firm” which was not publicly available. “The figures quoted are considered conservative,” he said and the company was “confident” 10,000 jobs would be delivered.

The company’s supplementary environmental impact statement for the mine and rail project claimed a maximum of 3,920 ongoing jobs, with a peak employment of 4,150 in 2016 when the operation and construction phases overlap.

It is possible the extra 6,000 estimated jobs are “indirect”, that is, other jobs created by the presence of the mine. Adding indirect jobs to make the case for a project or a subsidy has been common practice, but a 2013 Productivity Commission research paper warned this could often be very misleading.

It said: “Claims that jobs ‘gained’ directly from the cause being promoted will lead to cascading gains in the wider economy often fail to give any consideration to the restrictive nature of the assumptions required for input-output multiplier exercises to be valid. In particular, these applications fail to consider the opportunity cost of both spending measures and alternate uses of resources, and may misinform policy makers.”

Meanwhile, the Queensland government is promising an even more dazzling 27,000 new jobs if its offer of unspecified hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies for railways or ports kickstarts coal mining across the Galilee basin’s massive coal reserves.

But that 27,000 figure is also hard to pin down. First, it is based on the proposition that all four approved mines proceed – an unlikely outcome given the financial, environmental and logistical hurdles they face. It is derived, according to a government spokeswoman, from adding up the jobs projections from the projects’ environmental impact statements.

But a quick look at those statements, also published on the website of the Department of State Development, Infrastructure and Planning, shows the figures don’t seem to add up to 27,000.

The ongoing jobs promised in the impact statements of Adani’s Carmichael mine, the Alpha and Kevin’s Corner mines proposed by Gina Rinehart and Indian firm GVK, and the Galilee mine of Clive Palmer’s Waratah Coal add up to 10,510. The number of jobs promised during the construction phase of the mines add up to 11,515. That would mean about 10,000 or 11,000 jobs at any one time, possibly more in some years if construction and production overlap.

But Queensland’s deputy premier, Jeff Seeney, has said spending some of the money reaped from asset sales on minority stakes in rail or port infrastructure to get the mines up and running would ensure the 27,000 jobs were created.

“The decision we have already taken is [that] some of the money that will become available to us [through asset sales] is best spent ensuring that 27,000 jobs are available to Queenslanders into the future,” he said as he announced the investment in the Adani rail line.