Table Of ContentQuentin Beresford has had a diverse career in teaching, the
public service and journalism. He is the author of several books
including Rites of Passage: Aboriginal Youth Crime and Justice
(1996); Our State of Mind: Racial Planning and the Stolen Gener-
ations (1998), which won the Western Australian Premier’s non-
fiction prize; the multi-award winning biography, Rob Riley: An
Aboriginal Leader’s Quest for Justice (2006); The Godfather: The Life
of Brian Burke (2008) and The Rise and Fall of Gunns Ltd (2015),
which won the Tasmanian Premier’s Literary Prize. He is professor
of politics at Edith Cowan University in Perth, Western Australia.
To Marilyn and to our grandchildren
A NewSouth book
Published by
NewSouth Publishing
University of New South Wales Press Ltd
University of New South Wales
Sydney NSW 2052
AUSTRALIA
newsouthpublishing.com
© Quentin Beresford 2018
First published 2018
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private
study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act,
no part of this book may be reproduced by any process without written
permission. Inquiries should be addressed to the publisher.
A catalogue record for this
book is available from the
National Library of Australia
ISBN 9781742235936 (paperback)
9781742244228 (ebook)
9781742248646 (ePDF)
Design Josephine Pajor-Markus
Cover design Luke Causby, Blue Cork
Map Josephine Pajor-Markus
Printer Griffin Press
All reasonable efforts were taken to obtain permission to use copyright
material reproduced in this book, but in some cases copyright could not be
traced. The author welcomes information in this regard.
This book is printed on paper using fibre supplied from plantation or
sustainably managed forests.
Contents
Introduction 1
CHAPTER ONE The great coal rush 8
CHAPTER TWO India’s coal baron 29
CHAPTER THREE The coal wars begin 57
CHAPTER FOUR Coal nation: The triumph of coal over climate 82
CHAPTER FIVE Coal before coral:
Sacrificing the Great Barrier Reef 98
CHAPTER SIX In the shadow of Joh:
Adani and Queensland politics 130
CHAPTER SEVEN The Abbott government and
‘standing up for coal’ 165
CHAPTER EIGHT Malcolm Turnbull: The price of power 200
CHAPTER NINE ‘This huge black hole’:
The fight over native title 233
CHAPTER TEN The legal challenge from ‘greenies’ 256
CHAPTER ELEVEN The banks under attack 282
CHAPTER TWELVE The end game? 312
Conclusion 357
Notes 366
Bibliography 381
Acknowledgments 395
Index 397
GALILEE
BASIN
I CHINA STONE
CARMICHAEL
I
DEGULLA
I
ALPHA NORTH
IKEVIN’S CORNER
ALPHA WEST I
IALPHA COAL
I
CHINA FIRST
I SOUTH GALILEE
COAL PROJECT
Cairns
TownsvilleGREAT BARRIER REEF
GBAALSILINEE Abbot PoPriarniol ptlionseed BowMeWnaOcRkLaDy HERITAGE AREA
Hay Point
Carmichael Mine
Doongmabulla
Springs
Rockhampton
Great Artesian Basin Gladstone
Q U E E N S L A N D
BRISBANE
0 200
km
I
Great Artesian Basin Exisitng Mines
Introduction
On 9 February 2017, federal Liberal Treasurer Scott Morrison rose
from his parliamentary front-bench seat and delivered one of
the most colourful but disturbing political stunts in recent federal
Parliamentary history. Clutching a lump of black coal, the burly,
sports-loving and pugnacious minister ridiculed the Labor Oppo-
sition’s recent call for a higher renewable energy target, amid new
record summer temperatures.
The coal had been supplied by the Minerals Council of Aus-
tralia, a key backer of the conservative side of politics, and it had
been conveniently coated with lacquer so as not to blacken the min-
ister’s hand.1 In a performance that went beyond mocking the fear
of climate change into a defiance of nature itself, Morrison, amid
guffaws of laughter from his colleagues, teased the Labor Party:
‘Don’t be afraid, don’t be scared, it won’t hurt you, it’s coal’. He
accused the Opposition of ‘coal-o-phobia’. Morrison then handed
the non-blackening coal around members of the front bench as if
they were all in on the stunt. Photographs of Morrison holding
aloft his lump of coal show fellow Liberal minister Christopher
Pyne smirking and a cartoonish laugh breaking across the face of
National party leader, Barnaby Joyce.
In addition to trying to wedge Labor over its traditional links
with the mining workers union, the Construction, Forestry, Mining
and Energy Union, the artefact from the fossil fuel age was intended
to resonate with the federal Coalition’s base, where denial of climate
1
Adani and the War Over Coal
change and opposition to renewable energy have deep roots. Mor-
rison, with his strong evangelical Christian background, plays well
with this constituency. Although ensconced in the bunker of the
Treasury portfolio, Morrison’s reputation as a polarising politician
was well established. He had doggedly pursued the Coalition’s ‘Stop
the Boats’ policy towards the unauthorised arrivals of refugee claim-
ants when in the Abbott government. ‘He hasn’t been afraid to pitch
to the right of the party’, wrote Deborah Snow in a profile piece for
the Sydney Morning Herald.2
Afterwards, Morrison appeared on radio ‘shock-jock’ Ray Had-
ley’s 2GB program. Hadley, a prominent climate change denier,
shared a joke with his guest about the stunt. Amid the mutual joc-
ularity, Morrison had a point to make: ‘We have no more a fear
of coal than we have a fear of wind, or solar, or wave energy, or
pump-hydro, or whatever the option is’.3
Played across the various media outlets, Morrison’s coal antics
sent yet another message that the federal Liberal Party and its Coali-
tion partner, the Nationals, were avowedly pro-coal.
Morrison’s performance drew some harsh criticism from the
mainstream press. The Canberra Times commented:
Hailing coal – arguably the single-largest contributor to man-
made climate change – as the solution to our hot-weather
energy needs was so counter-intuitive that commentators
and social media could not help drawing parallels with the
‘alternative facts’ debate across the Pacific [that is, the United
States under Donald Trump].4
Respected business journalist Alan Kohler was even more scathing.
Widely known and admired for his informative finance report on
ABC TV news, Kohler describes being ‘infuriated and dismayed by
that stunt’.5 The following day he wrote a blistering critique in the
Australian titled ‘The Great Coal Hoax’, in which he argued that the
2
Introduction
energy crisis engulfing the country was entirely the Liberal Party’s
fault. The problem, as he saw it, was straightforward. Since cutting
down Malcolm Turnbull as leader in 2009 and replacing him with
Tony Abbott, the Liberal Party had been transformed into ‘fervently
pro-coal activists’. Kohler crisply recapped these historic events as
the shift from bipartisanship on an emissions trading scheme (ETS)
to Abbott’s hyper partisan opposition to the policy.
After the 2007 federal election, both the new Labor govern-
ment under Kevin Rudd and the Liberal Opposition under Mal-
colm Turnbull supported an ETS.6 The ascension of Abbott to the
leadership in 2009 wrecked this consensus: ‘from agreeing that cli-
mate change was a problem that needed a price to be put on carbon,
to denying that it was much of a problem at all, and calling the
proposed emissions trading scheme a great big tax on everything’.7
Morrison’s antics revived the coal wars that had been simmering
for years. Wrapped up in the complex, often bitter debates about
climate change and about energy policy, coal is in many ways the
political, economic and cultural totem for these broader questions:
what to do about Australia’s vast reserves of coal, and the powerful
corporations that mine the resource in an age of global warming? As
astute commentators noted, the Liberal Party had unapologetically
taken up one side of this conflict and it had been cheered on by
some powerful forces, including the nation’s shock-jock media.
In his article, Kohler was right to question how Australia had
gotten itself into this mess. Australia sits on a mother lode of coal
but the industry’s contribution to the national economy is relatively
small, despite the best efforts of the Minerals Council of Australia
to bolster the figures. From a peak in 2012, when coal represented
4.5 per cent of GDP, by 2016 this had shrunk to 2 per cent and com-
prised less than 1 per cent of total employment and federal taxes.8
Yet it is not surprising that coal looms large in the national imag-
ination. We have become a coal nation. Approximately 70 per cent
of Australia’s electricity is generated by coal and we are the world’s
3
Adani and the War Over Coal
leading exporter of coal in an industry that still produces around
40 per cent of global electricity. Exports of coal constitute 30 per
cent of export income which, together with iron ore, fuel the
national narrative – propelled by the mining lobby – that mining
is the engine of Australian economic growth and prosperity. The
export coal industry has been on an inexorable growth path since
the first exports in the late 1950s to the emerging economies of
East Asia.
However, the commanding position of coal in the national nar-
rative has left Australia with a deep conundrum. The industry has
been put on notice by the international agreements to deal with cli-
mate change and by the corresponding rise of the renewable energy
industry.
Given these developments, Australia has needed a rational
debate on transiting out of coal. Yet the Adani Carmichael mine,
and the promise of opening up the Galilee Basin, has helped lock
Australian politics into the fossil fuel age. There has been bipartisan
support for expanding Australia’s coal industry and opening up the
Galilee Basin. The question here is how did this happen?
This book unpacks the war over coal and the pivotal role of
Adani’s Carmichael mine in this conflict. In Australia, there are few
bigger political fights to take on. As a consultant to activist group
GetUp! observed:
What oil is to Texas and Tar Sands is to Canada, coal is to
Australia. This campaign [against Adani] had to not only stop
a new multi-billion mine (that would crack open a valley with
another half a dozen mega-mines behind it) it had to break an
old industrial addiction that’s enriched elites for generations,
and is embedded in the country’s founding story and
mythology. Not so easy a task.9
4
