Environment

More Adani asterisks

John Quiggin9 Comments

The Palaszczuk government has, unsurprisingly, capitulated to the Adani corporation’s demands for a tax holiday. To avoid accusations of bias, they have offered the same deal to other new coal projects. If these projects go ahead, the implications for the planet are disastrous. But, at least in Adani’s case, there are plenty of reasons to doubt that this will happen.

It’s now clear that any “investment decision” by Adani will involve spending modest sums on land clearing and surveying. That’s enough to keep the option open and avoid writing off the money already spent on the project. But the real decision, which requires bank finance, appears to have been deferred from June 2017 to some time in 2018. The first shipments of coal aren’t expected until 2020.

My guess is that, before anything of substance happens in the Galilee Basin, Adani will be back with more demands (maybe a Danzig corridor). Sooner or later, they’ll make an offer that can be refused, at which point they’ll pull up stumps and send in the lawyers asking for compensation.

(Sorry for the absence of links, I’ve been reading different bits and pieces).

9 thoughts on “More Adani asterisks”

  1. Danzig corridor? I don’t think they should stop at anything short of a Panama Canal.

  3. Why doesn’t the Queensland government, Annastacia Palaszczuk’s ALP, have the brains and guts to simply say “no”? Is this government group stupid or cowardly or both? Why is the ALP, like both groups capable of winning government in QLD, so in thrall to the coal lobby? Do we have to look very far? How much does the coal mining industry (and other miners) pay to the ALP and the other mob?

    I think the answer must be in the party donations from mining interests. There can be no other reason for the rank stupidity of still supporting coal mines. Basically, this means the current Qld government, like previous ones, is corrupt. It is corrupt to take coal donations and then support coal mining. Given the seriousness of global warming it is corrupt, climate-criminal behaviour. It’s also bad economics at several levels: subsidising environmental and climate damage, wasting public monies which could be better spent elsewhere and so on.

    Is Australia the last country on earth to massively subsidise coal mining? When did we become so stupid? Well, I guess I just have to look at our housing bubble, unemployment levels, sliding education spending and standards, and our ridiculous joke of a broadband internet to realise how Australia is rapidly sliding into something like second world status. Not to mention our decades long flirtation with neoliberalism.

    We have become the Stupid Country.

  4. Why doesn’t the Queensland government, Annastacia Palaszczuk’s ALP, have the brains and guts to simply say “no”?

    Well, fundamentally they don’t have to.

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    George: “Oh.”
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    It’s been amusing sitting back and watching Australia from afar because in effect it’s been denying gravity,” Mr Barry, who is based in Dublin, told the The Australian Financial Review.

    “Coal is dead…

  6. When people say that renewables can’t work, “when the sun don’t shine and the wind don’t blow etc” they haven’t seen this most amazing project, its actually up and going, down in Port Augusta SA.

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