Queensland: lobbyists one day, premier the next

Posted on February 17, 2012 · Posted in Blog

Two interesting articles in the Australian Financial Review this week show that neither industry nor politicians understand what’s wrong with the mining assessment process.  The stories were focussed on Queensland, but they’re relevant nation-wide.  Industry reps got their side in on Monday and the AFR covered Anna Bligh’s reply the next day.  The positions taken are predictable,  but it’s a shame the AFR didn’t dig a little deeper into the story, and you only have to look at the work we did on Queensland coal issues late last year to see there is a lot more to it.

Monday’s article  “Delay in Qld mine approvals triples” (paywalled) discusses that the time taken for mining assessment in Queensland has increased substantially.  In what could be in a dog-bites-man script, a roll-call of Queensland coal lobbyists and executives lament the state of the mining assessment process, tell us it’s costing us royalties and threaten to go overseas.  Yawn.  Coal exec and former Labor state treasurer, Keith De Lacy, said that:

Macarthur Coal’s first mine, Coppabella, started operations in 1998, only 15 months after the resource was first identified.  A similar project now would take five to seven years to pass the approvals process….

…It now costs $2 million to $3 million to undertake an environmental impact statement (EIS) which was no longer just about the environment but worker and community impacts.

Coal billionaire Clive Palmer suggests in a similar vein:

“The whole environmental system needs to be fixed.  The whole government approvals [process] needs to be addressed.”

The next day Anna Bligh defended her government’s record and said that:

   The Labor government would always strike a balance between development and the environment.

For once I agree with Clive: the system does need fixing, but not in the way he and Keith might think.

In 1998 when Coppabella was starting, the project had, no doubt, huge local environmental impact, but probably little impact on the wider Queensland economy and population.  I imagine the project helped diversify Queensland’s economy, improved our current account deficit and enriched Macarthur’s then largely Australian shareholders.  In these circumstances getting environmental and safety approvals are really all that is required to ensure development in the public interest.

But times have changed and the system has changed too.  Mining projects now have major effects on the economy, communities and the environment.  Skilled labour markets are tight, the exchange rate is at all-time post-float highs and the sheer number of mining projects are creating ever greater impacts on rural and even urban communities.  As these impacts have increased, more and more appendices have been added to environmental impact statements, as Mr de Lacy points out.  We’ve reviewed several of these for community groups in NSW and Qld and the economic appendix usually comes in at around appendix Q.  Appendix-ferking-Q!

While the economic appendix may come late in the EIS, it is important.  This is the only chance the public and decision makers have to consider if a mining project is in their best interests.  Ten years into a mining boom, a boom with different terms of trade and investment characteristics than any Australian boom before it, such decisions are no longer as easy as they were when Coppabella began.  Mr Palmer’s own China First coal project economic assessment showed that that project alone would REDUCE Queensland manufacturing jobs by 2,215 and 192 jobs in agriculture.

I agree with Messrs De Lacy and Palmer, that the place to debate the economic and community impacts of mining projects is not the late appendices of an EIS and that bureaucratic delay is not a good way to manage the effects of the mining boom.  Ms Bligh doesn’t seem to understand that assessment is about more than balancing financial “good” with environmental “bad”; that there are many impacts of individual projects and cumulative mining development that governments should be taking seriously.

But the way forward is not a red-tape-cutting and fast-tracking race, as suggested by opposition leader Campbell Newman later in Monday’s article.  Instead, we need to move to a system that seriously assesses the economic and social issues rather than tacking them onto the environmental “approvals process”.   This system needs to ask if projects are in the public interest.  Is the pace of development appropriate?  How can we compensate affected parties to ensure all are better off?

These are the most important issues that should be addressed first and with the utmost transparency.  At present, they’re debated only in obscure appendices and submissions by consultants of interest groups, far behind issues like the health of local stygofauna.  Then again, stygofauna are more interesting and cuter than most economic consultants.