Extract from The Guardian
The federal resources minister, Matt Canavan, wielded some big numbers this week as he pleaded with the Queensland media to help save the mining industry from an “unprecedented” threat.
The sunshine state, he said, was under attack from “environmental activists” who have brought court cases against Adani’s Carmichael coalmine. The big numbers came from a PricewaterhouseCoopers report, which found that “legal delays” had already cost Queensland $3.9bn in economic output and 2,665 “lost” jobs and had cost Adani $200m.
This, the minister advised the assembled media “is a story”.
Turns out, they were already onto it. Canavan cited what he called an “expose” in the previous week’s Sunday Mail entitled “Stop with Madness: Greens jeopardise Queensland’s future”. That story, in turn, favourably cited the minister railing against the greens and an accompanying editorial implored the federal government to “step in” and “rid Queensland of these delays”.
Conveniently, that happens to be exactly what the minister wants to do.
As a backbencher he was one of the most vocal advocates of the Abbott government’s so called “lawfare” changes – the amendments to the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act to remove the right of most environmental organisations and other groups to challenge developments under federal laws unless they can show they are “directly affected”. This, the government argued, would stop the dastardly “green saboteurs”. The senate refused to pass the changes and the early indications after Malcolm Turnbull became prime minister was that they would be shelved.
But Canavan is now the resources minister and is determined to revive them, speaking to the new senate crossbench and insisting the government “remains committed” to the changes.
It would be easy to forget, given these screaming headlines and dire economic predictions, that conservation groups have recently lost a number of cases against the Carmichael mine in the courts, which they are now appealing. Easier still to forget how few cases are actually taken, and how few succeed.
In any case, the argument for watering down Australia’s central environmental legal protections is now being framed in terms of the cost of delay while the legal challenges play out, rather than the cost of blocking projects altogether. Which brings us back to the PwC report and the very big numbers.
A quick search revealed the report had actually been first exclusively reported in the Courier Mail in June, as well as in numerous mining publications. But PwC told Guardian Australia it was unable to provide a copy because it remained the property of the client who commissioned it – Adani.
And Adani’s spokesman said that even though it had been cited in numerous articles and a minister’s speech the chief executive had determined the report would “not be released”.
Luckily Guardian Australia was able to procure it elsewhere, and it made for interesting reading.
Its overarching assumption is the Carmichael mine will proceed, at the scale originally envisaged, and as soon as the legal hurdles are cleared. Many analysts question whether the project is financially viable at all, and even those who think it is say the plan is to proceed with a much smaller operation.
And even accepting that the Adani mine is ready to go, the figures are being quite creatively interpreted.
The report appears to say, for example, that the mine will employ exactly the same number of workers as was always assumed. But if it starts three years later than originally planned, some of those jobs will be created later than first envisaged. The report averages the number of jobs over the decade from the original start date, first assuming the mine did start then, and then assuming it started three years later. The “2,665 lost jobs” was the difference in those averages.
And those calculations were based on the project’s original size and the original widely-advertised claim that the mine would create 10,000 jobs.
But evidence from an economist commissioned by Adani itself – Jerome Fahrer of ACIL Allen – given in the land court in one of the legal cases said: “Over the life of the project it is projected that on average around 1,464 employee years of full-time equivalent direct and indirect jobs will be created.” In other words, fewer jobs in total than those we are told have been “lost” due to legal delays. Adani has said the higher estimate was based on a “broader assessment” of the project’s impact.
The document also raises questions about whether “legal delays” have cost the company $200m. It says legal consulting costs were in fact $5.9m and internal staff costs to manage the cases were $1m. Another $21.8m is slated as the “holding cost” of maintaining a workforce. But the biggest cost by far was $123m, primarily for “redesigning previously approved components”. The main redesign was due to conditions imposed by the federal government to force the company to dispose of dredge spoils on land, rather than in the water. But the former environment minister Greg Hunt boasted about this so presumably we shouldn’t count it as part of the unbearable cost of lawfare.
It is true the company has faced additional costs because of the court cases. And the minister is quite right when he says the green groups are trying to use the courts stop the mine.
But he’s wrong when he says it’s because they are just “ideologically opposed” to all development.
In fact they are motivated by a different set of big scary numbers – that if all of the coal from Carmichael was burned, it would register on a global scale – amounting to about 0.5% of the “budget” of carbon dioxide that can be emitted before the world tips past global warming of 2 degrees celsius.
The minister, and the courts to date, say if Carmichael doesn’t export the coal to India someone else will, an argument that could be used by every country to continue with business as usual.
The consequences of that, sadly, really would be an unprecedented story.
The sunshine state, he said, was under attack from “environmental activists” who have brought court cases against Adani’s Carmichael coalmine. The big numbers came from a PricewaterhouseCoopers report, which found that “legal delays” had already cost Queensland $3.9bn in economic output and 2,665 “lost” jobs and had cost Adani $200m.
This, the minister advised the assembled media “is a story”.
Turns out, they were already onto it. Canavan cited what he called an “expose” in the previous week’s Sunday Mail entitled “Stop with Madness: Greens jeopardise Queensland’s future”. That story, in turn, favourably cited the minister railing against the greens and an accompanying editorial implored the federal government to “step in” and “rid Queensland of these delays”.
Conveniently, that happens to be exactly what the minister wants to do.
As a backbencher he was one of the most vocal advocates of the Abbott government’s so called “lawfare” changes – the amendments to the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act to remove the right of most environmental organisations and other groups to challenge developments under federal laws unless they can show they are “directly affected”. This, the government argued, would stop the dastardly “green saboteurs”. The senate refused to pass the changes and the early indications after Malcolm Turnbull became prime minister was that they would be shelved.
But Canavan is now the resources minister and is determined to revive them, speaking to the new senate crossbench and insisting the government “remains committed” to the changes.
It would be easy to forget, given these screaming headlines and dire economic predictions, that conservation groups have recently lost a number of cases against the Carmichael mine in the courts, which they are now appealing. Easier still to forget how few cases are actually taken, and how few succeed.
In any case, the argument for watering down Australia’s central environmental legal protections is now being framed in terms of the cost of delay while the legal challenges play out, rather than the cost of blocking projects altogether. Which brings us back to the PwC report and the very big numbers.
A quick search revealed the report had actually been first exclusively reported in the Courier Mail in June, as well as in numerous mining publications. But PwC told Guardian Australia it was unable to provide a copy because it remained the property of the client who commissioned it – Adani.
And Adani’s spokesman said that even though it had been cited in numerous articles and a minister’s speech the chief executive had determined the report would “not be released”.
Luckily Guardian Australia was able to procure it elsewhere, and it made for interesting reading.
Its overarching assumption is the Carmichael mine will proceed, at the scale originally envisaged, and as soon as the legal hurdles are cleared. Many analysts question whether the project is financially viable at all, and even those who think it is say the plan is to proceed with a much smaller operation.
And even accepting that the Adani mine is ready to go, the figures are being quite creatively interpreted.
The report appears to say, for example, that the mine will employ exactly the same number of workers as was always assumed. But if it starts three years later than originally planned, some of those jobs will be created later than first envisaged. The report averages the number of jobs over the decade from the original start date, first assuming the mine did start then, and then assuming it started three years later. The “2,665 lost jobs” was the difference in those averages.
And those calculations were based on the project’s original size and the original widely-advertised claim that the mine would create 10,000 jobs.
But evidence from an economist commissioned by Adani itself – Jerome Fahrer of ACIL Allen – given in the land court in one of the legal cases said: “Over the life of the project it is projected that on average around 1,464 employee years of full-time equivalent direct and indirect jobs will be created.” In other words, fewer jobs in total than those we are told have been “lost” due to legal delays. Adani has said the higher estimate was based on a “broader assessment” of the project’s impact.
The document also raises questions about whether “legal delays” have cost the company $200m. It says legal consulting costs were in fact $5.9m and internal staff costs to manage the cases were $1m. Another $21.8m is slated as the “holding cost” of maintaining a workforce. But the biggest cost by far was $123m, primarily for “redesigning previously approved components”. The main redesign was due to conditions imposed by the federal government to force the company to dispose of dredge spoils on land, rather than in the water. But the former environment minister Greg Hunt boasted about this so presumably we shouldn’t count it as part of the unbearable cost of lawfare.
It is true the company has faced additional costs because of the court cases. And the minister is quite right when he says the green groups are trying to use the courts stop the mine.
But he’s wrong when he says it’s because they are just “ideologically opposed” to all development.
In fact they are motivated by a different set of big scary numbers – that if all of the coal from Carmichael was burned, it would register on a global scale – amounting to about 0.5% of the “budget” of carbon dioxide that can be emitted before the world tips past global warming of 2 degrees celsius.
The minister, and the courts to date, say if Carmichael doesn’t export the coal to India someone else will, an argument that could be used by every country to continue with business as usual.
The consequences of that, sadly, really would be an unprecedented story.
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