Giving the cold shoulder to protesters

GOOD on the people of Clermont in Queensland who are pushing back against a wave of woke coming from the south of the country trying to tell them what jobs they can and can’t have.

As you read this, former Greens leader Bob Brown is leading a convoy of cars and trucks that have driven from Tasmania to Queensland to protest against the Adani coal mine. The irony of using fossilfuelled cars for thousands of kilometres to take a stand against coal-mining sums up the insincerity of the protest. It’s not being done by locals who will live anywhere near the proposed mine, but by people who can feel warm and fuzzy at the other end of the country telling thousands of Queenslanders what they should be allowed to do for work.

While there is no doubt climate change is real, the entire debate here in Australia is what are we willing to do to deal with it and at what cost are we willing to pay.

Here is where the rubber hits the road far harder than anyone in the convoy over the next couple of weeks. There is one truth no-one can hide from: without mining royalties, the Queensland budget alone would be in deep deficit. That means billions less for hospitals, police, teachers and everything state government does.

You can’t make up the money you lose by killing coal mining with new taxes on buying houses in a cooling market, increasing payroll tax or putting up speeding fines.

The reality for governments isn’t to knock back mining for the sake of inner-city hipsters, but to put any application for a new mine to full and fair tests of what the local environmental impacts will be. The Adani mine has passed every one of those tests and it’s as plain as day the lastminute road blocks being thrown in this project’s way are in search of a delay rather than due diligence.

Paul Murray

The Greens want the whole country to stop mining coal. But you can’t do that without blowing giant holes in almost every single government budget in the country. That means real people would suffer the consequences. These protesters don’t care if the people of regional Queensland get high-paid mining jobs, or any jobs that support the industry. They believe their religious zeal for dealing with climate change trumps everything.

When the convoy gets to Clermont the locals want to give the smug protesters the cold shoulder. My favourite is the pub owner who says he won’t serve them any meals. Rightly so, locals have had enough of people who have no skin in the game rolling into town and leaving without having to live the real consequences of killing the Adani mine. Australia needs to do its bit when it comes to climate change, but time to tell the truth. China can pollute as much as it likes until 2030, not to mention the US and India. Even if we closed every mine, turned off every light and closed every factory in Australia it won’t change the world, no matter how much we tweet or protest about it.

We should continue to have strong environmental protections to take care of the land on which we live. Anyone who breaks them should be punished and even closed down. But we can’t live in a fool’s paradise where we all expect to live in 21st century modernity while killing the very industries that provide it and fund the compassionate country where we take things like free school, health care and welfare for granted.

Toddlers have tantrums, adults make decisions.