WAR FOR WATER
AS THE STATE ELECTION ON OCTOBER 31 DRAWS CLOSER, POLITICAL REPORTER CAITLAN
CHARLES WILL TAKE A
LOOK AT THE SIX ELECTORATES IN OUR
AREA. TODAY SHE
EXAMINES BURDEKIN
THE Burdekin is where coal, cane and the ocean meet.
It stretches from the historic goldcome-coal mining town of Clermont, to the tourist town of Bowen and to the very edge of the Townsville region at Alligator Creek.
Home to the Bowen Basin mines and the cane farms of the Burdekin, the electorate is a powerhouse of production.
But the enormous electorate is not without its struggles.
The region has been waiting for more than a decade for the Adani Carmichael Coal Mine to be approved, with the project set to inject cash into the region.
Since it was first proposed, the mine has been met with significant backlash. In 2019, Bob Brown convoyed through North Queensland, making his way to Clermont where protesters were met with locals holding pro-adani placards.
The rail line, which is currently under construction, will connect the Adani mine to Australia’s most northern deep coal port, Abbot Point.
There are plans in place to expand the port so it can export up to 70 million tonnes of coal a year. Its current capacity is 50 million tonnes.
Cane growers in the northern end of the region have been fighting against the Reef Regulations, which came into place in 2019.
It has been a hot-button issue since the state government introduced the legislation to protect the Great Barrier Reef from agricultural run-off.
Environment and Great Barrier Reef Minister Leanne Enoch says the science behind the regulations is rock solid.
But many growers do not agree with that.
Home Hill grower Phil Marano said the science was “far from bullet proof and far from settled”.
He said people who spoke out against the regulations were labelled heretics and burned at the stake.
“We need proper quality checking of the science, decisions made on fact and not ideology,” Mr Marano said.
He added that growers were struggling under high electricity prices and the high cost of irrigation.
“They are the biggest impediments to agriculture,” the third-generation farmer said.
Mr Marano said the pandemic had proved the value of agriculture as a whole.
“COVID and the lockdowns have shown just how important agriculture is to Queensland and Australia as a whole … it’s still going and performing.”
Irrigation water costs have been a key topic among cane advocacy groups. The cane industry is pleading with the state government to cut irrigation water costs after the Queensland Competition Authority recommended it should be raised.
The Liberal National Party has pledged a 20 per cent reduction for Sunwater irrigators if it wins the election, while Katter’s Australian Party has pledged a 25 per cent reduction with the balance of power.
Labor is still in a consultation process about irrigation prices but has frozen irrigation water prices until next year due to the coronavirus pandemic.
For Christin Short in Bowen, the focus is more on the tourism and business industry’s recovery from COVID-19.
“A lot of our businesses have missed out on the busy tourism months, which generally starts in Easter for us, and carries through up to the school holidays, which we are going through now,” Ms Short said.
“We missed out on at least a couple of months within that period and now we need to look at how we can recoup some of those losses.”
Queensland Resources Council chief executive Ian Macfarlane said the Bowen Basin mines, many of which fall into the Burdekin electorate, support more than 18,370 jobs and inject $2.9b into the local economy.
But Mr Mcfarlane said there was room to improve, especially with new mines opening up.
He said the state government, whatever party it ended up being, needed to ensure the approval process was not politicised.
“We need the government to ensure the regulatory and approval process isn’t politicised and does run in a prudent manner,” Mr Macfarlane said. “We don’t want to see the sorts of approval times that we’ve seen for Adani.
“There are jobs swinging out there, 600 jobs … because the government has taken 12 years to approve this mine, to allow something that has passed every examination by every department in Queensland but for political reasons has not been approved.”
Mr Macfarlane said members of parliament, whatever side of the politics, needed to support the industry.
“It procured $63b worth of exports and given us 372,000 jobs, and yet there are weeks and months where we don’t hear coal, or resources, or oil or gas or nickel mentioned by some of our political leaders,” he said.
“We want to see support for an industry that not only does the economy stuff, but is the biggest employer of Indigenous people per percentage of workforce for any private industry in Queensland.”