I almost bought The Australian today, but I stopped myself and figured that I could either look it up on-line and if that failed, simply go back to the supermarket where I saw the headline about anti-coal activists driving India away and take a photo of the article with my phone. I mean, it was near the self-service department, so it wasn’t like there’d be any staff there to object.
Mm, ya gotta wonder about these self-service things… How many more before there’s nobody left working? As Henry Ford is reported to have said when he was shown an all-automated factory, “But who’d be left to buy the cars?”
Now, if you’ve read my previous blogs on Adani, you’ll know that I think that it’s more likely that Angelina will ring me and say that she’s heard about my writing and she’d like to meet me, than the proposed mine going ahead. I base it on two pieces of evidence in the public domain:
1. Thermal coal is at such low prices that people are closing existing mines, so how could it be a commercial proposition to set up a new mine? I am aware that there has been a bit of resurgence in the price of coking coal, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s going to lead to a spike in the price of thermal coal. Neither can we be sure that the recent increase will be sustainable in the long term.
2. More importantly, India has announced its intention to cease imports of thermal coal by 2017/18. Not only that, they’ve recently stated that they’re on track to do so.
However, it seems that Adani may not go ahead, not – amazingly – because of the reasons I just mentioned, but because of the activists.
According to “The Australian”:
‘A highly orchestrated, secretly foreign-funded group of Australian environmental activists opposing the $16 billion Adani coalmine in Queensland has “dampened” Indian investment interest in Australia and received heated criticism from the federal Coalition and Queensland Labor governments.
‘Indian Power Minister Piyush Goyal told The Australian yesterday the years of legal challenges to the vast Carmichael coal project, now revealed to have been funded by multi-million-dollar foundations in the US, “will certainly dampen future investments” from India.
‘Federal ministers and the Queensland Premier, Annastacia Palaszczuk, have warned of the danger posed by activists to jobs and investment, and questioned the links between the Australian groups, through their US funders, to the chairman of Hillary Clinton’s Democratic election campaign, John Podesta.’
I’ll spare you the quotes from Tony Abbott and others, because they’re predictable and embarrassing. The point, of course, is that we’re now being softened up in much the same way that Trump is softening up his supporters. When he loses, it won’t be because he ran a terrible campaign. He told us: “Make America Grate Again!” – unaware of the obvious pun about any country with him as leader would be sure to grate. No, it’ll be because the election was rigged and he never had a chance. (Imagine his reaction if the roles were reversed and Hillary was complaining about Fox News…)
When the announcement comes that Adani is pulling out, it won’t be because the economics just don’t add up. No, it’ll be because of those “activists”. And they’re getting money from overseas. Terrible. We should have a Royal Commission into where their funds came from because it’s alleged that they came from the USA. We can’t have bodies being funded from overseas. What do you mean tell us where the IPA gets its money? That’s a private body and it’s none of your business.
Of course, I could be wrong. The government may announce that they’ve suddenly found a spare few billion just to aid development in the North and how better to spend it than by giving it to an Indian company because we don’t have concerns about giving money to non-Australians; we only have concerns about people who aren’t Australian if they’re funding “activists” because Australians who disagree with government policy have no business being active about it.
However, given The Australian‘s article, I tend to suspect that we’ll probably have an announcement some time soon about Adani pulling out. First, of course, we’ll have more articles about “vigilante litigation” (now there’s an oxymoron, if there ever was one!), as well as a couple of stories linking the funding of activists groups to organisations from overseas or unions, followed by the odd editorial about how anyone opposing the mine is an inner city latte-sipping bearded hipster on welfare who’s also a member of a bikie gang.
