By James Moylan
We all know that the Queensland Government just ‘OK’d’ the largest coal mine ever to be built, which will employ oodles and oodles of workers. Hooray!
Everyone has seen footage of cheerful politicians, in hardhats, in a forest, being conspicuously happy. Lucky for us, when they made this announcement our politicians just happened to be surrounded by a squad of journalists and cameramen representing virtually every one our two giant-integrated-corporate-news-agencies.
And the footage was terrific. It was obvious that everyone had a good time.
Happy politicians. Happy miners. Happy Australia.
Unfortunately for the Australian public, Adani then immediately announced that they were proactively and excitingly putting the whole project back on ice (again). It seems odd that this part of the story just whizzed past all of our professional journalists without their even noticing. After all, it was widely covered online in some of the less reputable ‘new-age media’ outlets. Perhaps our Press Corps have ethical concerns about worrying the Australian population?
This is despite it taking only a couple of moments of online research (using a few of the dozens of news outlets available in India and the UK) to immediately understand why Adani would put such an enterprise on hold. Apparently they have no marketplace to sell coal into. Apparently, despite all of the Qld and Federal governments’ rhetoric about starving villagers being deprived of Plasma Screens – the Indian government is, at this very moment, drowning in coal. Hmmm?
It seems the Indian Government stockpile just keeps growing despite their refusal to enter into any new contracts for the foreseeable future. (The stockpile currently weighs in at 94 million tons, or one-fifth of India’s annual domestic coal production). Apparently a senior official of Coal India even commented recently (as was reported in the Economic Times) that this would certainly lead to dramatic reductions in production at several local coal mines and would also likely have dramatic implications for any company seeking to import more coal into India. Hmmm hmmm? Yes –well worth a double ‘hmmm’.
But not necessarily! If you want to substitute a much nicer reality for all of this nasty ‘real’ news then you, like hundreds of thousands of Aussies, can simply consume News Limited products. After all it’s just like ‘real’ news in almost every way. Just minus the nasty and disagreeable ‘facty’ bits.
Try this quick parlour game. First do a Google search for all ‘UK Press’ articles during the last week relating to ‘coal’ and you will see lots of scary stories like ‘World’s largest coal producer files for bankruptcy’ (Reuters), ‘A bloodbath in the coal business’ (The Daily Reckoning), ‘Poland feels the pain of its love affair with coal’ (Daily Mail). Etc.
But it can be a so much nicer world!
Now Google for News Limited articles about ‘coal’ during the same period, then settle back and read some ‘balanced’ commentary. Articles like: ‘Rio Tinto not backing away from Australian coal’ (The Australian Financial Review), ‘Whitehaven defies coal slump’ (The Australian), and today’s remarkable effort ‘Coal’s future burns bright despite shift to renewable energy’. (It almost makes one proud to burn fossil fuels on behalf of Australia).
This latest work in particular displays the sort of creative flair that most Environmental reports seem to entirely lack. Apparently, because someone, somewhere, has proposed that one day in the future, high-capacity, high-voltage, cable connections between China and Germany may be viable, Australia should immediately stop: ‘importing millions of solar panels and batteries from China to deliver the Turnbull government’s solar and storage revolution’. Got that?
Certainly the people responding in the threads beneath the article understood exactly what was meant by ‘whatever the hell it was that the author was saying’. Dozens of simply horrified citizens expressing their outrage over inflated electricity prices, chopped up birds, scientists, greenies, unemployed miners, poor starving Indian children, and greedy unions. Oh the humanity!
In the Fairfax press you do at least sometimes get some reporting about the possible impacts of things like the Peabody collapse. You also get the occasional piece that looks at the claims of the politicians in a rather quizzical fashion, but they all seem rather desultory and half-hearted. After all; why linger on bad news when anyone who is actually interested in all that that sort of stuff can just read the international press?
[Anyway it’s all about how the coal industry is in real trouble all across the globe. How share prices are plummeting and large fossil fuel concerns are going broke at an alarming rate. How the Peabody disaster takes the tally of large corporate bankruptcies in the US in this market segment, in the space of five years, to fifty. Pretty bleak stuff. So let’s concentrate on the latest celebrity scandal].
After all, if you live in Australia you deserve the right to be able to remain blissfully ignorant. In fact, it might be said that News Limited is simply standing up for the right of any Aussie to remain entirely unaware of many things that most of the rest of the citizens of the globe spend so much time fretting about. It’s handy if you are not absolutely wedded to things like ‘facts’ or ‘the future of the planet’. By simply choosing the right newspaper, television and/or radio outlet any Aussie can successfully ignore just about anything they want to ignore. (Except perhaps all the inevitable stories about grubby union thugs, criminals, and financial shark attacks).
So welcome to the brave new information age where ‘news’ is just another commodity. If you want to live in a world where climate change remains ‘just a theory’ and any response is likely a ‘boondoggle’ designed to allow a group of Marxist communist scientists to live a jet-setting life of ease and comfort at the expense of ‘hard working parents’ and struggling taxpayers; then go ahead. The Australian press has got your back.
If you feel the need to imagine China and Germany being linked with an imaginary high capacity electrical cable, so you can rail about communist wind turbines murdering hard working endangered Australian birds; then the media has a space just for you.
Meanwhile the forces of goodness and niceness are currently working on abolishing the CSIRO and Met Office since these old institutions are obviously far too ‘fact’ based to be of much use in the modern age. So stay tuned for more selective reporting on some of the important news from limited parts of the globe.
Or maybe just settle back in air-conditioned comfort and watch a ‘reality’ show instead?
Also by James Moylan:
Likely arguments in Day v Regina
Why we need to be intolerant of climate science fools
‘The modern and wonderfully diverse 21st century Australian democracy®’
Yes, we do need to talk about the spurious nonsense being taught to children in our schools
Election 2016: Media Groundhog Day
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