When it comes to the controversial Adani coalmine, and the politics surrounding it, politics that will thunder throughout the election contest, it’s useful to start with first principles.
The first thing to understand is that this issue isn’t binary. Queensland doesn’t love Adani and loves coal, unlike the rest of Australia, which doesn’t love coal and loves renewables. It’s often presented that way when the issue is viewed through the political lens, but that’s not reality.
The reality is that views about the project are mixed, both inside Queensland and outside the state. MPs in central Queensland say their constituents want the jobs associated with the project. MPs in metropolitan Brisbane say their constituents, at least the people who worry about climate change, have similar views to people in Sydney or Melbourne, meaning negative views, because this project has become a proxy for inaction on climate change.
So there is no “Queensland view”. There’s a range of views, which explains two things: firstly, why there was a tussle inside the Morrison government as it rushed with unseemly haste to get an approval for the project done before the election was called this week (more of this in a minute); and secondly, why Labor has been fence-sitting on the project for more than a year.
Over the Christmas break in 2018, Bill Shorten thought he might strengthen Labor’s stance against Adani, and went on a fact-finding mission with the businessman and environmentalist Geoff Cousins to investigate options. But he was talked out of the shift because some colleagues feared muscling up against Adani would create inconvenient pockets of political trouble in regional Queensland.
As well as the politics, some Labor types were concerned about issues of sovereign risk. The fear was if Labor spurned Adani, it would invite thunderous approbation from the business community about ripping up contracts, which plays into the narrative that Labor can’t manage the economy, which is the territory the Coalition has opened the 2019 election campaign on.
Now, let’s track back to the government. I know we are now off and racing in the election campaign, and that means we have left the governing zone and entered the designated campaign zone, but holy cow, what a shocker. We need to pause a minute and have a look at what’s just happened, rather than just lurch onwards preoccupied with the daily obsession about who fluffed their talking points.
The environment minister, Melissa Price, who has assumed a fixed rabbit-in-the-headlights expression ever since Scott Morrison appointed her to the most thankless job in the government, approved the Adani groundwater management plan this week, at five minutes to caretaker. Morrison’s subsequent sprint to government house ensured the CSIRO (which had provided technical advice and previously flagged concerns about Adani’s water management plans) would not appear before a Senate estimates committee to answer questions.
The lead-up to the approval was fraught. There was opprobrium building inside the government about an alleged go-slow on the decision. Some Liberals facing a backlash in their electorates because of the Coalition’s destructive record on climate change have wanted the government to back off from overt cheerleading for coal. But pro-coal Queenslanders wanted the Adani approval done before the election.
In the days leading up to the approval, government MPs from Queensland started a “ginger-up Melissa” campaign that grew loud enough to reach the media. An excellent report in the Courier Mail told the world the Liberal senator James McGrath had threatened to publicly call for Price’s resignation “if she did not fix a problem she created by attempting a deliberate go-slow on the [Adani] project”.
Now, I realise our collective tolerances are lowered because much in federal politics is brutish and chaotic, and many of the current crop of parliamentarians have little or no respect for basic conventions, so we might be tempted to conclude that all this is just another day in paradise, and get on with our business – but the truth is this is seriously appalling.
Let’s be clear. Price is the decision-maker in this matter. The federal environment department assesses the proposals and provides advice, and then the environment minister makes the decision about whether projects proceed and whether any approval is conditional. That’s how the system works.
Decisions are supposed to be evidence-based, not political, and certainly impervious to inputs like colleagues having tantrums or the proximity of elections. Now perhaps this one was all about the science, despite some compelling appearances to the contrary, but at the very least, there are serious questions to answer.
The great irony here is the great parliamentary champions of the Adani project, the folks bitching about Price and her go-slow – and briefing journalists about Victorians being difficult (read Josh Frydenberg, who some LNP types privately contend has become obsessed with holding Kooyong) – have quite possibly opened the door on a future legal challenge to the groundwater management approval.
That could easily be the consequence of all the B-grade election-eve noir.
The Australian Conservation Foundation is already challenging Price’s decision not to apply the water trigger when she assessed water infrastructure for Adani’s proposed coalmine. You’d think that might prompt the parliamentary proponents to engage their brains before opening their mouths, but apparently not.
Fast and loose does make you wonder whether the supposed supporters of the project actually want the project to happen, or if they just want to be seen doing the advocacy. I know this seems a strange thing to wonder, but it’s an inevitable consequence of watching contemporary politics from ringside. Far more talking goes on these days than doing. It’s one of the curiosities of the whole complex, and you do wonder whether if there was less talking, there might be more doing.
In that vein, Labor is talking, but elliptically, about what it might do about the latest Adani approval. There is a lot of tut-tutting about bullying Price, and finger-wagging about the government rushing the approval and then running to a campaign, in the process, stopping CSIRO from answering questions at estimates.
But so far, there’s no straight answer about whether Labor would review the groundwater decision in the event Shorten wins on 18 May. Labor is clearly building a case to do that, but the official formulation is the law will be applied.
Some of Labor’s current failure to provide a straight answer to a simple question relates to concern about future legal process and the potential consequences of loose language – which was the point I raised earlier about the recklessness of the Queensland thunder.
But some of it is politics too.
Labor flirted with the idea of toughening up opposition to Adani and stepped back because it wanted to try and be all things to all people – sort of for it, sort of against it.
The ambiguity is supposed to be artful.
But at what point, in the glare of a five-week election campaign, does it begin to look shifty?