Antinuclear

Adani is not about jobs, and never really was, https://www.smh.com.au/national/adani-is-not-about-jobs-and-never-really-was-20190614-p51xu0.html, By Matt Holden June 16, 2019 So Adani gets its final environmental approval from the Queensland government, and central Queensland gets the jobs it voted for in the federal election: “an enormous win for regional jobs”, according to Queensland LNP Opposition Leader Deb Frecklington.What that amounts to is about 1500 jobs in the construction phase – which at two years won’t even get us to the next federal election – and maybe 100 when the mine is operating, at least according to University of Queensland economist Professor John Quiggin.

It feels like you can believe whatever you want about Adani, or at least whatever suits your world view.

But Adani was never really about jobs. “Adani” is a litmus test in Australian politics: you are either for Adani, which means you are for economic prosperity and development of Australia’s regions, or you are against Adani, in which case you are against prosperity, against people who need jobs, even against central Queensland itself.

The simplistic dualism suits politicians whose business it is to squabble over political power and to mediate that squabble through culture wars (this one over coal, the next one over religious freedom, who knows what after that) rather than the work of making real policy.

It also suits the interests that will benefit from Adani – mining companies, fossil-fuel investors, construction and mining unions.

Adani has become more than a coal mine (although it’s not even that yet, and maybe never will be). It’s part of a narrative in Australian politics that poses a false choice between jobs and the environment, framed as the difference between living in the real world and living in the inner-city bubble, the real world being an imaginary state of mind (now known as central Queensland) where people’s only concerns are mortgages and school fees and health insurance and their kids’ futures, while the inner-city bubble is the place where bubble dwellers enjoy economic advantages that afford us the luxury of caring about problems other than those day-to-day concerns.

This isn’t the inner-cities lining up against the central Queenslands: Adani’s another wedge – a grimy, coal-shaped lump of a wedge, but a wedge nonetheless. The mine will be built (or not); the coal will be dug up and shipped (or it won’t). Whichever way it goes, the final reckoning of Adani will be an I-told-you-so where its boosters look politely away from the broken promises and/or the broken environment, and the rest of us – in all the inner-city bubbles and all the Central Queenslands – try to piece together a politics that works in the 21st century and an economy that works for all of us, not just some of us – and for the planet, too.