Adani

Mixed environmental messages in Queensland

On Friday, 3 November, Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk dropped what sounded like a bombshell. Palaszczuk, at the tail of the first week of a desperate re-election campaign, said she would veto a $1 billion loan to Adani from the federal government’s Northern Australia Infrastructure Facility (NAIF) after it emerged that her partner, Shaun Drabsch, had assisted the Indian conglomerate’s application for the loan in his role as a director for PwC.

Palaszczuk said she was acting to remove any perception of conflict of interest over the loan, intended to fund the construction of a rail line from Adani’s proposed Carmichael coal mine to its terminal at Abbot Point, north of Bowen. The response was immediate. The next day’s Courier-Mail went with a screaming headline: “Mine shaft”. Queensland’s only statewide newspaper claimed thousands of jobs were at risk.

It’s a well-worn trope. The newspaper has long followed the Adani line that as many as 10,000 jobs would be created by the mine, despite the group’s expert witness, Jerome Fahrer, admitting in court in 2015 that the number was fewer than 1500. Buried at the bottom of the copy was an admission: under the caretaker convention, Palaszczuk needed the support of opposition leader Tim Nicholls to veto the loan.… Read more..

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Bleaching whitewash

Last night, ABC TV’s Media Watch followed up a story I wrote for The Saturday Paper on The Courier-Mail‘s coverage of coral bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef. Questions were put to the paper’s executive editor Neil Melloy. He says that claims that the paper has under-reported what is happening on the reef are “frankly baffling, and appear to have been made by someone who does not read The Courier-Mail“. You can read his full response here.

“Anyone wishing to be clear about The Courier-Mail‘s position on the issue should read the paper’s editorial from Saturday 23 April,” he said. The headline for this editorial reads “Scaremongering won’t save our precious $5.4 billion drawcard”. Well, no, it won’t, but neither will obfuscating the extent of the problems it faces.

I have in fact been following The Courier-Mail‘s coverage of this issue quite closely, and in response I have my own questions to ask of Melloy and the paper’s editor, Lachlan Heywood (which I have put to him previously). I will now ask them again.

The aforementioned editorial concludes as follows:

“Perversely, the overblown claims also hinder action to protect the Reef as the science to date simply does not back up the hyperbole. Read more..

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