Opinion
There’s an old saying that you should never criticise a farmer while you’re eating. Which is not entirely true, of course: like any lobby group, farmers are just as open to criticism as any other. Even in the 1940s, Groucho Marx grumbled that “those fake rustics manage to gouge more money out of the government than all the pressure groups combined”.
If that was true then, though, it’s long out of date. Pensions, health and welfare are far and away the biggest devourers of the Aussie taxation pie. The most likely to be sticking it to the neck of the Australian taxpayer these days is a Boomer in a wheelchair, not a farmer and definitely not a miner.
That doesn’t stop inner city green-left types from incessantly screeching about “fossil fuel subsidies” as they park their Tesla in the garage of their leafy mansion with solar panels from China on the roof.
The hypocrisy is so blatant that even the Albanese Labor government feels obliged to point it out.
Resources Minister Madeleine King has issued the Albanese government’s strongest defence yet of the regions and energy and resources sectors, including coal and gas, declaring many east coast urban Australians have lost sight of where their food, prosperity and energy come from.
Labor at least realises that it’s going to depend heavily on the resources states, Queensland and WA, if it wants to cling to government. But it also has to deal with party rank and file Climate Cultists, who are implacably hostile to the mining industry.
With an ideological split over the future of coal and gas ahead of Labor’s national conference this week, the WA-based cabinet minister has taken a swipe at those living in the capital cities for forgetting the central role that the regions play in the nation’s economy.
As unions threaten strikes at Australia’s major LNG operations in WA, risking billions of dollars in lost production, Ms King also reassured the nation’s trading partners that Australia was a reliable supplier of iron ore, gas and metallurgical coal.
Everybody knows that you don’t need oil, gas and coal. You just get electricity from a power socket, duh. Just like food comes from a supermarket.
“Most of Australia’s jobs and economic opportunities have gravitated to the suburbs and inner cities in contrast to decades past,” Ms King will say in a keynote address to The Australian’s Bush Summit in Perth on Monday.
“This has not only depleted the bush of its young people, but set many small towns on a slow path to decline.
“It’s also led to some losing sight of what the bush represents and its central role in Australia’s future.
Mind you, city-based types referring to anywhere beyond the outer suburbs of the capital cities as “the bush” is just as out of touch. To people who live in the country, it’s, well, the country. “The bush” is something else entirely.
This type of faux-folksy terminology is almost as annoying as city-based politicians showing up in the country wearing a brand-new Akubra, for a photo-op.
But at least they’re not as out of touch as the average green-left voter.
“It has, I think, led to many Australians in urban areas losing sight of where much of the nation’s prosperity, food and energy comes from. We need to change this […]
Ms King said Australia’s energy and resource exports were now close to $500bn a year, led primarily by gas, coal, iron ore, gold and aluminium.
She said the Albanese government now wanted to accelerate the expansion of critical minerals operations in Northern Australia to leverage the untapped wealth and use it to drive Australia’s future economic growth and the revival of regional communities.
But it ain’t all mining, in the country.
“Regional and Northern Australia is much more than mining, as anyone here at this summit would know,” Ms King will say […]
Ms King will tell the forum that “growing a stronger more successful nation doesn’t begin and end at our cities”.
“It also means supporting our regions and regional towns to be strong, vibrant, and economically diversified,” Ms King will say.
The Australian
The mining industry, though, relies heavily on FIFO workers. For people who actually live in country towns, the only jobs too often available are as waitresses or kitchen hands.
If they really want to make regional Australia thrive, we’ve got to get past mining being the only game in a country town.