Adani and the War Over Coal by Quentin Beresford

Author:Quentin Beresford
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: NewSouth Publishing

Turnbull’s Orwellian shift

As English novelist and essayist George Orwell lamented in his 1946 essay, ‘Politics and the English Language’, the use of language had become ‘ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts’. And, he argued, slovenliness was a powerful political tool: ‘Political language … is designed to make lies sound truthful’. On climate change, Prime Minister Turnbull has shamelessly borrowed from Orwell’s insight. His transition from climate change crusader to climate change coward happened within days of him becoming leader.

On 5 October 2015, Turnbull dismissed the challenge Labor had set him to develop a bipartisan approach to developing a renewable energy target. Shorten said that the steep drop-off in investment in renewable energy in Australia was an international anomaly that must be fixed. He pointed out that, in the past year alone, clean energy investment had risen by 8 per cent in the United States, 12 per cent in Japan and 35 per cent in China. ‘In Australia, however, under the Abbott government’s overtly pro-fossil fuel/anti-renewables stance, it went backwards by 35 per cent’. While two million jobs in the sector had been created worldwide, Australia had shed 2300 full-time positions.23 Labor’s answer was to develop a commitment to a 50 per cent renewable energy target even though it lacked specific details on how it proposed to reach the target. But the man who previously helped to launch the report on zero emissions went on the attack. Shorten, Turnbull said, was ‘reckless’ in advancing a 50 per cent target when a ‘reduction in emissions you needed could come more cost-effectively from carbon storage, by planting trees, by soil carbon, by using gas, by using clean coal, by energy efficiency’.24

Turnbull had fallen in line with the Coalition’s talking points, which it shared with the fossil fuel industry. He described those who advocated transitioning out of coal as ‘delusional’. Direct Action, the Coalition’s climate change policy, which Turnbull had once described as ‘fiscal recklessness on a grand scale’, was now a ‘resounding success’. And he repeated the coal industry’s discredited claim that stopping exports of Australian coal ‘would be of no benefit to global climate whatsoever’ because Australian coal was cleaner.25 Journalist Lenore Taylor wrote in the Guardian that Turnbull’s pro-coal advocacy required ‘all his rhetorical skill to bridge the gap between what he knows is true and what he has to say to appease his party’.26

Senior government ministers continued to spruik the Carmichael mine using disputed and/or discredited claims. Campaigning in North Queensland ahead of the July 2016 federal election, Attorney-General Senator George Brandis recycled the assertion that the project would generate 10 000 jobs – an assertion that evidence from Adani’s own consultant in the Land Court in 2015 had shown was false (see Chapter 10). Senator Matthew Canavan excitedly told the media that the Adani project would ‘deliver billions in taxes’, overlooking the investigations into Adani’s tax minimisation schemes.

But on 1 July, days

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