We’ve heard a lot lately from the NSW Minerals Council about risks to mining jobs in the Hunter (“People power”, Singleton Argus, 10 July). Its CEO, Stephen Galilee, has been scaremongering about the potential impacts of revised government planning policy for the approval of coal mine projects. The reality is that these ‘reforms’ properly reinstate a previous policy that required the social and environmental impacts of a coal project be considered as well as its economic benefits.
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For generations the Hunter wine, tourism, horse breeding and agricultural industries have provided a solid economic base for the Hunter. We welcome the Baird government’s proposed changes to the planning process because they give some hope that these industries, as well as embattled communities like Bulga and Singleton, will survive into the future.
The NSW Minerals Council appears blind to the risks of the Hunter remaining shackled to an industry in serious decline, following a sharp fall in the coal price. Experts predict the coal industry is unlikely to ever recover and the Hunter will continue to be strongly impacted by its demise.
We have already lost 4,000 mining jobs over the last two years and there’s an urgent need to do some serious thinking around how we can diversify industry away from a heavy reliance on mining if we are to stem rising unemployment rates.
The Hunter Research Foundation has identified a future in new industries that create jobs in manufacturing and in services. There are also new jobs in the massive task of rehabilitation, fixing up the mess created by decades of open cut coal mining.
The NSW Minerals Council and the mining industry’s game of trying to buy off our local communities through stunts at football games, BBQs, stalls in shopping malls and other local projects is galling.
This charade cannot hide the devastating impacts of mining all around us: dairy and beef producers have been forced off their land, massive voids created in a once productive landscape, bushland lost and rivers polluted. Tragically, entire villages have also been destroyed to feed the profits of multi-nationals, including Ravensworth, Warkworth and Camberwell.
While the economy has in the past gained benefit from mining, the future is looking bleak. The Hunter’s economy needs balance, where mining is not our sole crux and young people living in the Hunter can look to a variety of future careers. If the Hunter region fails to pay serious attention to how we can diversify industries away from mining we will become like Alice in Wonderland - lost and disorientated down a rabbit hole.