ONE Nation's leading candidate for a NSW upper-house seat Mark Latham met with Singleton locals on Thursday to discuss the proposed expansion of the Glencore Mangoola mine.
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The former federal opposition leader shared his views and advice to Wybong residents Michael and Margot White prior to his scheduled meeting at the Singleton Diggers.
“It (the proposed expansion) has a lot more impact on residents,” Mr Latham stated.
“The noise impact will be quite severe on the surrounding residents and Glencore is yet to have the flexibility to buy out the people who will be affected by the noise impact.
“This one hasn’t gone to public exhibition yet but it’s always wise for the company to sit down and work with residents and Michael and Margot are reasonable people.
“They have worked in the mining sector themselves so they’re not against coal philosophically.
“In fact they’re in favour of it but they’ve looked at the proposal and it has obviously going to have a severe impact on (an estimated number of) residents.”
While some properties will be bought out for noise reasons, Mr Latham has publicly asked Glencore to extend their purchase as “an act of goodwill”.
“I was talking to Michael and Margot about what you should do when you live in a marginal seat like the Upper Hunter to make their interest known between the parties,” he added.
“Hopefully they can get a good outcome and the company can have a bit of flexibility.”
Mr Latham began his political career with the Liverpool City Council in 1987 after being an adviser to Labor politician John Kerin (1980-82) as well as a research assistant to the former Prime Minister Gough Whitlam (1982-87).
“Land use and planning issues have always been familiar to me since I started back in Liverpool,” he added.
“Though it’s little bit different in a rural district like Singleton, where you have the interaction between rural lifestyle and open cut mining, the same principals are in place.
“So I’m always sympathetic to the residents in these circumstances.”
Though his party does not in fact have a candidate for the Upper Hunter, he would later announce Neil Turner for the state electorate of Maitland.
He also paid tribute to the Whites for sharing their situation with him ahead of the upcoming state election.
“Michael and Margot only made contact yesterday so I’m very happy to have made contact with them,” he explained.
“I was very disturbed (earlier today) that Richard Marles (who is a senior labour front bencher) is celebrating the fact the global thermal coal market has collapsed and he thinks that that is a good thing.
“Well, in actual fact, the market hasn’t collapsed and it’s not a good thing and there’s 50,000 Australians who work in the coal industry; many of them are in the Hunter Valley.
“I would think someone like Joel Fitzgibbon, who is representing the seat of Hunter, should be rebuking his colleagues for saying something this stupid.
“Coal has to have a viable future in Australia and mining has to have a future but it has to be compatible with existing residential amenity and need.”
He believes the Wallarah 2 Coal Project, a proposed underground mining operation northwest of central Wyong on the Central Coast, should receive the go ahead.
“There are nearly 300 jobs there and it would be possible for the Wybong extension to go ahead if the company had the flexibility to buy people out,” Mr Latham said.
“The bottom line is that you can’t be racing around saying that ‘yipee, coal is finished’ given the whole energy debate in Australia is upside down.
“Nuclear is banned in NSW, uranium mining is banned and CGS is being destroyed and coal is being strangled out so renewable is winning by default.
“Well you can’t put all of your energy eggs in the one basket because renewable is risky because they’re more expensive and they’re not as reliable.”
(He was sure to refer to our neigbouring state South Australia as an example shortly after making this statement)
“The One Nation policy for NSW is to diversify the energy base so that we have flourishing coal, nuclear, renewables (if they can manage it) and we have lots of energy sources which can increase supply and drive down the process.
“We will pay a heavy price if we don’t have energy security and another one of our policies is to ensure there’s a replacement for Lidell when it’s closing in 2022.
“Our policy is to bundle up all the state electricity contracts and put a tender out for reliable based load power.
“That might give the financial capacity for someone to buy out AGL at Lidell and keep that coal fired power plant going.
“This is important for the Hunter Valley in terms of jobs because if you want manufacturing, aluminium and the coal industry then you’ve got to have reliable base load power instead of the 100 per cent reliance on windmills and solar farms.”