Opinion
Five days before NSW Premier Chris Minns announced he would intervene to grant the Indonesian mining company MACH Energy legislated approval to dig up millions of tonnes more coal each year at its Hunter Valley mine, he held an intimate boardroom lunch fundraiser.
According to electoral disclosures, Coal Australia, an industry lobby group, was among the attendees. A few weeks earlier, its chief executive Stuart Bocking had labelled the High Court’s seismic ruling that the mine’s 2022 approval was invalid because planning authorities had not properly considered emissions from Australian coal burnt overseas as “utter madness”.
Bocking - who was not at the fundraiser personally - was much happier on Monday. He hailed Minns’s “decisive action” and said the lobby group had, in fact, urged th e government to do exactly what the premier had now promised: use legislation to “provide certainty for project approvals, such as MACH Energy, to avoid costly, time-wasting and frivolous legal action from activists”.
Did the government greenlight an extremely fraught intervention into the planning system, effectively handing a one-off approval to a billionaire mine owner as a workaround to the High Court’s ruling because a lobbyist made a $2750 donation to NSW Labor and chewed his ear off at a fundraiser?
I doubt it. And yet, it is a handy example of why governments in NSW have for years felt it prudent to establish a fairly robust independent assessment framework for major mining projects, so decisions such as these are taken out of the hands of politicians.
For good reason. NSW politics is littered with examples of ministers misusing their power. Ian Macdonald. Eddie Obeid. Rex “Buckets” Jackson, if you want a deep cut. Basically, you find me the unfettered ministerial discretion, I’ll find you the relevant ICAC inquiry.
I’m not suggesting anything like that occurred with Mount Pleasant. Rather, the point is to demonstrate the limb Labor has gone out on here, and what it says about the current political moment.
Leaving probity aside, the real benefit of bodies such as the Independent Planning Commission and, indeed, the courts, is that they provide a measure of comfort to those impacted by major decisions – such as mine approvals – that everyone is playing by the same rules. As former Coalition planning minister Rob Stokes said in response to One Nation’s plan to scrap the IPC entirely, “The vested interests will love it.”
A lobbyist like Bocking might believe activists who brought the challenge against Mount Pleasant were engaging in “time-wasting and frivolous legal action”, but the High Court seems to have disagreed. No matter how limited the intervention – essentially the government has given MACH a temporary approval for the mine to increase its production while the issue plays out back in the lower courts – Labor has given them a backdoor to slip through.
Obviously, courts are not above questioning, and parliaments have the power and prerogative to make laws as they see fit. But play it out the other way. What would the reaction have been if the High Court sided with MACH, and the government intervened on behalf of the environmentalists? That’s sovereign risk, baby!
The government’s soundest argument here is that the material reality of 400-odd Hunter Valley workers, whom MACH Energy threatened to sack if it didn’t get the approval, matters more than hands-off decision-making. Those workers probably care less about the process than they do about having a job before Christmas. Given the mine lost in the NSW Court of Appeal in July last year and still, apparently, decided to ramp up its workforce by a few hundred extra people regardless, suggests the company was playing for this outcome. The company has refused to answer questions about when it scaled up its workforce.
Either way, though, the government was playing the cards it was dealt.
But Mount Pleasant is also more evidence, if we needed it, that the orange One Nation tail is wagging the dog.
As my colleague Caitlin Fitzsimmons wrote this week, Labor does deserve some credit on climate. At a time when the Coalition has largely walked away from the clean energy policies they championed in government, Minns and co have stayed the course, so that more than a third of NSW’s electricity generation now comes from renewables.
The premier has at least been consistent in his view that, for the state’s energy transition to work in the long run, it can’t unfairly burden the people of the Hunter Valley specifically and consumers more broadly.
With an unprecedented three-cornered election looming, Minns was never going to change tack now.
Michael McGowan is state political editor for The Sydney Morning Herald.
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