Coals From Newcastle

A few years ago, I stood on the breakwater at Stockton Beech at the mouth of Newcastle’s Hunter River. I watched a huge bulk ore ship sailing slowly out into the great Pacific Ocean. I knew that the ship’s hold was choc full of coal, black gold, the stuff that fuelled China’s industrial revolution. I knew also that soon that much of that cargo would be discharging its carbon into the atmosphere, contributing to the planet’s warming and posing an existential threat to my grandchildren. And yours.  The Newcastle port is the largest coal exporter in the world. In 2020 158 million tons passed through the narrow Stockton bottleneck. That’s Newcastle, New South Wales, not that other city where ‘the boat comes in’ with a mini harbour bridge in the North-East of England.

I was reminded of that image a couple of weeks ago when reading summaries of the latest (sixth) assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Stripped down, the IPCC report pointed out that not only was human-induced climate change affecting our weather patterns, it was all happening more extensively, more frequently and more violently than previously recognised. The Paris targets of 1.5 and 2% will, the report forecasts, be exceeded during this century unless drastic cuts in carbon dioxide are made, in the next few decades. The coming fifteen (sorry, fourteen) years are crucial to this narrow bridge to survival. Droughts, cyclones, heavy precipitation, Arctic melt and bushfires are increasing harbingers of the climate crisis.

So why is my country, Australia, so recalcitrant, so far behind the rest of the world when it comes to supplying the raw material for environmental destruction to the rest of the world? Why is Newcastle, NSW – a beautiful, historic and cultured city at the mouth of a river running through superb agricultural, viticultural and scenic landscapes, the source of so much misery?

One answer, often given by vested interests and politicians (of most stripes) is – jobs. Coal mining employs about 39,000 people and falling. Jobs are also created in ancillary industries like transport. In 2020, coal mining added $47 billion in gross value added to the Australian economy. But broad figures hide important truths. All Australians and our governments benefit economically from this industry. However, all mining generates carbon emissions during extraction and transport. But thermal coal – fuel for the factories and mills of China – also generates massive emissions in use. And Newcastle NSW coal is of the soft thermal kind. When does the trade-off between economic benefit and social-environmental cost  turn? When is the cost of continuing to drive climate change too high? When should the coal ships leaving Newcastle NSW stop?

The quick answer, if one accepts the recent IPCC report, is yesterday. The prospect of runaway climate change is becoming so real and so close, that not taking out insurance now by making radical steps to cut emissions looks more and more suicidal. But even if your subjective probability of the bleaker IPCC’s scenarios is very low, you should still support action now because the potential cost is so high. A small probability multiplied by a large outcome gives a large expected outcome, in this case environmental annihilation. The French mathematician Blaise Pascal famously suggested this as a logical reason for believing in God. In fact, one does not have to go to that length, since scientific evidence is piling up increasing the probability of human-induced climate change towards the limit. A large probability of a large outcome gives an even larger expected outcome than before.  

So, to repeat, why is Australia – let me rephrase that, why is the current Australian government – so inclined to not act on climate change? Why have the federal coalition parties – for foreign readers, confusingly misnamed – The Liberal Party of Australia and The National Party, treated climate change policy as a poisoned chalice? The former was created after World War II and is, in fact, Australia’s major conservative party. The latter started life after World War I as The Australian Country Party, claiming to represent the across-the-board interests of country folk, particularly the small farmers and large pastoral concerns, and the associated industries that grew up in the rural towns to  support those primary activities.

More recently, the Nats, as they are called, have rebranded themselves as the party of regional and rural Australia – RARA. Attracting around 7 per cent of the national vote, the Nats currently hold around 10 per cent of seats in the Federal House of Representatives and are also over-represented in the senate. But their influence on federal policy is even greater, due to its long-standing, if somewhat shaky, formal coalition with its larger conservative partner. Liberal-National Party governments have governed Australia for all but six years since 1996, and all but twenty-six years since the end of the 1940s. This situation was not initially intended. Prior to World War II, the country Party saw itself as an independent check on the two major parties, Labor and conservative. They sought to be a type of centre party along European, especially Scandinavian lines. In the 1930s, the party even outshone its conservative rival, governing in its own right in Victoria and in Queensland after the war. But there quickly developed the view within the party, especially at the national level, that the greatest leverage could be wielded by forming a more-or-less permanent coalition with the larger urban based liberal party and its precursors.

Coalition has proved to be a mixed blessing for the Nats. On the one hand, it has guaranteed them several seats in the national cabinet and an implied threat to withdraw their support if their vital interests as they see them, are at threat. This places them handily to block measures they find distasteful, or when the medicine must be taken, ensures that adequate carve-outs and sugar treats are dished out at the same time. On the other hand, minority status in a partnership of convenience often means that the medicine will be administered. It is also galling to be number two all the time, or number three on the ballots for Australia’s states-based upper Chamber. Still, for most of the time the political soulmates bump along. Until now.

Climate change is driving a wedge in the Nats’s historic support base. The National Farmers’ Federation (an accurate branding) supports strong action on climate change, including commitment to the 2050 net zero carbon target embraced by most of the rest of the world. A more recent organisation – Farmers for Climate Action – claiming to speak for 22,000 supporters has launched an ambitious networking strategy entailing community education and political advocacy towards climate change mitigation and adaptation. Countless smaller experiments along similar lines are breaking out throughout the regions, in partnership with local industry and community organisations. And yet, the Nats remain unmoved. This is perhaps not quite accurate; they are moving – further to the right. So much so, that the majority of their federal parliamentary members recently felt it necessary to replace a ‘moderate’ leader with the leading megaphone echoing the charge against net-zero emissions, Barnaby Joyce. Barnaby, as he is widely known, is as close as Australia has come in minting a home-grown Trump or Bojo. His wide-brimmed hat frames a red face that bellows populist simplicities and alternative facts. (Barnaby’s laughable metaphor, comparing developing a climate change policy to ordering a meal, has all the fingerprints of Rudy Giuliano and Sidney Powell.) His main job is to prevent the government of which he is now Deputy Prime Minister – a job title that is about as powerful as ‘the designated survivor’ in the US political system – is to prevent the Prime Minister from signing Australia up to net-zero at the upcoming climate summit in Glasgow 2021. In reality, his task will be to drag the chain in order to gouge maximum benefits for his support base when Australia finally bows to the inevitable. Forget the rhetoric, even the diehards in both coalition parties are aware of the tariffs and other barriers that will be slapped on Australia’s exports in the event rhetoric trumps reality.

But underlying the political theatre starring Barnaby, with bit parts contributed by Coalition renegades Craig Kelly and George Christensen, more serous fault lines are emerging. The Nats have increasingly come to represent the sectional interest of the large mining concerns, especially coal, that are extracting and exporting minerals to the fast developing economies of our global region. In this, they are helping to drag their senior coalition partners with them, strengthening the climate change deniers and neoliberal do-nothing brigade in both parties. Why?

One reason is fear – fear of losing votes to the lunatic right, especially in Queensland. But if one rules out straight-out corruption and bribery – a not insignificant stretch – it is difficult to see why a business friendly government has come to be mired in denial and inaction. Virtually every business peak association and large business concern in the country publicly supports at least minimal action, if only to forestall future international sanctions. Qantas, large financial institutions, even large miners like BHP accept the need to do or at least appear to do something on the mitigation front. Strange and stranger.

Perhaps the answer lies somewhere in the ability of coalition politicians to hold mutually inconsistent views and to turn whatever face suits the audience they are currently addressing. We have a Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, who is himself a policy vacuum, the man from marketing who can manufacture a catchy though vacuous phrase to avoid any need to address key issues, still less advance considered solutions. If he was a boxer, he would win bouts on points by continually backing away, parrying the increasingly angry blows of opponents and counter-jabbing over fifteen championship rounds.

But there are signs that the Morrison shuffle, the rope-a-dope leaning back protecting his chin, is running out of steam. He is finding it increasingly difficult to slough off the litany of failures – bushfires, quarantine, vaccine shortages, pork-barrelling, corruption, sexual misconduct – that have arisen on his watch. He techniques of denial, deflection and deceit have hit diminishing marginal returns. His hope remains twofold; firstly, that he can again pull off a campaigning miracle and second, that the electorate won’t opt for the Labor alternative.

On the first front, he has the advantage of incumbency; he can decide up until May next year when the election takes place. Timing is everything. He is searching desperately for ‘the sweet spot’, the short period between when most jurisdictions come out of general lockdown and when the subsequent surge in cases and hospitalisations cause ICUs and the medical staff to be overrun. Daily nationwide deaths in the tens can be politically withstood for a while. But as the daily rate climbs towards three figures, the full force of Morrison’s failures in 2020 will become so clear that asinine comparisons with the flu will fail to fly. This suggests that the federal election is likely between late November and early February. Obviously, Morrison would prefer the earlier date so he can spruik the mirage of happy family Christmas lunches. But the vaccination rate will probably  not have climbed sufficiently for a snap two or three week campaign to be called in late October. (What price for an election on the anniversary of Gough Whitlam’s triumph almost fifty years ago?) Only the prospect of a bleak and black Christmas might change that calculus. And has anyone given thought to how to manage logistically a nation-wide election during a raging pandemic?

On the other front, the ‘kill Bill’ campaign of 2019 will be harder to pull off this time around, as Labor has been careful, ultra-careful, not to give the government ammunition to scare the electorate. In fact, with minor exceptions, Labor looks like ‘Coalition light’. Although Albanese is no Keating or Hawke, he doesn’t carry Shorten’s baggage and Morrison’s leadership reputation has been shredded. But, ironically, Labor’s low-key strategy carries with it risks similar to Morrison’s quandary. By offering little product differentiation and, in particular, by equivocating on the coal question, Albanese risks votes leaking left to the Greens, especially in inner city electorates in the capital cities, like his. Both major party leaders are having great difficulties in keeping their respective bases from rusting off. And around the edges a growing pool of independents and one-issue candidates may come to wield disproportionate influence over who governs and for how long.

Finally, we can ponder two unlikely but not impossible prospects arising from the current political stasis on climate and energy policy In Australia. That is, might the two major parties fracture sufficiently to cause the remaining liberal factions of the two coalition parties to form a new centre-right party, perhaps buoyed by more right wing elements of the labour movement? And might the left in Labor, along with some moderate trade unions,  merge with the Greens to form a new centre-left counterweight with an overriding mission to get serious on climate change? Fanciful perhaps. But what is the option, if the dire futures of the IPCC are not to crowd in upon us? And there isn’t a lot of time.