LATELY a focus on interviews with Minister for Resources and Northern Australia Matthew Canavan has been on the Adani coal mine project in central Queensland.
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The Rockhampton based Queensland senator has recently discussed it on the panel of ABC’s Q & A, been grilled by The Project’s Waleed Aly about the job numbers, and frequently endorses the project’s feasibility and merits on his Facebook page.
Yet what benefit is this project to western Queensland? Or to Northern Australia, which covers 40 per cent of the continent’s land mass.
So we ask the Senator this question in person:
Journalist Chris Burns: Everything I hear of you in the media lately is about Adani, Adani, Adani. It’s clearly of great importance to yourself and your government, but...why should western Queensland readers and viewers and voters care about Adani and getting it off the ground?
Senator Canavan: It’s a fair point. One aspect here is it’s become a touchstone or a totem pole for people, so the media want to talk about it.
Even the people of the big cities want to talk about it, it starts to dominate things.
But in that aspect it is important, because if we can’t get something like this project going I do fear as how we are seen as a country, from investors.
I mean this has been going on for seven years, India has a huge market for us in the future for a whole lot of products including advanced metals, and I want to see our relationship grow stronger.
This is a really important deal to get across the line. All the approvals have been done, we have got agreements...from the land owners.
Let’s get this thing going. If we can’t do this there will be a rebound impact on other investors across the country.
The second point I make. This is not to me really about Adani. That’s what the media characterises it as and everybody wants to put an individual or a company into the frame. It’s about the Gallilee basis opening up a new coal basin and the first coal basin opened up in 50 years in Australia.
Look what the Bowen basin developed across the region including western Queensland and everywhere. It was an enormous impact. The rail lines that were built, there were grain and cattle as well.
The galilee has that opportunity as well. There are five other mines apart from Adani in planning stages altogether.
The Queensland government estimates 16,000 mining jobs. We only employ 44,000 people in coal mining at the moment. It’s our second biggest export. 16,000 jobs is huge, a huge deal and that will have positive benefits right across Queensland not just in central or north Queensland. In western Queensland and Brisbane as well.
It impacts right across our state if we can get that going.