Recession raises urgency on new mines

Fast-tracking Central Queensland coal mines is the quickest and easiest way for Australia to fight its way out of the recession. The Federal Government conceded last week that Australia had entered its first recession in 29 years, on the back of a summer of bushfires and the pandemic shutdown.

There’s only one way to create large-scale employment in this recession, and that’s to open up big new coal mines at the double. We need development on steroids, and that means immediately approving those six stalled mine applications in the Galilee Basin.

It also means annihilating all those bogus bureaucratic barriers that have delayed approvals by as much as eight years.  Any left-wing activists who stand in the way of these thousands of jobs must be shown to be boulders in the road to economic progress.

Official Gross Domestic Product figures released last week show that Australia’s Economy shrank by 0.3 per cent in the March Quarter. GDP is the total value of all goods and services Australia produces. Queenslanders don’t need to hear the official figures to know that the country is in recession. We already have locally some of the highest employment in Australia. Bushfires, drought and COVID-19 were the main causes, other than mine layoffs over recent years. But some export mineral prices are right at the top of the cycle. Failure to act now to open up these mines would be economic betrayal.

There are two key parts to the economy: export and domestic. One Nation is already taking the State Government to the High Court, to open up borders with the rest of Australia. And that will take care of the domestic part of our economy – however late. Opening up mines will take care of exports. Pauline Hanson seems to be the only leader in Australia with a handle on what local developments mean to jobs.