Adani, Following Its Dirty Footsteps

A Personal Story

Lindsay Simpson

• Publisher: Spinifex Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781925581508
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Politique en matière d'environnement et d'énergie

Adani's license to mine 60 million tonnes of coal for 60 years threatens Australia's precious ancient source of groundwater in the Galillee Basin, a vast underground water reservoir, part of the Great Artesian Basin, occupying more than 20% of Australia. How could a company with a globally disastrous reputation for environmental destruction along with a dubious financial status woo an Australian Prime Minister, a State Premier and a handful of regional mayors to back a project to build Australia's largest coalmine and the world's largest coal terminal only kilometres from the Great Barrier Reef? This book documents the inconceivable story of how Australian governments abrogated their responsibilities to protect this world heritage icon; bypassing environmental safeguards, thereby irrevocably damaging Australia's reputation as environmental steward of some of the world's most valuable natural assets.

Chapter 1

The Courting of a Mining Magnate

The Indian businessman next to me in the window seat is crunching coated chickpeas just before takeoff at the Indira Gandhi International Airport in New Delhi. It is 15 March 2017 and we are heading for Gujarat in India’s far northwest. Gujarat is India’s most lucrative industrial state and home to the US$12 billion multinational Adani Group – the largest port operator in India and India’s largest trader and importer of coal.

“It’s foggy out there,” I gesture at the impenetrable mist outside. “Why is that?”

“Madam,” the businessman replies still crunching. “That’s the morning.”

How could I have forgotten the density of the pollution in India? For four months in 2015, while researching my new novel, I had lived in Chennai in southern India. I’d forgotten the way it clogs the nostrils. Hugs the throat. Makes breathing an obvious rather than involuntary motion. Every breath signs a death warrant.

Tomorrow, on 16 March 2017, the Queensland Premier, Annastacia Palaszczuk, and her eight regional mayors will begin their descent into Mumbai from London passing through the liquorice-allsort layers of impenetrable pollution. I don’t know whether any of them have ever visited this continent. Representing eight regional areas across Queensland, they have secured ratepayer-funded budgets of up to $10,000 for a few days’ visit to India. Their mission: to ensure that Australia’s largest coal mine and potentially the biggest in the world – the Carmichael coal mine to be built by Adani Mining Pty Ltd – goes ahead. If successful, Gautam Adani, billionaire chair, one of the wealthiest men in India and founder of the Adani Group whose close friend is none other than India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi – will be the first to open the rich seams of thermal coal housed deep underground in the Australian outback previously never accessed because of the remoteness of the location.

The proposed mine is to include six open cut pits and five underground mines across an area that is 30 kms long. The company’s regulatory permissions are all but in place. A mining lease, already granted by the Queensland State Government will permit the company to mine 60 million tonnes of coal every year for 60 years. If the mine goes ahead, the groundwater from the Great Artesian Basin, home to the country’s ancient well – an area occupying about 22% of Australia – will be under threat. Adani is also about to be granted a free unlimited 60-year water licence by the Queensland Government (this happened on 4 April 2017). The mine will use 250 litres of freshwater for each tonne of coal produced. All the company needs to do, under the conditions of the licence, is to monitor and report the amount of water it extracts under this permit that runs until 2077. Its water usage will not be subject to public submissions or appeals.

While Adani is paying nothing to access the water, Australian farmers and graziers in the arid land surrounding the mine, who heavily rely on water for their livelihood, will still have to pay for that resource.

Adani, at this time in March 2017, is also poised to gain a $1 billion loan funded by Australian taxpayers to build a 388 km railway line to transport the coal to the coast where the world’s largest coal terminal will be built only 19 kms away from the world’s largest living organism – the Great Barrier Reef. The expansion of the coal port to accommodate the mine will require dredging an estimated 1.1 million cubic metres of spoil right next to the Great Barrier Reef marine park. Dissecting Indigenous spiritual land as well as thousands of hectares of agricultural land, the proposed rail line will transport the coal to around 500 ships waiting at anchor to ship the coal through the Great Barrier Reef to India.

But perhaps worst of all, the proposed Adani mine and proposed rail link will open up the massive Galilee coal basin, which straddles the Great Dividing Range covering an area of around 250,000 square kms, to a host of other mega mines including projects backed by Gina Rinehart, one of Australia’s richest people and one of the world’s richest women, and Clive Palmer, whose company bought the now defunct Yabulu nickel refinery north of the North Queensland city of Townsville and was later accused of environmental degradation. The refinery fronts on to the Coral Sea.

Blinded by promises of thousands of jobs, these Australian politicians are hastily visiting India to carve up what they perceive is a lucrative future for regional Queenslanders as well as shoring up their own political future. The mayors are already at each other’s throats. Unseemly headlines shout how they will divide up imagined spoils.

Later, there will be promises from two of the mayors to build a $30 million airport (which their councils will never own) to hand to Adani as a gift for fly-in fly-out workers to work in the mine – all with ratepayers’ money. Free office space is to be offered to Adani by the Mayor of Townsville, the North Queensland capital, while the company searches for suitable offices for its headquarters. The Mayor of Whitsunday Regional Council has been told to offer a parcel of land in the township of Bowen near Adani’s coal port of Abbot Point.

There is something unseemly about this scramble. By March 2017, there has been limited debate, even in the Australian media, about the massive scale of global environmental destruction this project will entail. The largest source of carbon dioxide is from the combustion of fossil fuels (coal, natural gas and oil) which produces 81% of human carbon dioxide carbon emissions. Burning coal is the biggest single source of carbon dioxide emissions from human activity. It generates less than 30% of the world’s energy supply, while producing 46% of global carbon dioxide emissions. Coal is, quite simply, incredibly dirty and it carries toxic airborne pollutants and heavy metals including mercury and lead into the atmosphere.

The effects of these carbon dioxide emissions are forcibly felt. 2016 was the warmest year on record since record keeping began in 1880 (1.2°C above pre-industrial era) according to NASA and a separate, independent analysis by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).¹ What is even more alarming, however, is that the change has proved to be consecutive – proof of continuing long-term climate change. Both organisations found that globally, 2013–17 was the “hottest five-year period on record.”

Since 2015, the Great Barrier Reef has been subjected to some of the highest temperatures recorded. In the summer of 2016, two-thirds of the coral in the northern reef died through bleaching. In some reefs in the north almost all of the coral died. Heat stress from these record temperatures damage the microscopic algae (zooxanthellae) that live in the tissues of corals turning them white. Up until the 1980s, mass bleachings were unheard of. In 1998 and 2002 the reef experienced its first severe bleachings but nothing to match the back-to-back bleaching of 2016/17.

In the weeks following Premier Palaszczuk’s visit to India with her assorted regional mayors begging for the country’s largest coal mine to be built, Professor Terry Hughes from the Australian Research Council’s (ARC) Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University (JCU), and convenor of the national coral bleaching task force, will fly over the Great Barrier Reef as part of an annual survey. He will conduct a follow-up survey from October and November 2016 when he discovers that in the northern third of the reef, 67% of coral cover was lost across 60 reefs (the largest loss ever recorded) through bleaching events. In May 2017, Hughes tweeted that a further 19% had died in 2017. Worse still, the bleaching had extended a further 500 kms south. And this Hughes found after flying for eight days in a small plane and helicopter covering an area of 8000 square kms and surveying more than 1000 of the Great Barrier Reef’s nearly 3000 reefs. Unlike the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority that also blames a strong El Niño for the bleaching, Hughes unequivocally blamed climate change for the reef’s demise and points the finger squarely at politicians and a lack of leadership to redirect resources from coal to renewable energy.

The Australian public slumbers apparently unaware that they, as taxpayers, will be, at this point in March 2017, the sole investor in Adani’s coal export plans, a company most have never even heard of. Their political leaders, however, are certainly acquainted with Adani both at the Federal and State level. One of his earliest supporters was then Labor Premier of Queensland, Anna Bligh, who was one of the first to declare the Adani mine a ‘significant project’ for Queensland, one that was suggested, at that time, to have an unbelievable lifespan of 150 years. She was also one of the first to propose that the construction of the mine and rail line would generate “around 11,000 jobs” according to a media release on the Queensland Government website in November 2010. So enthusiastic was she that she officiated at the opening of Adani’s Australian headquarters in Brisbane. She had met Adani earlier during a trade mission to India.

Since Gautam Adani’s entry into the Australian scene in 2010, he has made donations across both sides of politics and across various levels of local, state and national politics. Campbell Newman, Bligh’s Liberal National Party (LNP) successor, promised that taxpayers’ funds would help establish the mine. After leading a 76-strong business delegation and touring the Adani power plant and port in Mundra in 2012, he was given a lavish reception.

Tony Abbott, when he was Prime Minister, had been due to be seated next to Mr Adani at a luncheon in Mumbai for business leaders in September 2014, but Adani failed to show. Abbott was, the newspaper claimed, presented with a silver Indian vase and a pashmina wrap.² A troop of other Australian politicians followed: a former Deputy Premier of Queensland and two former New South Wales Premiers were hosted by Gautam Adani. Adani, the master of business relations, was the perfect host. After the trip of the Queensland mayors to Mumbai and the Mundra power plant, Rockhampton Mayor, Margaret Strelow, and Townsville Mayor, Jenny Hill, publicly declared $1600 and $1400 respectively for gifts bestowed on them by Adani including airfares and meals while in India.³ Prime Ministers have also been steadfast supporters of Adani. Former Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, once described the Adani mine as a “poverty-busting miracle that would put Australia on the path to becoming an energy superpower” according to an article in The Sydney Morning Herald on 30 June 2015. Nothing or no one, it seems, could stop the hype.

Abbott continued to inflate the number of jobs the Carmichael mine would produce. In his pursuit of promoting the building of the Adani mine, he used the number that is commonly bandied about by politicians and the media: 10,000. Adani had used the figure of 10,000 jobs in its Environmental Impact Statement and said the mine would bring $22 billion in royalties according to an article in The Age in December 2015. However, in April 2015, Adani’s own expert witness, Dr Jerome Fahrer in the Land Court of Queensland at a court hearing for objections to the proposed mine, declared in his affidavit there would be “an average of 1464 full-time employees (FTE) direct and indirect” jobs a year. At that time, the Land Court President, Carmel MacDonald, found that Adani had significantly overstated its job figures in court evidence as well as to the State Government. She rejected the company’s modelling, accepting instead Fahrer’s evidence that Adani would “increase average annual employment by 1206 FTE jobs in Queensland and 1464 FTE jobs in Australia.”

Three weeks after Premier Palaszczuk’s visit, the current Australian Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, is poised to fly to India to provide a ‘ringing endorsement’ of the mine. At that time, he tells the media that the mine will generate “tens of thousands of jobs,” according to David Crowe writing in The Australian. Turnbull will tell Adani that any legal hurdles to do with Native Title (the legislation that recognises the traditional rights and interests to land and waters of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people) will be amended according to The Australian Financial Review.^4/5 Up until 1992, Australian law did not even recognise that Indigenous people had any rights to Australian land or waters. Indigenous people are still not recognised in the Australian constitution, the founding document of the nation, nor recognise pre-existing Aboriginal rights as the Canadian constitution does.⁶

The God Adani has miraculously managed to convince the Queensland Government to waive the usual rigorous environmental State Government scrutiny that might challenge the mine. The Queensland Government, with unseemly haste, in October 2016, invoked critical infrastructure powers to fast-track Adani’s requests, powers given to the Premier to invoke in times of famine, drought and catastrophe. Palaszczuk’s Government will later in 2017 agree to a deferred royalties scheme for the entire Galilee Basin which will offer a deferral of mining royalties for the first four years of operation; a move the Australian Greens, at that time, estimated would cost Queensland taxpayers $253.3 million in net terms over five years for the Adani mine alone.

Federally, too, there is a lack of scrutiny in the scramble to approve the Carmichael mine. When seeking Federal environment approval for the mine, Adani failed to disclose the background of its CEO and Country Head of Adani Australia, Jeyakumar Janakaraj. Janakaraj had been Director of Operations at a copper mine in Zambia which was prosecuted for serious environmental charges involving major pollution of a river in Zambia, a fact revealed by Mark Willacy on the ABC-TV in December 2015.^7/8

The environmental history of companies’ executive officers is relevant when assessing the environmental history of a company in determining whether that company should be entrusted with potentially risky operations in Australia according to The Adani Brief, an investigation by Environmental Justice Australia into Adani business practices.

In February 2018, following a decision by the Federal Government not to prosecute Adani for the omission about Janakaraj’s past history, Samantha Hepburn, writing in the The Conversation, questioned the viability of our environmental laws to protect the environment, when falling between Queensland State and Federal legislation. According to Environmental Justice Australia (EJA), the Environmental Protection Act 1994 (Qld) is woefully inadequate. The public is supposed to be able to have access to copies of environmental authorities. But, in Adani’s case, when EJA filed a right of information application to obtain it, it discovered that in August 2011, the type of environmental authority Adani Mining Pty Ltd held was changed. Then in March 2012, the environmental authority number was changed again apparently due to an administrative error resulting in the original authority having three different numbers in two years. EJA pointed out that the Queensland Auditor General in 2014 found that the Department is “not fully effective in its supervision, monitoring and enforcement of environmental conditions and is exposing the state to liability and the environment to harm unnecessarily.”⁹

EJA also pointed out in its report that in March 2013, the Act was amended to require a company to be registered as “a suitable operator” before being granted an environmental authority. But it deemed anyone with an existing environmental authority to be “a suitable operator.” As Adani Mining Pty Ltd held an environmental authority, it did not have to go through a statutory process to assess its suitability to operate. For example, when being assessed, a company “must disclose information about its environment record” which includes executive o...