{"id":54828,"date":"2020-08-25T15:51:49","date_gmt":"2020-08-25T20:51:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=54828"},"modified":"2020-08-25T15:51:49","modified_gmt":"2020-08-25T20:51:49","slug":"the-coal-curse-a-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=54828","title":{"rendered":"The Coal Curse \u2013 A Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Coal Curse \u2013 A Review<\/a><\/h3>\n
\n

Governments are abrogating their first responsibility, which is to safeguard the people and their future well-being.<\/em><\/p>\n

The first part of historian Judith Brett\u2019s Quarterly Essay, The Coal Curse \u2013 Resources, Climate and Australia\u2019s Future, is a masterly dissection of Australian economic history since WW2.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Credit \u2013 Unsplash<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

It brings into sharp focus the divide between the protectionist \u2013 primary producer and manufacturing \u2013 forces of the immediate post-war period and the gradual shift to a neoliberal globalist model which favoured the mining sector. \u00a0The transition was marked by the Hawke\/Keating 1983 decision to float the dollar, and Paul Keating\u2019s \u201cBanana Republic<\/em>\u201d outburst three years later as commodity prices and the exchange rate fell, illustrating the dangers of an overly rigid economic system being left too late to reinvent itself in a rapidly globalising world.<\/p>\n

Luckily, economic expansion in Asia in the 1970s, 80s and 90s provided relief as demand for primary products soared \u2013 agriculture as before, but increasingly minerals and fossil fuels, notably coal and most recently gas.<\/p>\n

The essay documents how the mining industry \u2013 minerals and fossil fuels \u2013 came together in the 1970s to convince a sceptical polity and community of its value to the nation. Initially through:\u00a0\u201c\u2014the Australian New Right, a loose network of conservative men \u2013 and a few women \u2013 in high places, who combined a zeal for free-market economics with opposition to the progressive causes of the 1970s, including land rights and environmentalism.<\/em>\u201d \u2013 working through think tanks such as the Institute of Public Affairs and the Centre for Independent Studies.<\/p>\n

The network honed their teeth in opposing indigenous land rights and native title, and gradually accrued political influence as the economic importance of mining exports increased. Then, when the need to address climate change caused by the burning of fossil fuels became obvious in the 1990s, the network swung into action to oppose anything which would constrain growth in fossil fuel use \u2013 namely reducing carbon emissions.<\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Coal Curse \u2013 A Review Governments are abrogating their first responsibility, which is to safeguard the people and their future well-being. The first part of historian Judith Brett\u2019s Quarterly Essay, The Coal Curse \u2013 Resources, Climate and Australia\u2019s Future, is a masterly dissection of Australian economic history since WW2. Credit \u2013 Unsplash It brings […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,3,4],"tags":[147,328,4670,379,30227,1482,6996,30228],"class_list":["post-54828","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-energy-2","category-environment","tag-coal","tag-fossil-fuels","tag-globalism","tag-government","tag-ian-dunlop","tag-mining","tag-neoliberalism","tag-pearls-and-irritation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54828","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=54828"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54828\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":54829,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54828\/revisions\/54829"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=54828"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=54828"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=54828"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}