There’s a clue to the double-edged nature of resources politics buried in the share-price red and green of the Australian stock exchange.
Since Tanya Plibersek, the environment minister, used Indigenous cultural heritage powers in mid-August to reject the location of a tailings dam at the site of the McPhillamys goldmine project near Blayney in the New South Wales central west, there’s been a deluge of protest from proponents Regis Resources, the wider mining industry and the federal Coalition.
Regis has told the ASX it’s been forced to revisit the $190m value of the project and reconsider spending, along with contemplating possible legal action. Without the dam in that position, it argues the project isn’t viable.
Confusingly, though, its share price doesn’t reflect the gloom of that announcement. Since Plibersek’s decision on 16 August, it has increased about 16%.
Critics of the decision in mining and politics circles assess there’s high value and certainly no harm in singling it out for loud and sustained protest. Officially, the industry is leading that charge with Peter Dutton’s Coalition backing it in. In reality, it’s at least a little bit the other way around.
The McPhillamys decision is a useful vehicle for Dutton to target a group of voters he dearly wants to win over.
‘This is not the Labor party of the worker’
The Coalition has carefully analysed the different reasons people had for voting no in last year’s defeated referendum on enshrining an Indigenous voice to parliament in the constitution, and especially those self-identified Labor voters who call themselves working people. Dutton wants to turn that opposition to the voice into disillusionment with the government, and ultimately, votes for the Coalition at the federal election. He reckons the McPhillamys decision helps him do it.
“This is not the Australian Labor party of the worker,” Dutton told the Minerals Council’s annual conference this week. “Its members are committed to waging environmental and social crusades, especially against certain industries.”
But the argument goes further than that. It fell to the shadow resources minister, Susan McDonald, to spell it out, in a conference address preceding Dutton’s own.
Tanya Plibersek’s decision, taken under section 10 of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Protection Act, relied on advice from the Wiradjuri Traditional Owners Central West Aboriginal Corporation. Another group, the Orange Local Aboriginal Land Council, had originally opposed the McPhillamys development but more recently shifted its position to neutral.
McDonald said the corporation isn’t the real voice of local traditional owners and the land council is the recognised authority.
But her argument not only questioned the validity of the advice and evidence Plibersek accepted – details of which she hasn’t made public – but who is and who isn’t legitimately Indigenous. Further, it implied that being Indigenous can be detrimental to Australia.
“It was once that a person’s indigeneity impacted on an individual’s sense of community and to benefit welfare, education and health, for example,” McDonald told the conference. “It was about how someone defined and identified themselves, and the impacts of that decision were largely confined to themselves.
“But now the impacts of that decision are no longer necessarily confined to themselves. The impacts can be imposed on others. How someone identifies – who they identify with – can now jeopardise an entire gas or mining operation, deprive other Australians of jobs and income, and deprive other Indigenous Australians of their collective say on the future of their communities.”
In Plibersek’s rare use of section 10, Dutton and the Coalition see a chance to reignite some of the sentiment that emerged during the voice referendum debate and turn it into a different kind of electoral success.
At the conference, Dutton tied the Regis decision to Labor’s broader environmental and cultural heritage agenda. He vowed to overturn it if he wins office, saying “that is just the start”.
“The government that I lead will not allow activists to dictate economic policy and to pull a handbrake on our prosperity,” Dutton said.
He argued Labor is driven by placating disappointed party members, stopping the loss of votes – especially in Western Australia, where a swag of seat gains delivered Albanese victory in 2022 – and appeasing the union movement.
Plibersek can’t rule out climate trigger
“So let’s be under no misapprehension: the government is putting partisan interests and political survival ahead of our national interests.”
It wasn’t really a message for the mining industry. It was for those target no voters, and everyone else who’s frustrated at the financial pressure they’re currently enduring.
For the miners, the main game is industrial relations – and Dutton had a different message for them: the only way you’ll dismantle the Labor IR laws you hate so much is to back the Coalition. The Minerals Council has already lent its support to Dutton’s nuclear reactors policy, even though it is absent any substantive and quantifiable detail on cost, implementation, or short-term or long-term impact on energy use and the climate.
Now it’s leaning into the criticism of Plibersek’s proposed environment protection authority. Currently missing enough parliamentary friends to get it passed in the Senate, the legislation to create an EPA is the subject of negotiations between the government and both of the groups that could deliver the requisite blocs of votes: the Coalition and the Greens.
When he took his Cabinet to WA last week, Anthony Albanese told the local paper, The West Australian, he was prepared to shave some proposed powers from the EPA and not give it authority to decide applications, leaving it only to enforce compliance with environmental rules. Although some on Labor’s left also don’t like the idea of unelected officials making such decisions, it was a concession aimed at the Coalition.
It didn’t shift the dial.
At this week’s conference, Tania Constable, the Minerals Council chief executive, asked Plibersek to rule out inserting a climate trigger for rejecting development projects or requiring they be assessed for their climate impact – options the Greens have demanded.
“I‘ve got to be clear, we are in intense negotiations right across the parliament,” Plibersek responded. “I’m not going to pretend to you that there’s no discussion of climate considerations as part of this negotiation. I can’t pretend that.”
That remark was interpreted as an attempt to put pressure on the miners to put pressure on the Coalition to reach a compromise with the government and pass the bill. If that’s what it was, it also didn’t work.
Dutton’s advisers and those of his shadow environment minister, Jonno Duniam, have been talking to the government again this week. The Greens met with Plibersek’s office on Friday.
Albanese has made it known what kind of compromise he’ll countenance – and it isn’t with the Greens, something that would merely give Dutton more political ammunition. That’s not news to the opposition leader, who’s well aware of how much the prime minister needs to hold seats in the mining stronghold state out west – also home, incidentally, to Regis Resources.
The government says it’s not in a hurry to get a deal, which is just as well because there’s no obvious incentive for Dutton to deliver one.
On the contrary, his rhetoric suggests that stalemate suits him just fine.
Karen Middleton is Guardian Australia’s political editor
