I was on a plane to India when someone from the coal industry excitedly interrupted my reading with the news that Annastacia Palaszczuk had resigned.
The irony of Palaszczuk’s time as Premier is that her Government was funded by an industry she worked hard to shut down, or at least stop.
In her first election, Palaszczuk made a big deal of saving the Caley Valley wetlands – near
Abbot Point – from the evils of the Adani project. The wetlands were formed in the 1960s when some local duck shooters wanted to attract more prey to the area by building some bund walls.
Duck shooting has long since ended there. This man-made pond was briefly elevated to the greatest environmental battle since the Save the Whales movement.
Since Palaszczuk’s deal with the Greens had done its work and won her the election, I cannot remember her mentioning it again.
North Queensland was left, though, with a much smaller port and no tourists came to visit the Caley Valley wetlands – except the Stop Adani protestors that were more interested in the coal port than the ducks.
In her second election, Palaszczuk more closely aligned herself with these protestors and announced that she would veto a planned Federal Government loan to Adani to build a new 100 million tonne per annum rail line to the Galilee basin.
This time her victory almost killed the opening of the first new coal basin in Australia for 50 years.
In the aftermath, as the then Federal Resources Minister, I convinced the Chairman of Adani to stick it out and have another go.
The project was scaled back.
We had to fight another election on the project and, with a little help from Bob Brown, we unexpectedly won the 2019 Federal election.
Palaszczuk and Jackie Trad were forced into a humiliating backdown on the project.
The Adani mine now employs 2000 Queenslanders and is going from strength to strength even though it is a smaller project than we once hoped.
Just before I left for India, the surprising news broke that the US Biden Administration had approved a US$553 million loan to Adani to build a port in Sri Lanka.
We tied ourselves in knots about providing a loan to build a rail and port in our own country!
Despite the Adani coal mine eventually going ahead, we are still paying for the small mindedness of our leaders.
The direct impact from the smaller rail line and port is huge on its own.
The Adani mine is just 10 million tonnes per annum whereas the rail line would have been built to carry 10 times that amount if we had provided Adani finance.
Coal markets are booming, and even using a conservative price of $100 per tonne, that lost 90 million tonnes of coal capacity costs our economy $9 billion a year.
At a 10 per cent royalty, we lose tax revenues to Queensland of $900 million.
The Adani project alone could pay for the Brisbane Olympics over the next nine years before it is staged.
The indirect cost is even larger.
Adani was the biggest investment in Australia by an Indian company. It was hoped that it would be the start of many large investments by Indian companies in Australia.
We have built Queensland on the back of partnering with Japanese, Korean and Chinese investors.
We have the natural resources they need, they provide the capital, and Queensland gets thousands of jobs and billions of tax revenues in return.
There has not been a second Adani.
A big part of that is because the message that Indian companies received from the Adani experience is that we are not an easy place to do business with.
Palaszczuk was a successful politician on the metric of winning elections.
Other politicians respect her for that. She is the politician’s politician.
She is leaving because she is no longer the people’s politician.
Popularity is fleeting.
By chasing popularity instead of respect, the tragedy of the Palaszczuk reign is that she leaves with neither.
