No NEW coal

Many people would have seen the "strange" media reporting that The Greens want to shut down the coal industry.

This is of course the way the old parties (and the coal industry) like to portray a "transition over 20 years" as meaning "shut down today".

See my media release of last Friday for background.

How can they be trusted to do proper planning if they don't start to plan for the next 20 years now?

Wasn't it the Minister for the Hunter, Michael Costa, who said "who needs planning"?

The Greens position is that no new coal mines should be approved. We will not shut the existing mines down.

In Parliament The Greens will push for a NSW manufacturing industry based on solar panels and wind turbines located in the Hunter. Each unit of energy generated by the renewable energy industry creates four times as many jobs as the same unit of energy created by a coal fired power station.

We have seen successive NSW and Federal Governments fail to prevent massive job shedding by the coal industry in the Hunter, fail to support new manufacturing industries based on the new sustainable technologies, and fail to plan for the future.

Naturally people will be anxious about job security after coal if there is no plan for alternate industries – however we cannot maintain our current practices and assume that the climate or job security will remain unaffected.

The Greens plan will create more secure employment and a cleaner world. Bob Brown’s call for a plan within three years for an alternative to the reliance on coal has been misreported as a plan to stop all coal mining within three years.

The Greens and Bob Brown have consistently been unafraid to tackle the big environmental and ethical issues of our time.

We must plan now for a safe and secure future for everyone in our community.