King Coal is back! This week the New South Wales Independent Planning Commission gave permission for two coalminers in the Hunter Valley to continue their operations until 2045. Hallelujah! Glencore and Yancoal have now been given the go-ahead to extend the life of their so-called Hunter Valley Operation.

Naturally, the stupidist comment of the week in response to the news came from the Climate Council, whose head honcho Greg Mullins, proclaimed, ‘What NSW exports as coal, we import back as bushfires, floods, heatwaves and droughts.’

Er, no. What we ‘import back’ is money and jobs. Fifteen hundred jobs at the very least are saved. And the profits, which should be roughly in the area of $25 billion, will go to re-invigorate both the region as well as, via royalties, the NSW government’s coffers to the tune, again, of potentially billions of dollars. In other words, what we will really be ‘importing back’, Mr Mullins, are much-needed schools, hospitals, roads, homes and livelihoods.

If there are severe bushfires in Australia this summer or next, they will be the result of either arson, accident or the lengthy periods of neglectful forest management rather than a new mine in the Hunter Valley. Similarly, severe flooding in the eastern states will be the result of the chronic failure over decades to build sufficient dams and other infrastructure, along with foolishly developing Australia’s flood plains, rather than the coal being dug near Singleton. The constant, juvenile and hysterical fear-mongering by left-wing lunatics about the exploitation of Australia’s natural resources has done immense damage to this country. We are poorer than we should be, we are far less innovative and entrepreneurial than we once were, and, unforgivably, for the first time in this nation’s history, we are leaving the next generation less well off than the last.

The Glencore and Yancoal operations still require the approval of the federal government, but it is difficult to see how the Albanese Labor government would have the guts to seek yet another confrontation with the Minns Labor government.

Already, Premier Chris Minns has shown himself to be far more acutely aware of the threat One Nation and a reinvigorated conservative movement in Australia poses. Mr Minns has publicly said, on the issue of immigration, that New South Wales must not become ‘like France’. That is as good a coded message for ‘slow down the importation of Muslims’ as one could ask a Labor premier for.

This comes on top of Premier Minns not only apologising for his error in allowing the original and disgusting antisemitic pro-Hamas protest to take place at the Sydney Opera House on 9 October, 2023, but also his comments and reactions around the royal commission into antisemitism, where he described as ‘disappointing’ the commissioner disgracefully and shamefully permitting the questioning of a Jewish representative, David Ossip, by lawyers acting for pro-Palestinian activists.

Mr Minns has also put himself at odds with federal Treasurer Jim Chalmers over the Reserve Bank’s somewhat muted call to cut government spending. It is unlikely, with One Nation now breathing down Prime Minister Albanese’s neck, that federal Labor would be so silly as to now block the Hunter mining project. But that cannot be taken for granted. Don’t forget, it was Labor leadership hopeful Tanya Plibersek who blocked a gold mine – yes, a gold mine – from being developed because of a mythical indigenous ‘blue-banded bee’ she reportedly saw painted on a mural.

Nonetheless, there will no doubt be much climate sound and fury from the newly elected Greens leader David Shoebridge, who has visions of replacing the Labor party as the pre-eminent party of the left. Heaven help us all. But clearly the Greens, as dangerous and preposterous as they are, allowed their own survival instinct to kick in within the confines of the partyroom and rejected the leadership aspirations of the obnoxious Mehreen Faruqi. The other contender for the leadership, the dim-witted Sarah Hanson-Young, was also passed over by her colleagues, many of whom no doubt still recall her inability to distinguish a factual TV documentary on border control from an episode of a fictitous drama series called Sea Patrol.