The Queensland government is planning to use a windfall from rising coal royalties to boost jobs growth in regions thought to be fertile ground for One Nation.
The Palaszczuk government is expected to announce an economic stimulus package targeting areas that have not benefited from the state’s employment recovery, using a $1bn state budget boost driven by coal exports.
The treasurer, Curtis Pitt, will unveil the jobs and business package as part of a midyear fiscal and economic review to be released on Tuesday.
The premier, Annastacia Palaszczuk, told the Courier-Mail that “while the Queensland unemployment rate is down, it is stubbornly high in a number of regions with the prolonged drought and mining downturn”.
Queensland’s unemployment rate recently fell to a three-year low of 5.8% but areas outside the south-east corner, including Townsville, remain among Australia’s worst jobless hotspots.
The forecast recovery of Queensland coal royalties belied a report released by the International Energy Agency on Monday, which said world coal consumption was likely to have declined in 2016 and that seaborne exports would shrink again in 2017.
The opposition employment spokesman, Jarrod Bleijie, criticised the “latest reincarnation of a so-called jobs plan that proves the past two have been abject failures”.
Bleijie said the government’s $100m Back To Work package had promised to create 8,000 jobs but so far had delivered fewer than 1,000, “a complete and utter failure by anyone’s standard”.
He said latest figures showed youth unemployment in many regions had “skyrocketed”, including in outback Queensland (33.7%), Cairns (27.4%) and Wide Bay (23.8%).
One Nation commands a primary vote of 16% statewide, according to a recent Galaxy poll, a rise political observers speculate is driven by economic insecurity and disillusion with mainstream parties that both face losing chunks of their blue collar and semi-rural bases.
Figures in the Labor government hold mixed views of the challenge posed by One Nation, with some wary that Pauline Hanson’s return to prominence through the federal Senate will allow her party to capitalise on voter discontent in struggling regional economies.
But others, including cabinet ministers, predict that a year or more of exposure of One Nation’s haphazard performance and internal division at the federal level means the threat will be blunted by the time of the Queensland election next year.
The Queensland government has earmarked the controversial Adani project as a major hope for jobs growth in Townsville, where the energy conglomerate will relocate its Australian headquarters to drive its proposal for the country’s biggest coalmine.
Queensland Greens senator Larissa Waters argued tax figures showing Adani in Australia paid only $39,000 on earnings of $487m in 2014-15 (0.008%) demonstrated the folly of taxpayers potentially subsidising the company’s rail project.
The IEA report forecast the seaborne coal export market was likely to decline in 2016 and 2017, before recovering 1% a year until 2021. It found coal-fired power plant financing accounted for only 4% of global energy sector investments in 2015.
It also warned that momentum in “carbon capture and storage” technology – which the industry hopes will significantly cut emissions – was “likely to stall by 2020”.
Tim Buckley of the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis said the key takeout from the report was that “the IEA has consistently downgraded its forecasts for coal each year since 2011”.
