Jobs for some but not others
A few weeks ago, ALP Senator Penny Wong annoyed me hugely with her response to the National Climate Emergency Rallies:
“What many of these people are calling for simply can’t be done. It can’t be done while supporting jobs.” (via)
What a crock. Apart from the fact that the Garnaut Review and the Stern Review prove her to be flat-out wrong, it also shows a ridiculously narrow view of what a job actually is.
Because, according to Greens Senator Bob Brown in a Lateline interview last week, there are 63,000 people relying on the Great Barrier Reef for their jobs. And 128,000 jobs in the Murray-Darling Basin. These natural features are what we rely on for tourism, and farming, and fishing. If the rain stops falling over the Basin, or the ocean heats up the Reef and kills the coral, what are all those people going to do for a living?
That’s 191,000 jobs that we could lose if we don’t stop climate change. So what is Senator Wong on about?
Oh right – there’s 28,000 jobs in the coal industry. I know people in the mining industry, and they work hard for their money, to support their families. But they’ll feel the effects of climate change too, when all the farmland dries up and food becomes more expensive, or we have to import more and more of it. And when they can’t take their kids on holiday to see the natural wonders of our country, because we’ve let them die.
If we stop burning coal, our people can be retrained into other jobs. There’ll be other mines. And not all of the coal jobs are mining, anyway, there’s also operations and distribution and maintenance work. But those same jobs will be needed for solar panels, wind turbines, bio-gas and biochar facilities as those industries grow. Maybe even for geothermal or wave power plants too.
But apparently 1 coal worker is worth 2 tourism workers, or 4 farmers. Or maybe those 191,000 people are mistaken, and what they do all day doesn’t count as a real job in Senator Wong’s employment numbers. Anyway, those coal workers must stay coal workers, even at the expense of the rest of the country or their own futures. It’s a strange kind of math, to value people this way.
2 Comments
Want to know when this site has a new post? Just choose one of the links below to receive an email notification or add Go Greener to your feed reader.
Subscribe by Email
Subscribe in a reader
I agree with you Julie. How can one type of job be worth more than another? The coal industry must be spending a lot of money lobbying the politicians. I wonder how many free lunches they will be able to shout them when the food bowl of the Murray/Darling dries up!
Gav
Nicely put. Wong’s logic smacks of narrow thinking and catering to lobbyists. Oh our farmers are doing it hard and need a lot of help around election time, but not the rest of the time, and not in any long-term way…
It’s the same thing that protects timber logging workers over forestry tourism workers. What are the loggers going to do when the timber company finishes clear-felling all the timber in their local area and leaves for the next forest? What are their children going to do? Nothing in local tourism, for sure.