With Australia in desperate need of economic golden eggs as we struggle with a massive debt burden and face a possible world recession, they’re trying harder than ever to kill the goose that is laying them. The huge $50 billion slash in the 2021-22 budget deficit, cutting it by two-thirds from $80 billion to $32 billion, largely resulted from record company tax collections of $126 billion. These were driven up by our highest-ever resources and energy exports of $421 billion, led by the condemned-to-death fossil fuels of coal, oil and LNG which together made up almost half the total. And in the current 2022-23 financial year, the golden eggs will be even richer as resources and energy exports are officially forecast to reach even higher to $450 billion as coal export revenues surge to $120 billion to exceed iron ore.

But governmental net-zero targets, investment bans by woke climate-catastrophe-obsessed boards of directors and super funds, a court system happy to be the plaything of climate-activist lawfare that has made Australia the world’s most litigious developed nation for mining projects, have all combined to bring the campaign against fossil fuels – and thereby against Australia’s historic dependence on reliable cheap energy and status as an exporter – to a serious tipping point.

Unless there is a truce in this war against fossil fuels, the current financial year will be the last time they will be capable of coming so significantly to our economic rescue. Already, next year’s official forecasts of an expected decline in the Ukraine war’s high commodity prices, of a Western world economic slowdown and for its rush to renewables (as self-destructive emissions targets are imposed), are together likely to result in a cut in our fossil fuel export revenue by almost a quarter in 2023-24. This, along with Australia’s deliberate official obstructionism to fossil fuel investment, particularly in coal, will all combine to kill off this economic lifeline whose current significance has been deliberately downplayed by those seeking environmental purity.

So while this year’s forecast iron ore exports at $119 billion takes the headlines, the fossil fuels of metallurgical coal at $58 billion, thermal coal at $62 billion, natural gas at $90 billion and oil at $15 billion are together officially forecast to be almost twice as big as iron ore’s export earnings this financial year and to make up, at $225 billion, half of Australia’s total minerals and resources export revenue. While, on their own, coal exports are earning more than iron ore, so effective has the campaign been against coal that not even the organisation that is supposed to represent it, the Minerals Council of Australia, was prepared to acknowledge coal’s primary role when it issued a press release last week welcoming the latest official resources and energy forecasts by the Department of Industry, Science and Resources, ‘as a strong reminder of the of the economic benefits delivered by the mining industry’.

In noting the forecast that Australia’s resource and energy export earnings will reach a record $450 billion in the current financial year , the MCA correctly asserted that, ‘Australia is only in a position to take advantage of these [high international] prices due to increased production across a range of commodities. In the last decade, over $250 billion of investment in new mines, processing equipment and infrastructure has resulted in Australia’s bauxite mining increasing 41 per cent, iron ore production increasing 84 per cent and lithium output rising nearly 400 per cent’.

Not a word about the biggest single revenue earner, coal, which became the mineral that MCA pretends does not exist ever since an emissions-obsessed BHP threatened to quit the MCA if it continued to lobby for coal; note the absence of coal in MCA press releases in recent years.

But when MCA campaigns against pressure for rises in mining taxes and royalties, as it has this month, by boasting of mining’s record $43 billion contribution made to the Australian economy in 2020-21 (with 2021-22 sure to be even considerably larger), coal’s existence is re-discovered and its multi-billion-dollar share is included – without acknowledgement. And by asserting that the effective tax rate on Australian mining investment is already high relative to many jurisdictions in other mining countries, it reminds governments that while Australia needs to attract more investment in mining (but you must not mention coal!) in order to benefit from growing international demand, there is strong competition for investment from other mining countries.

However, at least coal has proselytisers on a state basis. As Stephen Galilee, CEO of the NSW Minerals Council pointedly told me, ‘Some people want to ignore the fact that our coal sector even exists This is despite coal continuing to be NSW’s most valuable export commodity, worth around $22.6 billion in exports, and delivering a record $4 billion in royalties to the NSW government this year alone’.

But what of the future, given the high demand for NSW coal that Galilee claims is some of the highest quality available anywhere in the world, producing more energy with less emissions than coal from elsewhere? ‘There are currently 17 potential coal-mining proposals in the planning and development pipeline in NSW representing a further $4.6 billion investment.’ But nearly all are proposals to expand or extend operational lives of NSW’s forty existing coal mines; greenfield projects face too many hurdles.

The same goes for Queensland, where my old parliamentary colleague Ian Macfarlane who runs the Queensland Resources Council, said the latest official forecasts ‘reinforce the significance of the resources industry to the budget bottom line. Coal exports underpin both the Australian and Queensland governments’ budgets’. But Macfarlane warned that governments, particularly Queensland’s, ‘can’t take future investment and future returns from coal exports for granted’ and that the Queensland government’s decision to hike up coal royalty taxes to the highest rates in the world has resulted in ‘large mining investors already rethinking their investments in Queensland’.

Is it time someone brought another lump of coal into parliament to remind MPs of its economic significance?