CIVIC and business leaders claim a “vocal minority” of landholders furiously opposed to the Shenhua Watermark coal mine is drowning out the community’s “overwhelming” support for the project.
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Farmers on the Liverpool Plains have vowed this week to “go to war” over the Chinese state-controlled company’s bid to extract 268 million tonnes of coal from deposits at Breeza.
An online petition calling for both the state and federal governments to stop the $1 billion mine entering production had fewer than 5000 signatures a fortnight ago, but now boasts more than 31,000.
However, Gunnedah and District Chamber of Commerce and Industry president Ann Luke said the furore over the project was at odds with the prevailing sentiment in the community.
She said two chamber-run surveys of Gunnedah business owners in the last 18 months revealed about 75 per cent were in favour of the mine due to its predicted economic benefits.
Ms Luke also said that the majority of the district’s farmers wanted the mine to go ahead, however, they were unwilling to speak publicly lest they alienate their counterparts on the Liverpool Plains.
“They talk to me every day ... because you have to earn off-farm income these days if you’ve got a normal sized farm, or you grow big and monstrous,” she said.
“But if you can’t trust your state and federal government and the scientists, who can you trust? I’m certainly not going to trust instead the people with whom the mining is being done in their backyard.
“Not on their land, mind you. On the poor country that nobody farms and that has been sold (to Shenhua) by farmers.”
According to Shenhua, the mine will create 600 jobs in both the construction and production phases and pump millions of dollars into the local economy through wages and the use of local services every year.
Gunnedah’s deputy mayor Gae Swain said she hated the negativity surround the mining industry and feared the town, without its coal mining industry, would return to the dark days of the late 1990s.
“I’ve been through the bad times where young people were leaving and taking their families because they had no opportunities for jobs in Gunnedah,” she said.
“This is a further opportunity for us as a community to pull together and look at the economic benefits that can come out of this.
“I understand there’s some concern, but there’s certainly been a hugely rigorous process that this whole application has gone through.”