" Ms Plibersek said on Friday that the job numbers that the Adani mine is expected to generate are overstated.
We can't rely on an Indian mining company to bring jobs to central and north Queensland," she told ABC radio. "
I don't have a problem with this statement.
Have the job numbers changed from day one?
If they have, the project lacks credibility IMO.
No taxpayers money should be on offer to this overseas company IMO.
Although Adani had its political patrons, behind the scenes serious questions were being raised about the project’s economic viability. In 2015, documents released under freedom of information laws revealed that, even as the Newman government was doing everything in its power to push the project through, Queensland Treasury was arguing Carmichael was unbankable and raising concerns about the project’s lack of transparency and long-term viability. Reasoning that the project was better understood as a play for the Indian energy market than an Australian coal project, Treasury officials said Adani’s financial structure and indebtedness made it “highly susceptible to cost shocks”, and that while coal projects were not being boycotted by financial institutions, it was “fair to say that there is not a lot of market support for investing in Galilee thermal coal projects at present”. In one email sent only days before Newman’s announcement the government would help fund Adani’s proposed railway, Treasury analyst Jason Wishart advised the project was “unlikely to stack up on a conventional project finance assessment”.
Officially at least, government support for Carmichael has been driven by its supposed economic benefits, and claims the project will create at least 10,000 jobs and generate $22 billion in taxes and royalties.
It’s not difficult to see why the promise of jobs resonates in Australia’s north. In Townsville, unemployment hovers above 9 per cent, compared to around 6 per cent in Queensland as a whole, while in inland areas it is even higher. Youth unemployment is particularly acute: in September 2018 in Townsville 17.7 per cent of people aged 17 to 24 were out of a job.
Yet the claims made about Carmichael’s economic benefits are highly questionable. When asked in court in 2015, Adani’s financial controller, Rajesh Gupta, not only conceded that government revenue from the project was unlikely to exceed $7.8 billion, he repeatedly declined to rule out taking advantage of tax minimisation schemes to shift potential profits offshore to tax havens and lower-tax jurisdictions such as Singapore. Other witnesses, such as energy analyst Tim Buckley, went further, arguing that Adani was “going to lose money at … the operating level [so] it actually won’t pay any tax”. Similarly when former Reserve Bank economist and Adani consultant Jerome Fahrer was pressed on the question of jobs, he admitted the figure of 10,000 was “extreme and unrealistic”. Instead, Fahrer argued that, at the peak of construction, the project would employ approximately 2400 people, but
because many of these jobs would come at the expense of those elsewhere, the number of jobs actually created would be considerably lower. Instead, Fahrer said that over the life of the project an average of 1464 full-time equivalent direct and indirect jobs would be created.
It is possible even these estimates overstate the project’s benefits. Adani’s vision has always been for an operation that is automated from “pit to port” in an effort to improve productivity and reduce workforce numbers. In 2016, economist John Rolfe said these strategies had the potential to move jobs away from the mine itself and into urban centres, a process that has already been observed in Western Australia, where Rio Tinto controls driverless trucks in several mines from an operation centre in Perth. Likewise research by The Australia Institute suggests development in the Galilee would lead to significant job losses at existing coalmines elsewhere in Australia, potentially eliminating up to 9000 jobs in the Hunter Valley, 2000 in the Bowen Basin and 1400 in the Surat Basin.
https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2019/april/1554037200/james-bradley/how-australia-s-coal-madness-led-adaniRaider