Thanks Paul for a window into that vast region with so few people and so much coal.

I lived in the Pilbara for 5 years. The iron ore and gas of that region has lasted for 50 and 30 years respectively and and no doubt has decades to run yet. Instability of population and housing has been an issue all that time; we bought a house for $50,000 in a 'lull time', sold it for 70,000 and now it could be worth 700,000. Crazy stuff. The huge wages mean nothing if no quality of life results, both for workers and locals.

But thermal coal? This is an entirely different commodity - increasingly 'dirty and dangerous' as a major cause of man made global heating. Does it have a safe secure future as an export commodity like iron ore and gas? I doubt it and I certainly hope not. In that case there is a fair likelihood that the whatever is built in the Galilee will be 'ghost infrastructure' in 20 or 30 years, just like scores of other mining settlements around Australia but perhaps on a much larger scale.

Why are we even opening up new coal mines? Surely the whole point of the carbon tax and the climate treaties is to phase out coal as quickly as possible. If a lot of that Galilee coal is going to China and India then perhaps those countries need a gentle reminder of what it's all about. For starters they could voluntarily pay equivalent carbon tax (about $60 on a tonne of thermal coal) to show they are equally committed to emissions reductions.

I find it sickening the way Australia big notes itself at the climate conferences. Our emissions reduction target is a piddling 5% for the period 2000-2020. Some of our biggest polluters get 94.5% carbon tax exemption. Brown coal generators got a $1bn downpayment to stop business but instead they'll keep going another 20 years. Now a huge new coal province is to be opened up. Can somebody explain that?

All too true, Taswegian.

But the biggest problem is something that most people just don’t see at all; it is the use of this wealth to actually take us further away from a sustainable future and deeper into economic catastrophe a little bit further down the track.

Our mindset is still totally in the wrong place. We are still geared towards facilitating massive development of the north if at all possible and promoting and supporting very rapid population growth, despite all the obvious signs of trouble with our ability to provide all the necessary resources to support it.

This is insane, at a time when we should have come to realise just how vitally important it is for us to stop expanding and concentrate on matching the demand for everything with a healthy ongoing supply capability. That is; developing a sustainable society.

The enormous wealth that we still have in the ground should be used to this end. It could be used to actually improve services and infrastructure and hence quality of life for the whole existing community very effectively. But instead, it is being largely used to duplicate services and infrastructure for ever-more people….and provide big profits for those who are already rich and powerful and who get their way when it comes to pushing for government decisions which facilitate this ongoing massive population growth rate!

Worry about climate change and the duplicity inherent in our government’s policies. Worry about the effects that new mines have on local people and communities. Then multiply these worries by a couple of orders of magnitude and you’ll be in the right arena when it comes to how this wealth is being used…. or I would argue; gravely misused.

A rather well thought our piece of writing.

I suggest that state govs only really care about the $ mining brings in. Considerably more thought could be given to how rural and regional communities cope with mining. There seems to be very little consultation.

These areas have bare bones populations.