Coal group to reap millions from budgetBen Cubby and Matthew Moore June 20, 2009 ONE of the state's biggest coal companies is set to receive the bulk of a $20 million taxpayer handout to help it export more coal, reversing a key point of the Government's cost-cutting mini-budget.
The local Labor MP from Bathurst has revealed that an unexplained one-line entry in Tuesday's budget will deliver the Government the right to allocate the fund to Centennial Coal and other inland coal exporters to subsidise their freight costs.
The transfer of taxpayer funds to coal companies follows lobbying from the NSW Minerals Council and the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union.
Freight subsidies for coal mines were axed last November, but the system was quietly reinstated this week, with a "special assistance package" of $10 million a year for two years buried in Tuesday's budget papers.
On Wednesday the Government put out a press release, describing the spending as a "mining jobs stimulus package" that would protect 2000 mining jobs in the western coalfields around Lithgow and in the Gunnedah district.
The Government said it had not yet decided which companies would get the money, but the Bathurst MP, Gerard Martin, said Centennial Coal would be a beneficiary of the public support.
"Centennial came to us and … I supported their submission along with the CFMEU," Mr Martin said.
"They pointed out how [the mini budget changes] would marginalise the mines and how it [closure] was a possibility."
Mr Martin rejected the suggestion there might public resistance to using taxpayers' money to help public companies export coal. "From our point of view it has kept those mines viable," he said.
A spokeswoman for Centennial Coal, Katie Brassil, said the company employed 800 people in the state's western coalfields. It had two main export mines at Clarence and Charbon and another coming on line at Airly.
She did not expect resentment at a big company getting millions of dollars in taxpayer support.
"It's about underpinning jobs," Ms Brassil said. "We see it as a mechanism to secure jobs in regional areas."
Centennial Coal, Australia's fourth-largest coal producer, announced in March that it had exported 21 per more coal than in same period a year ago.
World coal prices have fallen from the record highs of recent years but are still historically high, and Centennial told shareholders in April that would produce earnings of up to $72 million this year.
The NSW Greens said the public should not be subsidising coal producers.
"Hiding behind the flood of figures in the budget, the Government hoped no one would notice that yet again it has allowed the coal industry to put its hands in taxpayers' pockets," said a Greens spokeswoman, Lee Rhiannon.
"There is no economic justification for this expenditure. The same amount of money spent on renewable energy projects would produce far more jobs than is created by this subsidy."
The Government also announced yesterday that it was pledging $250,000 a year to the University of Newcastle to help establish a NSW Institute for Frontier Geoscience, which would train graduates in mining science and carbon capture and storage research.
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