Phillip O'Neill: it's clear a new politics of coal has arrived

In his 2011 book Carbon Democracy, New York academic Timothy Mitchell attributes the intensity of coal's politics to coal's uniqueness as a fuel, especially the way it needed to be man-handled from pit faces through to where it was burned in power stations and smelters. A second factor, says Mitchell, was coal's role in economic development. From being a simple source of heat for homes and kilns, coal, through the decades, became the mainstay of power for electricity generation and metals production. Coal underpinned the first industrial revolution in the late 1700s, and then industrialisation and urbanisation, and lifted working people out of dire poverty.

Mitchell compares coal to petroleum, a fuel refined from crude oil, a liquid that rises to the ground without labour, is processed in technology-intense distilleries, travelling through pipelines without a human hand touching the stuff. A consequence, says Mitchell, is we had no such thing as militant petroleum unions, no local townships dependent on petroleum workers' wages, and no political parties where petroleum workers would press their claims.

But coal, the furnace-ready rock, needing labour for extraction and transportation, delivered industrial power to organised workers. Be it the pit face, the washery, the loader, the train, the port, the power station, the coke ovens, from any of these points, a strike could shut down a supply chain, freeze a company's operations, tank an economy.

Coal disputes carried high stakes. In 1929, the NSW government sent armed police to bust a picket line at Rothbury after a 15-month lockout by mine owners, and miner Norman Brown was shot dead. Not dissimilarly, in 1949, Labor prime minister, Ben Chifley, sent troops into collieries at Minmi and Muswellbrook to bust a seven-week strike. A nation had been brought to its knees.

Dangerous working conditions, the ferocity of industrial struggle, community loyalty, they were the same in northern England, the Ruhr region in Germany, the Appalachian valleys in Pennsylvania, the Hunter. They gave the coal miner a nobility, and the coal unions a throne. Coal was elevated in working-class politics and folk lore.

In Australia, the Labor Party was the loyal parliamentary advocate for the coal unions and their communities. In the glory years of coal in our region, Lambton miner Rowley James won the seat of Hunter by massive majorities in 12 successive elections between 1928 and 1958, typically winning around 75 per cent of the two-party preferred vote, and, remarkably, winning unopposed in the 1929, 1937 and 1943 elections. But now everything is upturned. The level of membership of coal unions in the Hunter has dropped below 40 per cent. A majority of miners are non-union, contractors for labour hire companies. The importance of coal to other sectors is diminished. Newcastle's coke ovens are shut. The power stations are closing. Not surprisingly, Labor struggles to hold its Hunter seats.

The days of the coal worker are numbered. The exact timing is unclear as world energy prices fluctuate, but the last days can rush to the present quickly, as power station workers at Liddell, Eraring and Bayswater know too well.

A new politics of coal has arrived. This time, a different characteristic of coal - it is the worst fossil-fuel contributor to greenhouse gases - has stripped industrial power from coal workers and political power from their communities. Coal miners have lost their nobility, coal unions have lost their throne, and the relevance of Labor politicians to a more diverse Hunter valley is under question.

There is an important job on offer in this new politics: to lead coal workers and communities through this time of uncertainty, to chart a course to a coal-free future, one that prepares Hunter communities for a life that will be vastly changed.

Yet leading into this election, the major parties seem uninterested in applying. After the election, then, we'll be back to these same questions, like a dog to its vomit, as Labor's Paul Keating would have it. The new politics of coal will be here, waiting.

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