Last week the NSW government, via its natural resources minister Courtney Houssos blessed the Hunter with another committee to guide it through the exit from coal.
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This one will be the Future Jobs and Investment Authority for the Hunter, one of four in NSW.
The others will focus on the other coal regions, the Illawarra, Lithgow and Gunnedah.
They will advise the NSW government on pathways for exiting coal, both as a fuel for power stations and as a commodity for export.
The new authority is described in a government issues paper. You can read and comment on the issues paper online. Comments close on 12 July.
Don't expect to be impressed.
The issues paper reads like a government plan for a committee, nothing more.
Funding for the committee will come from the existing Royalties for Rejuvenation fund - where $25 million in coal royalties are parked each year - but not before 2028 or when the fund reaches $250 million.
It's a miserly amount considering coal royalties tipped $4.8 billion into state coffers in the single financial year 2022-23.
Also unimpressive is the lack of imagination in the issues paper. A review of coal transitions elsewhere in the world is narrow and reference-free.
A highlighted example of successful post-mining land use in the Hunter is the proposed Black Rock Motor Park on the site of the old Rhondda coal mine at Teralba.
Surely the writers of the issues paper are having a lend.
But one part of the paper, figure 12 on page 14, is worth looking at.
The graph shows that, currently, the coal sector generates 52,000 jobs in the Hunter - around 15,000 in power stations and coal mines and a further 37,000 indirectly through supply chain and income multipliers.
It is arresting to see this number will be halved in the next decade, with direct coal employment predicted to fall to 8500.
Then, by 2038 only 5000 coal jobs will remain, according to the prediction.
In the following decade the curtains close, the coal show is done.
Every part of the Hunter will be affected, as a jobs loss more than ten times the number when the Newcastle steelworks closed washes through the regional economy.
It is a mind-boggling schedule. After 250 years of commercial exploitation, coal extraction in the Hunter will be no more.
Call me a naysayer, but I reckon an exit of such magnitude necessitates more than a 27-page issues paper featuring a motor sport park and a nod to the chance of clawing back a minuscule portion of coal royalties starting sometime around 2028.
The authors of the issues paper show no understanding of the monumental and violent impacts of coal extraction on people, communities and the environment.
The Hunter has had the lot, dangerous working conditions, obscene shift schedules and long-distance commutes that ruin health and family life, perverse wage levels that diminish the value of schooling and post-school training, industrial cultures that shut out women, giant chasms that tear agricultural lands asunder, regional rail systems and an industrial harbour and its port-side lands hijacked by old king coal, the lungs of children filled regularly with a dose of particulate matter beyond World Health Organisation guidelines, and a once-prosperous agricultural processing sector at death's door.
Meanwhile, the shift to renewables is underway across the Hunter, but only the jobs-free bits: giant batteries in old power station car parks, giant transmission lines across field and forest, and a giant gas-fired furnace on an old smelter site.
A jobs bonanza from the shift to renewables remains unproven, a plan to manufacture solar panels at Lake Liddell has many doubters, and the establishment of commercially viable hydrogen hubs has a long way to go.
So, we have another authority, a state government one, to add to the federal government's Net Zero Authority and its increasingly ethereal High Speed Rail Authority, a body denied federal funding beyond 2025-26 in the latest budget, it needs saying.
A long fight for the future of the Hunter looms.
