Resource Industry Network has lobbied the community cabinet meeting in Mackay for measures to help the local business sector as the coal industry downturn hits home.
The Mackay-based group is pushing for the State Government to rethink Queensland’s coal royalty regime, but also has an eye to helping the METS sector tap other opportunities to survive.
RIN general manager Dean Kirkwood came before community cabinet armed with about 2050 signatures on a petition the group kicked off last month as part of its Regions Before Royalties campaign.
More than 600 people had also included comments on that petition, with many heartfelt examples from business owners and community members on the impacts they were seeing, Mr Kirkwood said.
“It was excellent to be able to take that into community cabinet and to present that to them,” he said.
“It wasn’t just Dean on his hobby-horse again talking about it. It was actually the real voices of the people who live here and work here and are being affected by it.”
He said that RIN took a position that if the royalty issues could not be addressed straight away, the State Government should at least provide a timeframe on when action would be taken.
“In the meantime, between today and fixing the royalties, there’s a number of other suggestions and programs that we put forward that would help businesses get through these tough times,” Mr Kirkwood said.
This included government working with businesses to give them the ability to tap sectors other than the coal industry – such as defence, energy or critical minerals, he said.
“We have the biggest METS concentration of businesses in the southern hemisphere here,” Mr Kirkwood said.
“They’re amazingly skilled. They’re amazing in terms of the way that they embrace innovation, but they really just need a hand to be able to a/ have access to these industries and b/ slightly re-skill their workforce to ensure that they can work in these other industries as well.
“So a lot of these businesses learn by seeing, so it might be a case of taking a delegation to an area that’s embraced one of these other industries so that the businesses can see how they will fit into the whole ecosystem of that sector and then they’ll come back and shape their businesses to be able to take advantage of those opportunities.”
The pain being felt across regional industry is evident in the comments added to the Regions Before Royalties petition.
“Queensland Government needs to stop looking at overall mining companies’ profits and start looking at local contractors who are going broke. The gap between perception and reality out here is huge,” wrote one respondent.
Another said; “with over 30 years’ experience in the mining industry, I’ve never seen morale this low. People are losing faith in leadership and in the government’s commitment to regional Queensland.”
RIN is set to step up the Regions Before Royalties drive next week with a digital communications campaign.
“We are looking to head down to Parliament in December to actually catch up with more members then as well, just to continue to get the story across, continue to ensure that our needs are heard and that the pain that people are going through, the stories of that, is being heard down in Brisbane as well,” Mr Kirkwood said.