China down, India up. One of the striking features of today’s...

China down, India up. One of the striking features of today’s announcement is that WHC is actually selling relatively little coal to China: already, and increasingly, the growth in demand will come from India. Page 10 of the results presentation paints the picture. India’s share of global demand for met coal is currently around 7 per’s part cent but is projected to triple to 23 per cent by 2050; China’s share of total demand is projected to decline over the same period. On a medium-term view and for a host of reasons, including tactical and geopolitical, this is unquestionably a huge plus for WHC and other met coal producers.

I noticed another point in the presentation (trivial by comparison, but significant nonetheless). I see that WHC presents data for Taiwan separately from data for China, clearly implying that they are two separate countries. That is courageous on WHC’s part, given that any such depiction is strongly contested by the Chinese authorities. (An aggressive lady from the Chinese embassy took issue with a section of my son’s PhD thesis, for example, because it referred to ‘Taiwan’ and not to ‘Chinese Taipei’). The battle over Taiwan is still to be fought, of course — yet another reason why it’s a good thing to be diversifying our export sales to other countries in the region, and especially the fast-rising India.

A final and separate point. The presentation makes clear that labour-related inflationary costs remain a significant issue for WHC, and cites in particular the impacts of the federal government’s Same Job, Same Pay Act. This pernicious piece of legislation, pushed through by the Albanese Government in a ‘scratch my back’ deal with the unions, will be bad for WHC, bad for miners more generally, bad for business as a whole (and small business especially) and, in an economy where inflation is still a major threat, bad for the community as a whole. Repeal of this legislation (and the re-establishment of an ABCC) should be added to the Opposition’s priority list for next year’s federal election.