Cadence’s report shows TAI’s report to be highly misleading

The Australia Institute (TAI) have again been caught using dodgy economic modelling to attack the NSW mining industry. In August 2016, TAI released a report ‘Never Gonna Dig You Up’ which claimed the NSW economy ‘would not be affected at all in the short term’ and barely affected in the medium to long term if coal mining was phased out.

However a review of TAI’s report by highly credentialed Cadence Economics found that the ‘research’ was based on unfounded assumptions and dismissed critical economic impacts.

They assume the job losses caused by ending coal mining would be picked up by ‘other sectors’, including having workers move from the coal-producing regions of NSW and Queensland to Victoria and Western Australia. In other words, they assume that real jobs will be replaced by phantom jobs.

TAI’s report also significantly underestimates that the net number of jobs that would be lost from ending the coal industry.

They claim net national job losses would only be around 1,400. However using the same employment modelling parameters as the Commonwealth Treasury, Cadence Economics estimates jobs lost would be between 20,000-40,000 across the nation.

This latest piece of discredited ‘research’ by TAI continues an embarrassing pattern of economic blunders from this anti-mining outfit.

Download the full Cadence report here.