The Director of the Australian Coal Association Ralph Hillman said that the carbon tax would affect the coal mining industry much worse than what the Gillard government had projected.
He said that in the older coal mining areas where costs are rising and mine lives are getting shorter, you were going to see mine closures. He added that the growth that takes place will be further west where there are bigger, lower cost mines.
The carbon tax has had little support in Queensland as the Queensland Resources Council fears that it would affect 3,000 coal mining jobs and about another 13,000 indirectly related jobs in the service industry in the state. QRC spokesman Michael Roche said that the coal industry should have qualified for carbon permit compensation to the tune of 66 per cent of their liabilities. Instead the industry has been given assistance equivalent to 7 per cent. It was a miserable package, according to Hillman.
Chamber of Commerce and Industry Queensland (CCIQ) said that the carbon tax was going to create a bad for small and medium business owners. CCIQ spokesman David Goodwin said that the only thing that they will have is extra red tape and expenses and no compensation. That is a fact that the Minerals Council of Australia agrees with.
Mitch Hooke the Chief Executive Officer for the MCA said that the more central mining is to the growth of a region, obviously the more profound the impact of the tax would be. He added that the companies that are going to be most affected are going to be those who cannot respond to this carbon tax, and that's pretty well all of them.
The Indian firms are also troubled by the carbon tax as the producers of steel feel that coal from Australia will become more expensive to procure once the carbon tax comes into effect. Some feel that the impact on Indian coal importers needs to be adjusted after the details of the tax come into play.