Peter Costello has 'lost the plot': Ian Dunlop

Ian Dunlop, he says Peter
Costello has "lost the plot".

The former chair of the Australian Coal Association and CEO of the Australian Institute of Company Directors, Ian Dunlop, said reports that the Future Fund was considering financing of Adani’s controversial coal mining project in the Galilee Basin suggested its chairman Peter Costello has “lost the plot.”

Reports emerged this week that the Future Fund had been approached by the Indian company to provide finance, after more than a dozen international banks refused to lend money to the project. The reports suggested that Indian Foreign Minister Arun Jaitley is scheduled to meet Costello, the former Howard government treasurer, this Friday.

“It is extraordinary that faced with the structural decline of thermal coal and even a basic understanding of climate change, Peter Costello would entertain the possibility of funding Adani’s Galilee Basin coal mine,” Dunlop said in a statement.

“It seems remarkable, but perhaps the former Treasurer hasn’t noticed the coal boom has ended. One would hope that his fellow board members would have greater foresight.

Read the RenewEconomy story - “Ex-coal chief tells Future Fund’s Costello: the coal boom is over.”

(Just a few weeks ago Clive Hamilton, an Australian author and public intellectual who, since 2008 he has been Professor of Public Ethics at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics, a joint centre of Charles Sturt University and the University of Melbourne, spoke at a Melbourne public function questioning the Australian Government's perverse interest in and fascination with coal, suggesting there was a certain madness afoot in Canberra. He noted, as does Ian Dunlop in the RenewEconomy story that governments around the world are stepping away from coal – Robert McLean.)