Roma, some 600km west of Brisbane, used to be a country town where you could drive your car onto the airport tarmac to pick up friends arriving on the few flights servicing the place.
It had a small motel many years ago when I lived there but most travellers stayed at pubs with names such as The School of Arts.
The population back all those decades ago when sheep and cattle ruled was nudging 5000. Compared to some of the neighbouring towns such as Injune and Wallumbilla, it was a big place.
Today, Roma is getting an 83-room motel, and the airport terminal a $15 million overhaul to help it better deal with the 35 flights a week now on the airline schedule.
There are other changes. An area which was farmed by burly Anglo-Celtic chaps with names such as Ranald and Dougald now has an increasing number of school kids for whom English is a second language, some from Vietnam.
And the town’s population in nine years is expected to reach 15,000 – and keep going up.
The reason for this massive re-invention of a proud but tiny western village, which not long ago faced certain death as young people left it and money stayed away, is coal seam gas.
The extraordinary geology of the region – part volcanic remains, part leftovers from an inland sea, lots of artesian water and gas – is an ancient gift of life for Roma and surrounds.
“It’s bigger than the wool boom of the early 50s,” said local federal member, the Nationals’ MP for Maranoa, Bruce Scott, a Roma man all his life.
Wool and meat remain important, but Scott says these days fluoro vests outnumber RM Williams boots.
Those television advertisments paid for by mining companies to claim there are wonderful community endowments from CSG are obviously self serving. But that doesn’t mean they are untrue.
Roma, for example, now has a Care Flight helicopter which in six months has airlifted people from 20 accidents.
However, there is a powerful belief in major cities such as Sydney, and among influential media and political people, that CSG is an unredeemable evil.
It can ruin aquifers, wreck bountiful farmland, and subject land owners to the well-funded tyranny of giant mining companies.
At the extremes this might be so. But it can also bring life to towns which those hurrumphing people in Sydney and Canberra might never before have thought about.
The political point is that if the Government bows too deeply to demands for action on – or against – coal seam gas exploitation from the Greens or independent Tony Windsor, it might find a particularly nasty rural rebellion on its hands.
Bob Brown and Windsor want, at the very least, a study into the possible harmful effects of CSG mining, with Tony Windsor tacking this demand onto conditions for his support for a mining super profits tax.
They aren’t CSG fans.
Labor doesn’t hold many of the seats involved with CSG mining, but the Coalition does.
And if Sydney Liberals think they will have a free run prosecuting the expansion of CSG projects, they will have their partners the Nationals to contend with.
Bruce Scott says precautions have to be taken, and that they have in Queensland under the Anna Bligh Labor State Government
There are buffer zones keeping CSG mining away from residential areas; prime agricultural land is protected; the miners have to integrate with the existing local economy, not the other way around.
Nationals Leader Warren Truss, another Queenslander, yesterday released “a blueprint for coal seam gas development in Australia” .
It covers what it says are the economic, environmental and community concerns about CSG, but clearly its purpose is to allow the projects to progress, not to halt them.
“Managed properly,coal seam gas has the potential to revitalise parts of regional Australia, delivering a new economic boom,” said Truss.
The Nationals are talking about one of the few, sustainable options for hope among dying rural communities. Don’t get in their way.
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