In an eerie reminder of Gunnedah’s fate in the 1980s, when coal mines shut overnight and the displaced miners picketed for a year to get their jobs back, without success, mining companies like BHP are once again sacking workers and throwing whole communities into disarray without any notice or preparation.  

Such is the nature of the mining company beast – people are merely economic units to be used and abused and sacked by text message.  Get in, get out – leaving human and environmental devastation.

Prime agricultural land and its precious water supplies will still be feeding and employing Australians for generations to come.  That is what we are fighting for – and the rural communities that have stuck together throughout good times and bad.