Queensland may have thrown in the towel in its wars with the cane toad, the rabbit and the crown-of-thorns starfish, but it may not be too late for the state government to curtail the incursions of another rapacious foreigner, the Indian miner. And it would be something like poetic justice if, after years of well-funded campaigning, protesting and lobbying, the most potent weapon in the anti-Adani arsenal turned out to be another, rather less ubiquitous bird. It is only surprising that the environmentalists have kept this particular powder dry for so long, given that the endangered status of the black-throated finch was established in 2005. And one can hardly blame Adani CEO Lucas Dow for being suspicious about the timing of the publication of the report which looks likely to delay construction of the Carmichael mine for at least another six months. Or for questioning the objectivity of the man the government commissioned to write it; Melbourne University Professor Brendan Wintle’s antipathy to the coal industry being almost as well documented as his passion for species conservation. But perhaps this is symptomatic of a more inclusive approach to legislation on the part of the Palaszczuk administration. And now that One Nation’s first female Muslim parliamentary candidate has endorsed Pauline Hanson’s demands for a ban on the burqa, perhaps when the Queensland government is asked to make a call on that equally contentious issue it will defer to the judgment of Australia’s leading sharia advocate, Sheikh Shady al-Suleiman.

For my part, I don’t have any doubts about Professor Wintle’s professional integrity, and I don’t need to read his report to understand that bulldozing vast tracts of pristine grassland is unlikely to enhance the survival prospects of a bird which lives almost exclusively – if a tad boringly – on the seeds of that grass. But if the Queensland government really wants to show that it cares about endangered native fauna there are other, less contentious measures it could embrace. And one of them would be the pest control policy of one its more uppity regional councils. The burghers of curiously named Banana Shire – 16,000 sparsely-populated coal-and-cattle-dependent square kilometres an hour or two south of the proposed Carmichael site – care so much about their local indigenous wildlife that they have unilaterally declared war on what everyone agrees poses a far greater threat to it than any single commercial enterprise. Feral and domestic cats are estimated to kill more than a million native Australian birds each day – and almost as many reptiles and marsupials. So you’d think that the Banana Shire Council’s 2010 decision to offer a $10 feral cat bounty would have met with the approbation of everyone except spinsters and witches, and that other shires and councils would be quick to follow suit, and that the state government might even have offered its imprimatur. Unfortunately, mammal eradication programs are only effective if they target the young of the species as ruthlessly as they target the adults. And while Banana Shire may not yet be the Silicon Valley of Central Queensand, by 2010 75 per cent of its households had broadband. Which means that when the council extended its cat offensive to a $5 bounty on ‘kitten scalps’, it incurred the displeasure of two much more influential demographics: the adults who spend all day watching YouTube because they don’t have a job, and the teenagers who spend all night watching YouTube instead of doing the homework which will make them employable.

If the environmentalists are ultimately successful, Adani will abandon its grand Australian designs and turn instead to a much more compliant Indonesia for the coal it depends on to electrify the homes of 30 per cent of the world’s second most populous country. At which point the Queensland government might rethink its neutrality on cat eradication, if only to provide some alternative occupation to the people the Carmichael mine would have employed. There would, of course, be a period of readjustment which some might find difficult. ‘What did you do today, daddy?’ ‘I chopped the heads off sixteen kittens, sweetie. That’s why we’re having pizza.’ Bring on the Banana republic.