Excerpt from the article by JOSHUA ROBERTSON The Queensland premier, Campbell Newman, has been forced to fend off attacks on the integrity of his government as new details emerged linking one of his ministers to a business figure involved in a controversial coalmine expansion. Newman hit the election campaign trail on Tuesday with Ian Walker, who Guardian Australia can reveal took a donation from a board director of New Hope Coal before his election in 2012. Walker, as the minister for science, information technology, innovation and the arts, subsequently oversaw the department which cleared levels of air pollution from uncovered coal trains in Brisbane before the expansion of New Hope’s Acland mine. Advertisement Walker was also acting minister for state development when he called for public input on New Hope’s environmental impact statement for Acland last year. The state Labor leader, Annastacia Palaszczuk, has claimed that the Liberal National party government had opened the door to corruption and on Tuesday radio host Alan Jones renewed his attack on Newman over Acland. Donor records show that New Hope director Bill Grant gave a $2,000 personal cheque to Walker’s campaign fund in October 2011. The donation would have been secret under the LNP’s widely-criticised move to raise the threshold for declaring contributions from $1,000 to $12,400 last year. The pollution study by Walker’s department was released to companies including New Hope a week before it was made public in 2013. READ MORE = theguardian/world/2015/jan/21/queensland-election-newman-government-scrutiny-coal-donation
Posted on: Tue, 20 Jan 2015 22:37:32 +0000
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