Over the past several years, numerous actors across Australian society have increasingly advocated ‘just transition’ policies to help coal communities move beyond their reliance on fossil fuel extraction. As part of this, individuals from the environmental movement, trade unions, various NGOs and the private sector have called for a range of initiatives designed to help maintain the social and economic integrity of these regions as coal inevitably declines. Yet while just transition ideas have grown in popularity in these numerous forums in Australian society, it remains unclear how they are being understood by the very workers and communities for whom they are being proposed. To shed light on this question, we conducted interviews with residents of coal communities throughout Eastern Australia. We found that respondents had several key anxieties about just transition ideas and their impacts on their lives. In this paper, we break our findings down into five main themes that help explain these anxieties.

在过去的几年里，澳大利亚社会的众多参与者越来越多地倡导“公正过渡”政策，以帮助煤炭社区摆脱对化石燃料开采的依赖。作为其中的一部分，来自环境运动、工会、各种非政府组织和私营部门的个人呼吁采取一系列举措，旨在帮助维持这些地区的社会和经济完整性，因为煤炭不可避免地会下降。然而，尽管在澳大利亚社会的众多论坛中，公正的过渡理念越来越受欢迎，但仍不清楚这些理念是如何被提出这些理念的工人和社区所理解的。为了阐明这个问题，我们对澳大利亚东部煤炭社区的居民进行了采访。我们发现，受访者对过渡想法及其对生活的影响有几个关键的焦虑。在本文中，我们将我们的发现分为五个主题来帮助解释这些焦虑。