Ranncid
Australian issues, Economics, Energy issues, Environment, Labor politics, Language, Science - - Posted on May, 1 at 11:25 pm by Helen
I heard Fran Kelly interview SA premier Mike Rann on Radio National Breakfast a few days ago. Apparently Rann has totally gone over to the nuclear industry and is all enthused about his new interest. I haven’t been able to find a transcript, but a recent interview with him is here.
What with JHo being all enthusiastic about putting 25 or so reactors around Bennelong (yeah, right) and Krudd being all excited about digging much more of the stuff up, I’m a little depressed. Not because I am a hormonal hysteric who’s incapable of rational thought, but because of all the research I did when young (and things like the Fox Report into the Ranger and Jabiluka uranium mines, as well as the fallout from the Maralinga tests, were in the wind). A few things haven’t changed since then:
* The byproducts of the nuclear fuel cycle last for several millennia,
* We don’t have any permanent solution for its storage, so it must be actively managed,
*most “great civilisations” have lasted about two thousand years, max, except for a couple of Chinese dynasties, and we know what their OH & S record is like,
* Therefore, we are creating a huge problem which has to be managed for millenium after millenium, long after our grandchildren are dead (not prematurely, we hope), and after any energy benefit from the toxic waste has been used, and
* Any major error will render large swathes of country uninhabitable, its food inedible and its water undrinkable for several centuries, if you’re lucky. As wind and water do not respect boundaries, this will have global impacts.
And so on. So I was even more depressed as I listened to Mike witter on.
But Mike will get his way, because he and Kruddy and JHo and the rest of them are so good at portraying themselves as the Hard men who think hard thoughts, and subtly discrediting their opponents. They do it with the little plutonium particle “emotion”, which they drop into their discourse like krypton, rendering the whole environment toxic. As in,
“Well, of course, Fran, nuclear energy is a very emotional issue.”
Bingo! Anyone who disagrees with you is now a hormonal hysteric incapable of rational thought. Whether emotion can have anything to do with which facts are correct and which are not is not a subject for discussion, nor is the idea that becoming emotional about the death of rivers, desertification, clearfell logging and nuclear contamination could be simply a reaction to cold, hard facts. No, real men don’t have emotions, and only real men can be true leaders, as we find out:
(from memory) “We’re the ones willing to make the tough decisions.”
Now whether he actually said tough or hard is moot, but you get the drift, as I did, as indeed I was meant to. But being the wrong-thinking type that I am, I thought this was a bit arse about.
Because in general, the people who want to adopt the nuclear fuel cycle seem to be the ones who are most fearful of adopting renewable energy technologies, and …horror!… using less energy! It’s all about trying to keep business as usual. Let’s not start manufacturing solar cells and windmills and things; digging stuff up and selling it is what we’re good at. That, and using lots and lots of fossil fuels ourselves.
You know, if a pollie suggested actually leaving the uranium in the ground, using less energy, finding a way to run the economy without depending on continuous growth, and doing a serious push with renewables, that would be a tough decision. I think it’s the Ranns and Rudds and Howards who are the fearful ones. ALP pollies are too much in love with the status quo. I wonder Peter Garrett can sleep at night.
Crossposted at the Cast Iron Balcony
Posted in Australian issues, Economics, Energy issues, Environment, Labor politics, Language, Science |
May 1st, 2007 at 11:44 pm
I’ve never been impressed by Mike Rann, he’s always come across as stuck up and bordering on conservative - yuck yuck yuck.
Don Dunstan would be rolling in his grave if he knew how his former protege has let down progressives in areas of fairness and equality.
dd
—-
http://connectthroughvalues.com
May 2nd, 2007 at 12:06 am
What you said in the last paragraph Helen.
It ain’t gonna happen because we are addicted to the growth economy and politicians, despite what they think, don’t make tough decisions
they just make decisions that they think will get them elected/reelected.
May 2nd, 2007 at 12:26 am
It is not a good look in SA. The problem that Rann has is that his state is in deep dog-poo. Jobs are disappearing at a huge rate of knots - there is nothing on the horizon that will fix it - SA has the highest unemployment rate in the nation and so he has nowhere to go. Not only that but incomes there are the lowest in the nation. So he needs a distraction that he can keep blowing hard about until after the next state election - that is mining in general and uranium in particular. Because no-one else wants to be there he will rave about mining - day and night. The thing is that this won’t save him because it will take 20 years to ramp this mining stuff up and by then the markets will have gone elsewhere. Ah - another reason why we need to treat our politicians like underwear and change them often - because they have no idea about how to deal with their constituents. Tell the truth - be genuine and get everyone working together. Is that too hard? Apparently.
May 2nd, 2007 at 6:57 am
It is not a good look in SA. The problem that Rann has is that his state is in deep dog-poo. …
And now Nicole Cornes: Ay-yi-yi!! (Thanks to Adelaide Writer)
Is the ALP trying to self-destruct now?
May 2nd, 2007 at 9:45 am
Adelaide is a town planning error really. There are no compelling reasons to have a city anywhere between Melbourne and Perth … it’s a relic of the old empire mentality that you had to build a town every few hundred miles to assert right of occupation.
Time to let nature take its course maybe … offer the inhabitants resettlement assistance to Populate the North (Bill Heffernan can found a new Adelaide-by-the-Gulf)… and then we could use all the Murray-Darling water for more constructive purposes.
May 2nd, 2007 at 11:04 am
Spot on rf
http://www.ruddhowardfear.com/nuclearawaste
and has anyone heard anything about this claim?
http://www.ruddhowardfear.com/howardnucular
May 2nd, 2007 at 1:14 pm
Murdoch & Packer w/ the assistance of outside interests have been manipulating elections here for years. But i’m glad you brought it up via the links ‘V’. Definately worth checking out.
Anyone watching the mainstream media today & yesterday surely could not help but see how interconnected the Corporate media are…& how rigged the system is. A farce.
We hear about British terrorists, Sri-lankan terrorists, the supposed death of an Al-Qaeda leader in Iraq…then they add animal activist arrests (involving the British Fascist Police system w/ the support of Tony(doesn’t give a sod about life) Blair, protecting Huntingdon Life Sciences…
(wikipedia)
SKY NEWS, the only Aussie Pay TV channel, has been getting stuck into Labor non-stop…& promoting Peter Costello’s upcoming budget like it’s manna from God…add GW Chimp’s veto of the ‘Iraq Withdrawal bill’…& the so PREDICTABLE & OBVIOUS rigging of the interest rates structure by a Reserve Bank that has ZERO credibility…& you get a so called PERFECT couple of news days for the BAD GUYS.
Before we attack Labor too much…we need to think about the fact that Labor in the States has to LOOK different from the Federal Labor Party…wall to wall SAMENESS can be worrying for some voters. Too much chuminess can also force an upcoming Labor Govt. into energy & environmental policy corners that will be tricky to get out of if it turns out they supported the wrong system.
I have similar worries to many of the above tho…& that’s why my mates & I are all voting for Andrew Bartlett of the Democrats or the Greens (depending on the State) when it comes to the SENATE…in order to KEEP the BASTARDS HONEST.
Labor will get my lower house vote.
As for the mainstream media…i’m doing what most do these days…giving it the middle finger job & turning it off. I’m going ‘independent’ blogs for the rest of the day.
May 2nd, 2007 at 1:30 pm
and as for the Nicole Cornes situation…all i can say is, check out most of the Coalition members, see how much they’ve done over the years…bugger all…look at the bloody environmental, energy, dental, Corporate, Higher Education, private debt level & Iraq War mess these so called professionals & ‘big thinkers’ have got us into.
Penny Wong supports her colleague in the Adelaide Advertiser:
Now there’s a lady who knows what she’s talking about. The mainstream media intend to try & assassinate the reputation of every Labor, Green & Dem candidate they can…they’re are a bunch of silk suited, bejewelled, vacuous puppets who couldn’t hold down a normal job if their ‘powder puff’ lives depended on it. Put their articles where they deserve to be…in the bin…or down the toilet.
Give ‘em HELL people! It’s our Country too.
May 2nd, 2007 at 1:50 pm
Yes I love how the ‘realist’’s great solution to toxic waste from spent fuel to CO2 is some variant on “dig a big hole and bury it”. Point this out though and you are naive and emotional.
May 2nd, 2007 at 2:39 pm
Anyone who trusts this governments 10 billion buckeroos water plan needs to think again. I just noticed this Water Fund ad doing the internet rounds today…note the word ‘EMERGING’:
& when you take into account what the water thieving Right-Wing mongrels are doing in Amerika:
(http://www.alternet.org/envirohealth/50994/)
…you get a pretty good idea of the SCAM going on here in Australia & what the future holds. Water as a commodity. And before you know it, your rain water tank will be taxed to the hilt.
Now you know why King Howard put Mr. lawyer/business money bags Turnbull in charge of ‘water’.
These privitization scoundrels make me barf! They’ll charge us for the air we breathe if they get the chance.
I wrote about the water CON on Blogocracy last week…little did I realise it was gonna be this BIG.
Time to fight back! Pass on the info & links.
May 2nd, 2007 at 5:18 pm
These privitization scoundrels make me barf! They’ll charge us for the air we breathe if they get the chance.
Just like the Roman governor of Syria who told a Jewish delegation:
“Verily, I would tax the air you breathe”.
It’s an old dream…
May 2nd, 2007 at 6:20 pm
Actually on SBS last night I saw a doco on how Monsanto is trying to charge pigs for the piglets they produce! German farmers are getting a little testy about the fact that Monsanto has found a way to claim intellectual property rights over whole species! I kid you not, it will not be long before they have the commons completely wrapped, and we will be charged monopoly rents for existence. Oh I forgot, we are. It’s called the GST.
May 2nd, 2007 at 7:47 pm
Labor has to win the election. To do that they need to say anything that makes that possible.
After the election - as John Howard has reminded us - anything goes.
May 2nd, 2007 at 8:01 pm
I saw it too Aussie Shiela, in a word it is called Biopiracy. I first heard about this when I was at Uni and then again in the doco called The Corporation.
Other places to begin similar investigations are:
http://www.biotech-info.net/fast_track.html
and
http://www.navdanya.org/earthdcracy/food/food-security.htm
May 2nd, 2007 at 9:18 pm
That is the kind of realism I’m talking about- the kind that automatically writes off 80% of the australian public as idiots. They aren’t: you can actually explain your position to them. Remember all those polls that show the enormous majority of the public recognise global warming as an imminent danger. It may be hard to get your message to cut through but it can be done. Everyone is wetting themselves over the business backlash to Labour’s IR agenda but the majority of the people will naturally empathise with employee’s perspective over that of the business community. The reality is that the skills shortage has ameliorated the downward pressure on wages of the AWA’s in the resources sector. The reality is that the demand from China is not going to go backwards any time soon. The resources sector know this: they know that there is absolutely NO threat to them posed by labour’s agenda, but hey, an extra few percentage points profit is not to be sneezed at so they WILL get very theatrical because they have nothing to lose. Rather than write everyone off as improbably stupid can’t we just keep describing what is the genuine truth of the matter?
May 2nd, 2007 at 10:57 pm
some one said there is a pile of radiation sick workers from the roxby down mines , whats happening to them i dont know ,but i bet rann and howard don’t want to know about it
May 2nd, 2007 at 11:17 pm
“Adelaide is a town planning error really. There are no compelling reasons to have a city anywhere between Melbourne and Perth … it’s a relic of the old empire mentality that you had to build a town every few hundred miles to assert right of occupation.”
Heh, heh! You’ll be laughing on the other side of yer face(after the Federal election naturally), when Rann turns up with a plans to make SA the real ‘Saudi Arabia of uranium’ with Australia’s first nuclear power plant to fire up our minerals’ boom and a desalination plant so you pissers in the Murray Darling, with yer smoky old coal can get nicked. Then we’ll see who’s bloody redundant!
May 2nd, 2007 at 11:24 pm
“..you get a pretty good idea of the SCAM going on here in Australia & what the future holds. Water as a commodity.”
Good God! You don’t mean just like food clothing and shelter? Will such oppression and obesity never end?
May 3rd, 2007 at 1:24 am
I can’t wait until the Observa types are sitting in their partially-filled swimming pools with their partner whining “but honey, i’m tired of lying around in 3 inches of scummy water”…& their free marketeer spouse replies “sweetie, trust me…once it rains we’ll have all the water we need to fill this beauty, til then, keep adding the washing up water”.
Time’s almost up Observa. Tick Tock….ding dong, Kevin calling!
May 3rd, 2007 at 1:31 am
not having a meltdown are ya Observa?
ya know, you’ve given me a great idea…once oil fueled avatian becomes too expensive, we could use the Right-Wing blowhards like Obs to fill the new Zeppelins w. hot air…yep, Australia rising.
May 3rd, 2007 at 4:55 am
I came to Adelaide in 1969 with my young children from the UK. Why did we come here and not to any of the other states? Purely and simply, it was because the houses and cost of living was so much cheaper than anywhere else, and we had absolutely no money, well $600.00 all up. With Don Dunstan (Premier) and Whitlam (Prime Minister) soon elected, life became so very interesting, there was a vitality, new knowledge and enthusiasm that was so infectious and enlightening. Though leaving school at 14 in England, I was soon accepted to start my nurses training, and then was the first woman in my family to win a place in tertiary study (indeed I am still studying at the same university, as ever taught and my PhD candidature supervised, by a group of the most inspiring, intelligent and generous lecturers you could wish to find). Indeed, people in the 1970’s flocked from all round the rest of the country because the arts (including the new film industry and Festival of Arts Theatre), health and education sectors were seen as the places to be.
I have since come to love this place with a passion, the people here are just bonza (I have been a nurse - psychiatric, intellectual disability and general, and once reactive arthritis took over my life, an adult educator), and I have cared for and taught many South Australians during their best of times and their worst of times.
I can attest that South Australians are hard working, intelligent, optimistic and resourceful - just come and look at how they have pridefully colonised this enormous, and in places, unforgiving, state, with a population never more than one and a half million, mostly of course, a good deal less. 40% of us have water tanks (Victorians and NSWelshians have between 4-5%), and our water storage/recycling is light years ahead of the other states, though we have to do much better.
We have always punched way above our weight; indeed, we have more Nobel Prize winners from here than most other states, and on reflection, possibly, per head of population, the most in the world.: William and Lawrence Bragg; Howard Florey; J, Robin Warren, and Nobel Literary Prize winner John M Coetzee, now an Australian citizen, chooses to live here. Oh, and Australia’s first astronaut is a South Australian.
Many of the most notable Australian films were made here by or for the SAFC, the Flinders Uni film school produced some of Australia’s best filmakers, and we are the state that stages the ‘Ring Cycle’, acclaimed worldwide. And before the Crows and Port Power were formed for the AFL, a good number of the VFL best players were South Australians. I could go on and on, but like most South Australians, I don’t like to brag.
Mike Rann, is in something of a cleft stick, like all the Premiers before him - and though there has been a couple of drones, most have been extremely canny, hard working and far sighted - he leads a team that has to continually find/make work; we are a long way away from the other states, with desert covering a great deal of our land mass, and if we don’t keep ensuring doors open as soon as others close, such as winning federal government contracts (i.e. the new navy destroyers, new research and development), finding places to export our produce, manufactures and minerals to, and entice tourists and overseas students here, people would undoubtedly find it far cheaper to just fly right over us. It is an undoubted fact, we have to be very entreprenurial to maintain our State into the future.
We are all well aware that Rann, although an early acknowledger of global warming, and a great promoter of renewable energy: hot rocks, solar power and wind energy - read up on his Thinkers In Residence program - has done a 360 degree turn where uranium mining is concerned, and many of us wish that such large deposits of the stuff hadn’t been found here. Again some of us wish it were left in the ground, and will maintain the rage. But, and it’s a big but, we also quite cognisant of the fact that our state has the most rapidly ageing population in the country, indeed our state, per head of population, has the most aged in Australia - and our olds live longer than anywhere else, and we are desperate to keep our children employed here if we possibly can, especially in the country towns.
For this large family, thank heavens, so far only one of our sons has made the break for job reasons, and two of our grandsons live interstate, one a medic in the Army. The others are rusted on South Australians, for all the right reasons.
BTW, don’t you dare tell us where to get off.
To be able to walk on Semaphore or Largs Bay beaches, just before sunset, parade the Port docks and grab a dolphin cruise on a Sunday afternoon, spend time with friends at the The Guv, have minestrone soup at the Cafe Peseano, North Adelaide, coffee on Rundle Street, or Jetty Road, Brighton; visit the Adelaide Hills, Burra, the Flinders Ranges, the Iron Triangle, the Riverland, drive down to Victor Harbour, Horseshoe Bay, Middleton, Cape Jervis, Kingston, Robe, Penola et. al., et. al., et. al., buy fresh produce from the Central Market, stroll the many Farmers markets, craft and antique fairs throughout the state, research in the Bar Smith, mmmmmm, makes life exceptionally liveable. Wish you were here…..
May 3rd, 2007 at 3:44 pm
[...] There have been numerous incisive posts on language and political rhetoric in the last few weeks from the likes of tigtog, Gummo and Pavlov’s cat. Adding to this bounty, hormonal hysteric Helen puts the ‘emotional’ side of the nuclear debate. [...]
May 6th, 2007 at 7:21 pm
I shake my head. The South Australian story actually gets worse. Apologies to the rusted on locals of whatever political persuasion - who think that it is the best place in the world - sadly it ain’t for many reasons. Here’s one.
Take for example the greater Adelaide metro traffic management system - a system that has had no significant capital investment for over 30 years. Analysis shows that the real economic cost of the “hurry up and wait” system is somewhere close to $1 billion annually - in terms of lost time, extra fuel and additional pollution costs.
Yep, nearly $1 billion of additional and unnecessary cost imposed on South Australian’s - every year. Not to mention the extra CO2. Why isn’t this a big deal - exposed on the front page of Rupert’s Advertiser each day?
Now contrast that with the cost to fix the problem. Somewhere between $30 and $40 million of low-end - 1970’s technology will solve this problem. By any measure this is a good investment and even blind Freddy would do it. But no-one in power will do it, why - ignorance, laziness or stupidity?
Because - the SA Government has become so addicted to Red Light and Speed Camera Revenue that they won’t spend the money to fix it - as soon as they do they will lose much of the “extra” revenue generated from the “traps” that have been created over the last 30 years. Not that they are bad people - just that they have become dependent on this and other “funny money” - like pokies. And the locals seem oblivious.
Here is the dilemma. The system is stuffed - has been for years - they know that. The cost to fix it is relatively minor - they also know that. But if they do fix it - they will forgo a growth revenue stream - which they desperately need/want.
What would you do? More importantly why doesn’t anyone notice - and complain?