Show me the WA to go home “The time difference in WA is crazy — you get off the plane and it’s 1998,” a friend of mine used to joke about our home state. Certainly the state government is doing its bit to affirm the nostalgic vibe of the place by putting out talking points on how best to combat climate change (with thanks to the Australian Institute’s Polly Hemmings who spotted it) which looked fairly dodgy back in 2007 when the Howard government was giving it a go. In this, the year of Our Lord 2023, the WA Labor government offers what it calls “eight ways you can contribute and take action right now” and what we call a monumental piss-take:
Yep, averting the actual apocalypse is largely about washing machine settings and attentive tooth brushing, apparently.
WA is a place that sees no conflict in the government putting out a media release about draft emissions reduction legislation co-written by the state director of an oil and gas industry lobby, where the lines of employment between politics and the resource sector crisscross like shoelaces and where climate protesters are arrested by counterterrorism police for graffiti made in wash-away chalk. Which might explain why “throw yourself upon the cogs of the machinery of a resource economy so it cannot function”, or, dear lord, even “political donations reform” don’t feature on that list.
Laboring the point Labor MP for Victoria’s Eastern Metropolitan Region Sonja Terpstra may have used her electorate office to advocate for the Yes23 campaign but apparently the campaign at large had nothing much to do with the ALP. In response to posts by marketing strategist and teal enthusiast Brent Hodgson, who confronted Terpstra with the poor performance of the Voice in ALP electorates, Terpstra went all Shaggy — “It wasn’t a Labor campaign — more detail that is missed,” she said, suggesting Hodgson take it up with Yes23. Given the centrality of the Voice to Labor policy in its first term of government, it’s an interesting take.
The Happy Home In the weeks after the May 2022 election, “Squat Morrison” started to trend on Twitter — as people began to wonder aloud when he was planning to depart Kirribilli House. He stuck around for nearly two weeks after being evicted by voters.
Morrison, like Tony Abbott and John Howard before him, broke convention by making Kirribilli his primary residence during his time as PM. So it was no surprise when he got up in Parliament yesterday to join Prime Minister Anthony Albanese in thanking the Kirribilli cook, Adam Thomas, who is retiring. Apart from being one of the nicer moments in a meaninglessly fractious question time, it gave Morrison a chance to cycle through his greatest hits, Jenny and the girls, pretending he’s a sports fan, and of course, curries:
… The only thing I think Adam and I ever disagreed on was the football teams we followed. I thank him for the many cooking tips he gave me with my curries and for indulging me in regard to the mess that I often made in that kitchen.
I do declare Ed Coper, author of Facts and Other Lies: Welcome to the Disinformation Age, has been in the media a great deal lately, talking about the billowing fog of misinformation that helped the No campaign to such a crushing victory at the weekend. Entirely fair — the guy wrote the book on the subject, after all. But when is it relevant to point out that he also did work for the government on the campaign? As Guardian Australia noted back in February, Coper “was brought in to advise the government’s referendum engagement group on misinformation and disinformation at a meeting in February”.
This fact didn’t make it into pieces quoting him from the BBC and The West Australian, and the ABC described him as a “Yes campaign adviser and executive director at Center for Impact Communications”. Weirdly, the relevance of this gig is not even consistent within publications — the Nine papers mention it in one piece quoting him, and don’t mention it in another.
Hard a-starboard Here’s one we’ll be watching with great interest: Starboard Value, the activist hedge fund run by Jeffrey Smith, has bought shares in News Corp, in what Reuters calls a “move that could presage new calls from investors for changes to Rupert Murdoch’s media empire”. It’s all dreadfully opaque at this point — we don’t know the exact plans or the size of Starboard’s stake, and all the concerned parties are keeping schtum so far, though we note that its first move appears to be to encourage News to sell its stake in REA Group, its real estate business.
Meanwhile, Britain’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), the UK competition regulator equivalent to our ACCC, has launched a sweeping investigation into possible breaches of competition law — including allegations of wage theft and informal collusion between production houses to suppress payment levels — by some of the UK’s major TV broadcasters and production companies. The CMA investigation includes smaller production house such as Sister Pictures — whose productions include Chernobyl and Gangs of London — which is part owned by Elisabeth Murdoch.
Whoever “pegged” on a line those clothes shown in the photo has obviously never pegged out wet clothes.
Those of us who are old and remember when drying clothes on an outdoor line, even in the days before the invention of the marvellous Hills hoist, was the only option, can only mock.
Even though you’ve pointed out the absurdity of the photo, what are the chances of anyone under 50 (40? 30..??) even understanding what was the problem with the depiction?
Morrison won’t resign from p’ment, he’s waiting for the call from Lib Head Office to lead the Coalition to victory after 40 months in the wilderness. I hope it will be 40 years though. It will be 40 months if Albo calls the next election as late as possible.
Did Adam’s cooking tips for Morrison include the valuable advice to cook the chicken before you put the curry sauce on it?
Drinkable water is in short supply all over the world, with a common solution – desalination. Desalination with non-fossil energy is straightforward as adjunct to coastal nuclear power plants. Desalination can also serve as an intermittent consumer for intermittent power from wind and solar.
Desal is big in Perth WA, powered by wind farms. Everything coastal will be underwater in the not-too-distant. The requirement to boil water is completely bypassed: wind’s advantage. And PV doesn’t even have moving parts. Unmanned intra-galactic spacecraft is OK for nuclear power, and medicine. We’d run out of fuel for nuclear eventually, so why bother?
Global uranium supplies are copious, will not run out in the lifetime of our species. Fissioning of one ton of uranium displaces between five and ten million tons of CO2. Resources of pretty well all mineral commodities are indefinitely sustainable. However we do need environmentalists to beat the drum about the loss of our 2D natural resources, such as marine parks, forests, biodiversity and ground water.
Desalination acts on hot water (not boiling), which is available as the exhaust heat from any steam powered power station. Most of today’s desalination acts by pumping vapour from above a warm tank and condensing it under a cooler tank. Incoming technology uses increasingly efficient membrane technology, using less total energy but relying on electricity that might otherwise be sold. Intermittent desalination is largely tolerant of intermittent power supply.
The natural resources you mention are being killed off by fossil fuel, which also has killed off nuclear, along with the price – not to mention Fukushima. Electricity generation is the world’s biggest industry with plenty of dirty players in the field who don’t like competition. They have everyone afraid of nuclear, in this country anyway. Look at the way they’ve gone on about wind farm infra-noise even though there is no such thing. People believe what they are told when it sounds threatening. Like nuclear, even though they will happily cop a CT scan or fly at 30,000 feet. I really can’t see nuclear power in Australia until we’ve stopped fossil fuels and then found renewables have come up short, if they do. I’m all for a full variety of power sources, including nuclear. Without electricity we’re stuffed. By the way, my family was staying with friends in Cumbria, and over breakfast we were carefully talking about his work as a shift foreman at Sellafield. During this his young son ran in with great excitement and said, “Dad, tell them about the time the reactor door blew off!!”. The subject was immediately changed…
Great – then the nuclear power plant can use up all that desalinated water in its cooling.
It is a common misinformation to say that nuclear power plants use up freshwater because they are nuclear. Coastal power stations dump their waste heat in the sea – or during desalination. In fact any steam-driven power stations – whether coal, gas or nuclear – need to dump their heat. However it can be dumped directly into the air at a cost of about 5% of production, as at Kogan Creek PS in Queensland.