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April 17, 2012
I rarely read The Australian these days now that it is behind a paywall. The exceptions are Meganomics and Mumble and the occasional opinion piece if it looks to have something interesting to say. Few do.
Since George Megalogenis recommended that I read David Uren's We've lost the will to build I went and had a look. It's behind a paywall but Uren argues that Australia has lost the ability to develop infrastructure in the teeth of community opposition.
David Rowe
He traces this back to 1983 when the newly elected Hawke government used the commonwealth's external affairs power to block the construction of a 180-megawatt hydro-electric project on the Franklin River in Tasmania.
He mentions the failure to build hydro-electric, irrigation or urban water dam projects; coal-fired power stations, and the second airport in Sydney as examples of this failure to build necessary infrastructure. This is important, says Uren because the declining productivity seen in Australia now partly reflects the ageing infrastructure reaching its use-by date.
I have three comments about this. First, Sydney's second airport is a good example of this failure to build crucial infrastructure. The finger can be pointed at both the ALP and the Coalition because they have placed their own interests above the public interest.
Secondly, the other examples chosen--dams and coal-fired stations--- are problematic from an environmental perspective, given the ecological destruction wrought in the Murray-Darling Basin and global warming being caused by the burning fossil fuels.
Thirdly, Australia is building infrastructure in the form of the national broadband network and renewable energy (wind and solar) But The Australian, and News Ltd in general, is deeply opposed and downright hostile to this form of infrastructure building and it conducts campaigns against them; even though Australia is a “late starter” in the transformation to a low-carbon economy, thanks to its reliance on low-cost fossil fuels.
Uren, therefore, basically mentions specific infrastructure that is favoured by particular industries---the irrigators, the fossil fuel industry and the big emitters who want the Australian energy market to remain highly concentrated, and structured around centralised power generation.
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build more coal-fired stations?
How can Uren be taken seriously when gas-fired power is accepted as the best way to provide a transitional or complementary power generation technology. Isn't gas good for peak power generation, because you can shut it on and off, which you can’t do with coal?
Or does this flag what a future Abbott led Coalition government would do.