The Week in the West: Weather gods look poorly on eastern states imports
Plus: Labor offers no credible pathway to Australia's net zero ambitions.
I recently found myself caught in the crosswinds of the debate around offshore turbines. I took a trip down to my hometown of Bunbury to investigate a community campaign - and found myself getting a little too close for comfort to some anti-wind farm activists.
You can read about it here:
Gerard Mazza
Keep an ear out for an upcoming episode of The Last Place on Earth podcast, where we'll take a further plunge into the world of offshore wind opposition - and the broader political currents surrounding it.
Meanwhile, elsewhere:
Ariel Bombora, the daughter of the man who murdered two women in Floreat last week, made a brave and damning statement to the ABC about the failure of WA police to protect women from violence:
"My mother and I made it clear that our lives were at risk – we were repeatedly ignored, repeatedly failed. These failures have cost the lives of two incredible women. I did everything I could to protect my mother — when my father couldn't find us he murdered her best friend and her best friend's daughter."
As reported by NCA, the WA Day festival set to be held this long weekend has been cancelled due to recent heavy rainfall and more of it forecast. Two years in a row, interstate acts have been booked to headline Celebrate WA's festival, and two years in a row, the show has been called off due to storms. Cosmic justice, or just climate change-induced extreme weather? Before the cancellation, West Australian Music (WAM) wasn't too happy that Guy Sebastian was set to headline. "West Australian artists are more than good enough to take up all positions on the lineup and the approach taken by Celebrate WA tells us they disagree," went WAM's earlier press release. We'd suggest the festival's list of sponsors also deserves some scrutiny. BHP, Roy Hill, Woodside, Rio Tinto, Alcoa, Perdaman, and 7 West all appear. Now that's a lineup!
Did Labor's Future Gas Strategy, driven by Rockingham's own Madeleine King, sound like a crock to you? Well, over at The Conversation, eminent Western Australian climate scientist Dr Bill Hare has crunched the numbers, and it turns out we're a long way from a credible net zero pathway. This federal government's doing exactly what the last one did: tricky accounting, relying on dodgy offsets, and laying out the red carpet for big gas companies.
Bill Hare
