The Week in the West: Comrade Dutton’s 25-year plan for nuclear Collie
Plus: Considerate landlord under fire.
Here’s the latest on what’s been happening in the West and The West:
Opinion: Climate warmongers
It turns out a bit of nice rhetoric and an unambitious target weren’t enough for Labor to end the climate wars. Who’d have thought? While the media fixates on small differences between two parties who are both tarrying and putting their faith in magical techno-fixes (be they carbon capture and storage or nuclear), more substantial climate conflicts are looming in the background. Read more here.
Gerard Mazza
If it bleeds it leads?
We warned weeks ago that tides were turning at The West Australian. This week, it was a lone independent MP who felt the bite of new editor Chris Dore’s raking approach to newsgathering. Wilson Tucker MP told a fairly harmless, fairly classic story on page five of The West last week - after receiving a no grounds eviction from his rental he was unable to find another in Perth’s untenable tenancy market. So despite his six-figure Parliamentary salary, the upper house member for the massive Mining and Pastoral region is currently alternating between hotel rooms during sitting weeks and the pop-up tent on his Prado in the Kimberley the rest of the time. “I describe myself as nomadic rather than homeless,” he told The West’s Josh Zimmerman, but that wasn’t sufficient disclaimer to stop Labor MPs immediately blowing up the phone of former ALP/current West hack Dylan Caporn. Days later, Dylan had a new scoop - turns out Wilson owns his own home in Hamersley, which he rents out to tenants whom, unlike the state government and his own landlord, he wasn’t keen to kick out when they’ve done nothing wrong. Despite Wilson coming to The West with a story specifically premised on the fact that even wealthy, powerful WA lawmakers are unprotected from WA’s unfair rental laws, they turned on him twice in two days. “WA’s ‘homeless’ MP Wilson Tucker bought four-bedroom Hamersley home for $830k, leases out to tenants,” ran Dylan’s “exclusive” on Tuesday, before the headline was somewhat sharpened for the same story on Wednesday’s front page - “Filthy Rich Hobo”. Story shoppers beware - instead of looking a gift horse in the mouth, The West’s new management seems much more likely to slit its (own?) throat.
Is nuclear just sabotage for a ‘Just Transition’?
The climate wars are well and truly in their nuclear season, with Peter Dutton dropping a sparsely-detailed policy bomb this week. He’s proposed seven nuclear reactors by 2050, including one in the South West coal mining town of Collie. The town has been on a ‘Just Transition’ journey in recent years, with the state government committing $662 million to develop alternatives to coal, including renewable developments and tourism. Construction has begun there on Australia’s biggest battery, meaning Collie is deeply invested in the renewable energy transition that Dutton seems intent on disrupting. WA’s shadow energy minister Steve Thomas said Dutton had plenty of work to do to get Collie locals to stop worrying and love the reactor. “The Collie community is largely opposed, at this point, to nuclear energy, so the Federal Opposition will have 20 years to convince them that it’s a good idea,” he said. One wonders how locals will be employed in the meantime, given Collie’s Muja coal-fired power station is supposed to close down next year. The ABC reports a nuclear reactor in Collie wouldn’t open until 2040 at the earliest. Dutton’s plans begin to look a lot like cover to extend the life of fossil fuels.
There are many good arguments to be made against installing a nuclear reactor in Collie, but Labor’s Minister for Gas Industry Appeasement Madeleine King took her criticism in some interesting directions. In The West, she labelled the proposal “positively Soviet”, because the reactors would be (god forbid) publicly owned. As well as defending the neo-liberal world order from the Commie Coalition, she expressed fears for the wine-growing and tourism town of Margaret River, 150 kilometres from Collie. “The people who live there and vineyards and the businesses that work there could rightly assume their brand, their hard work over many decades to develop that fine place and that fine region will be tarnished with a nuclear power plant.” It seemed a bit of a stretch given most travellers on the well-worn path from Perth to Margs don’t go through Collie, and that Collie has recently emerged as a popular tourist destination in its own right.
As a fossil fuel town caught between competing visions for our energy future - one detailed, funded, and underway, and one existing largely in the fever dreams of coalition MPs, Collie is a good microcosm of this stage in the climate wars. We’ll keep an eye on it in the coming months.
