IT WILL HUPPEN
 
I read some of the final speech to the Victorian Parliament by departing Labor MP Theo Theophanous and I thought of Shakespeare. A touch of Macbeth. The quote, when Malcolm says to King Duncan about the execution of Cawdor: ‘Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it.’

Theophanous made a lot of sense when, as a former State energy minister, he made a plea for the debate to be re-opened on nuclear power. Pit he hadn’t pushed harder while in office.
 
But he said: ‘ If the Prime Minister is true to his word that climate change is the moral challenge of our generation, then nuclear energy as a form of base-load power  will probably have a role to play in addressing it.’
 
And he made the point many of Australia’s Asian neighbours are moving to nuclear energy to boost power supplies and cut carbon emissions.
 
The attitude of Labor Governments, both Federal and State really puzzles me. Apart from the rank hypocrisy. We apparently think nuclear power is evil and not to be considered here at home. And yet we merrily sell uranium to all and sundry to produce nuclear power overseas.
 
I guess proving that you can have your yellowcake and heat it too.
 
I’ll admit that thirty years ago, around the time of Three Mile Island and Chernobyl and the Armageddon like threats of meltdowns, I was anti-uranium.
 
Thought it should be left in the ground until proven safe rather than dug up and used until proven dangerous. But nuclear power plants have been operating safely around the globe for yonks. Seventy per cent of France’s energy comes from nuclear power. There are nuclear plants within a grape throw of vineyards.
 
Britain has just commissioned more plants and President Obama has approved three more in the US. The first since Three Mile Island.
 
To the Labor Party it is the elephant in the room even as they stall debate, again, on the location of a nuclear waste dump in the outback.
 
Here in Victoria the ALP policy is that we remain a nuclear free state. But frankly, those pompous local council signs trumpeting ‘This is a Nuclear Free Zone’ look rather sad and quaint. Clean nuclear power IS the future.
 
As Rachel Hunter would say: ‘It won’t huppen overnight. But it will huppen’.
 
Friday, February 26, 2010

© Copyright Derryn Hinch 2010