Drilling The Great Barrier Reef For Oil…

Rossleigh

6 years ago

One of my pet hates is people who respond to the headline and don’t actually read what I’ve written. Yes, yes, I know that one can argue that headlines should actually reflect what one is writing but I have three problems with this:

Often the headline isn’t chosen by the person writing.
I’ve found that people tend to read headlines that they disagree with more often than ones they agree with. For example, “Why Tony Abbott Was Australia’s Greatest PM” will get more views than “Why Tony Abbott Overachieved Given He Became PM With A Total Lack Of Charm Or Intelligence!”
I’m often writing satire.

So, just to annoy people who don’t read beyond the title, I’ve decided to call this one “Drilling The Great Barrier Reef For Oil”.

As far as I know, there is neither oil anywhere near the Great Barrier Reef nor any proposal to look for any potential drill sites…

Of course, we are talking Northern Queensland so before you know it, we may be having a debate about how many jobs drilling for oil would create. Never mind that there’s none there. It’s all about jobs and if some company can be convinced to look for some, why it may even create more jobs than Adani. After all, there’s no prospect of finding any so they could be looking forever, unlike Adani who’ll either leave after they’ve run out of coal, or leave when they’ve sucked all the underground water and sold it for more than they can get for coal.

However, mythical oil deposits aren’t my reason for writing.

I was just wondering how nuclear power is suddenly on the agenda and the media is more concerned with John Setka…

Now, I can see that John Setka is part of what’s wrong with Australia. But not because he’s head of a union. It’s interesting that if a politician was accused of saying and doing the same sorts of things that Setka is alleged to have done, we’d hear one of two things: “It’s personal and we shouldn’t be commenting because it’s nothing to do with the party” OR “This an attempt to shut down freedom of speech by the PC brigade”.

How Setka’s behaviour is an excuse to attack the union movement, I’m yet to understand. After all, it’s not like the ACTU came out in support.

Whatever, I’m more concerned about the nuclear power thing.

And not because of the nuclear power. I’m quite happy to put a nuclear power plant in Townsville. They need the jobs. And one in Rockhampton. Cairns. Mackay. Cardwell.

In fact, we can put so many nuclear plants up there that we can shut down all the coal fired plants in the southern states and the electorate of Dickson can store all the toxic waste… I mean, if they’re happy to re-elect Dutton…

No, it’s the fact that Scott Morrison and various journalists suggested that talk of nuclear power was a “scare campaign” by the Labor Party.

Ok, that lovable rascal ScoMo did tell us that nuclear power was “not not on the table”. When some people interpreted that double negative as meaning that it was on the table, Morrison cleared it up by saying that they Liberals had no plans to change the legislation and that nuclear power wasn’t legal and they had no plans to change that but if someone came along they’d listen but he doubted that would happen because it just wasn’t viable…

Somehow this seems to have changed since the election.

Mm, I guess I shouldn’t be too hard on Scottie. Nobody can predict the future, after all. Predicting the past or present is equally impossible, because of the nature of the word “predict”. However, one would hope that the PM would have a little bit more of a handle on what was likely to happen, should he and his band of merry men win the election…

Sorry, I shouldn’t have called them “merry men”. And not just because it’s sexist. No, it suggests they’re like Robin Hood’s gang who stole from the rich and gave to the poor. There’s no way our current government would do that.