The hypocrisy of this media release is surely breathtaking: "Resources Minister Kon Vatskalis will deliver a keynote address to hundreds of delegates attending Australia’s largest uranium conference this week ... where [he] will promote investment in the Northern Territory.”
How will he explain to the conference that his government, with blatant political opportunism, during the run-up to a by-election, cancelled the exploration licence it had issued to Cameco Australia Pty Ltd for the Angela Pamela site, after Cameco had spent millions of dollars there?
How will he explain away the haplessness of that action, given that Labor had Buckley's chance of winning Araluen, and of course did not?
And how will he explain to the Greenies that, now the by-election is out of the way, he is all in favour of uranium mining?
Is it any wonder we're laughing stock of the nation. COMMENT by ERWIN CHLANDA.
The air traffic control tower at the Alice Springs airport, built in 1968, may soon become a relic, and four jobs may be taken out of the town.
Airservices Australia is planning a trial beginning late next year of "remote tower technology," allowing controllers to be based elsewhere in Australia – and conceivably, overseas – working with images and data transmitted by broadband or fiber optic cable. If the scheduled trial is successful – in operational terms – will it take skilled people out of the town? There is a poignant quote from Judith Brett's insightful essay into the depletion of rural and outback communities (Quarterly Essay Issue 42), commenting on the effects of the banks' downsizing from their "imposing historic buildings" in the main-streets: "Rural towns were dismayed. Since the founding of these towns, banks had brought in new families: bank managers to join the local golf club and chair fundraising drives, and tellers to play in the football team and marry their daughters. Now all they had was an ATM."
The other argument in this context worth keeping an eye on is about the high speed broadband: Will it bring expertise to the bush, or take it away?
By ESTELLE ROBERTS
(MOZZIE BITES is on holidays)
Stuarts Well stole my heart. And kidnapped my imagination. I got big brain, a friend’s term for when...
A soaring bird can take our hearts
with her; in her flight we see an incomparable image of freedom.
Conversely, there is no more potent image of mortal endings than her
fall to earth in death. "Succumbing to gravity" she leaves the airs,
expiring in the space of the earthbound before passing beyond. KIERAN FINNANE looks at Pamela Lofts' compelling series of drawings.
By ERWIN CHLANDA
Alice Springs' leaders are a cosy club, a snobbish hierarchy, drinking the same cocktails and dumping on people daring to highlight their...
By ERWIN CHLANDA
The government urgently needs to get behind Central Petroleum's project to produce "ultra clean" diesel from massive coal deposits in the Simpson...
By KIERAN FINNANE
June 23, 2011
At the recent forum about young people's dreams for Alice Springs, a schoolgirl asked what could be done about underage...
By KIERAN FINNANE
June 23, 2011
The fight against the availability of ultra-cheap wine in Alice Springs has had a win, with Coles Liquor announcing that...