Richardson: What the Frack?
You know we’re approaching silly season when the Conservation Council puts out a media statement endorsing a Liberal initiative and deriding the Labor Government’s snide response to it. But the Opposition’s half-hearted bid for an inquiry into shale gas extraction in the south-east appears to have landed it in Fracking hell.
If you thought Fracking was that racy gyrating dance move practiced by Miley Cyrus at the MTV Video Music Awards (and less successfully by Clive Palmer during a breakfast radio appearance), think again. It refers to the process, otherwise known as hydraulic fracturing, of extracting shale gas by injecting liquid at high pressure deep underground to force open existing fissures.
It appears to be an idea whose time has come, at least given the enthusiastic support it’s garnered from a little-known, occasionally-Australian businessman named Rupert Murdoch, who is wont to drop gentle social media hints that he thinks Fracking is pretty great.
For example, in October 2013 he tweeted: “Has (British PM David) Cameron got no idea of effects of ever-rising power charges on masses? Lose election or stop windmill nonsense , start fracking now”.
And in August this year: “Fracking will make US not only energy independent but cheapest country for industry, homes, etc with massive boost for employment Wake up NY”.
Or, just this week: “NY State, outside city, in miserable condition. Big test for (New York mayor Andrew) Cuomo who could transform vast area with fracking, ignore ignorant Greens.”
Murdoch has interests in Genie Oil & Gas and is a member of the company’s strategic advisory board, but his media dabblings aren’t limited to occasional musings on Twitter; he also happens to own the odd newspaper.
So, for the SA Libs to signal that they have reservations about the extraction method, which is a key to unlocking potentially vast mining wealth, is what Sir Humphrey Appleby used to euphemistically call “a courageous decision”. Not that they’re Robinson Crusoe in their eco-conservatism; Energy Minister Tom Koutsantonis was scathing last year when the (evidently outgoing) Victorian Napthine Government extended a ban on fracking until 2015, while NSW has been similarly squeamish.
So fracking, while not to be confused with Miley Cyrus’s dance moves, is every bit as controversial.
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The thing is, though, the Libs aren’t ideologically anti-fracking. But they are pro-winning-the-seat-of-Mount-Gambier, which has been unusually problematic for them in recent years.
"The Libs then, will champion an inquiry, albeit not very enthusiastically."
I have a regular correspondent from the south-east (well, I say “correspondent”, but the correspondence is exclusively one-sided since, as he has noted himself, I am “totally hopeless at answering a simple letter”), who sums up the sentiment in the area succinctly: “We are told that drilling in the south-east and the potential for fracking is actually quite safe, or pretty safe, or fairly safe, or within the margin of possibilities unlikely to cause any problems to the water table in this area on the balance of our knowledge as we know it. Of course, if they’re wrong and they do contaminate the water table down here, there goes the Coonawarra and a lot of our beef grazing land. But of course, they’re fairly sure they are not wrong.”
Former Liberal mining spokesman Martin Hamilton-Smith told parliament yesterday that the “inquiry” option was nothing but a half-baked compromise between his own push to avoid a fracking moratorium and a partyroom bid to follow other Liberal states in embracing the “Lock The Gate” mantra; a compromise, based on poll-driven panic, to “save the seat of Mount Gambier”.
The Libs then, will champion an inquiry, albeit not very enthusiastically. They didn’t, for example, support a similar push by the Greens to establish an Upper House inquiry. And they moved to debate establishing their own review on a day when parliament will only be sitting if it has enough business to bother so doing, which it doesn’t.
In the meantime, they’ve been roundly critiqued by the SA Chamber of Mines and Energy, whose chief executive Jason Kuchel was once a prospective Liberal candidate.
But, they rather sheepishly point out, the inquiry was an election promise, and while they might not have won Government they did manage to win Mount Gambier. So they’re doing the most decent thing they could think of: pushing for an inquiry, but in a really half-arsed way.
“I don’t think there’s anything that anybody should fear about this,” enthused Steven Marshall in his best “I am pro-mining but also pro-farming and pro-environment and pro-Mount Gambier” manner.
“In fact,” he continued ambitiously, “I think that the companies involved should welcome this because I think it will allow everybody a chance for their information to be put on the table.”
Funnily enough, the companies involved didn’t welcome it.
It is, of course, somewhat consistent for the Opposition to hold election commitments so sacrosanct. Sometimes, at least.
"According to Jay Weatherill, he “didn’t have all the answers” at the election. That, he says, is why he didn’t win by much."
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The Libs’ faux-moral indignation about Labor’s Emergency Services Levy cash grab, for example, has been predicated on the fact there was no suggestion of it before the March poll (perhaps because there was also no suggestion of the Federal budget cuts that prompted the ESL spike).
“There was no mention of this massive tax hike before the recent State election,” raged Marshall in a recent media release. Of course, Labor DID make mention of its not-very-popular carpark tax before the election, but the Libs conspired to block that anyway, because they didn’t like it very much.
Defeating the carpark tax does tend to undermine the Libs’ credibility when they whine that Labor should have come clean about the ESL hikes before polling day, just as Labor’s outrage at having its budget bill compromised after winning the election is tempered by the fact it’s spending a small fortune trying to overturn key budget measures of the democratically-elected Federal Government.
Indeed, so aggrieved is Labor about the whole post-election frolic that it wants a clean slate. According to Jay Weatherill, he “didn’t have all the answers” at the election. That, he says, is why he didn’t win by much. He had SOME of the answers, of course; they were written down somewhere in that ubiquitous glossy brochure he clutched to his bosom throughout the campaign like a frightened child clutches a dog-eared teddy.
But now he has ALL the answers. And he wants the new Governor, Hieu Van Le, to enunciate them all for us at a special sitting of parliament in the New Year. To do this, though, he must first prorogue parliament when the current session expires in early December. Which will, entirely coincidentally, also shut down a raft of committee inquiries potentially embarrassing for Labor – on systemic child protection failures, the Gillman land deal and electoral reform, for instance.
The Premier’s not even coy about this: “I want to sweep the table clear, I want a new agenda,” he says, “(not) all of the quibbles of the past, all of these committees that are agitating old grievances”.
The thing is, though, a self-indulgent ideological frolic replete with medallion-coated police officers and bewigged judges (at a time when the Attorney-General is bemoaning that courts should open on weekends to help process remand prisoners and ease the strain on police resources) is at odds with the austerity era constantly painted by this Labor administration.
The Weatherill Government has generally not been above saving nickels and dimes: it halved the capacity of its VIP suite at the Clipsal, and divested itself of a corporate box at the Entertainment Centre. So the rationale for spending and/or forfeiting tens of thousands of dollars to shut down parliament only to re-open with requisite fanfare in February is unconvincing.
Family First MLC Rob Brokenshire says parliament should only be prorogued every four years, when it is dissolved ahead of a general election, and I’m inclined to agree.
But not Jay Weatherill.
“People are addicted to bad news in this state,” he lamented on FIVEaa radio. “I am sick and tired of the cynicism of people like Mr Brokenshire and sections of the media [ think he means me] that just keep banging on with what’s wrong with South Australia and can’t see what’s right with South Australia.”
He argues that simply because, months on from the election, he’s finally starting to come up with that “bold” agenda he spoke of back in March, he deserves a fresh start to spell it out; at least, once he dots all the ‘I’s and crosses all the ‘T’s.
It will though, he promises, involve “root and branch reform of executive government, of parliament, of our public service, of our tax system, of our economy … it will take people’s breath away”.
I must admit, I’m a little breathtaken already.
Tom Richardson is InDaily’s political commentator and Channel Nine’s state political reporter.
From January 2015, he will report full-time for InDaily.
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