@Wiggles
@aussie.zoneDid a quick google search of his name, turns out his time at News Corp was limited, and it didn't end on good terms
Early on Friday morning, News Corp Australia announced that Williams had resigned, just 20 months into the job. In a letter to staff, Williams thanked his colleagues, while admitting that "the issues encountered have at times been frankly really confronting". Confronting, indeed. In his short and tumultuous tenure, Williams had managed to not only alienate some of the company's most senior editors, most notably Chris Mitchell, editor of The Australian, and Paul Whittaker, editor of The Daily Telegraph, but infuriate Lachlan Murdoch, the man who had originally got him the job. "News Corp might be a publicly-listed company run out of Delaware, but there's never any mistake that you are working for Rupert," former Sunday Telegraph editor Neil Breen says. "It's a family company. You run it the Murdochs' way or you don't run it at all."
The source of the above quoute: https://www.smh.com.au/business/companies/making-the-wrong-enemies-how-williams-was-cut-down-at-news-20130809-2rnsx.html Which was a Wikipedia citation: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Williams_(media_executive)
If he managed to anger them so much while he was employed by them, hopefully he can anger them even more de-shitifying the ABC.
I find it highly hypocritical that while the LNP were fear mongering against China they enabled them to become the global leaders in PV manufacturing which turned into a $50 billion annual return (I think that's the amount/rate the article cited) for them, which instead could have been flowing back into Aus.
It's also would have created thousands of jobs, you know, the thing the coalition were constantly proclaiming they were always working to create. Unless they meant creating jobs by casualising the work force so everyone could work fewer hours for each employer but he the "opportunity" to have multiple, lower hour jobs.
Considering
Only 1% of Australian taxpayers own nearly a quarter of all property investments across the country, amid concerns over escalating rates of wealth concentration.
Data provided by the Australian Taxation Office has revealed the extent of that concentration, with more than 7% of property investors – or 215,321 people – accounting for 25% of all property investments.
That 7% also have three or more interests in investment properties across the country, with 1% of investors – or just 19,895 people – currently holding six or more investment interests.
And that is only the top 1% of tax payers (which is only 7% of investors), I can't imagine what percentage of property investment is owned by the top 10% of tax payers.
No doubt, but steel production produces a lot of pollution as well. It will be interesting to see the progression of green steel manufacturing tech and battery tech vs one another over time, even hydrogen tech. Its a tough choice because at any point we could see a major breakthrough in one of them making all the others relatively less cost and environmentally sound options.
So I've been reading up on this topic a bit more and I came across this
Problem Australia’s interstate freight rail network comprises many long sections of single track. This restricts the number of train paths, reducing rail’s competitiveness with road, and hindering rail’s ability to meet growing freight movement demand. The interstate freight rail network needs to be enhanced to accommodate growth in the freight and passenger task, and improve efficiency and safety.
On the bright side it is a proposal to upgrade a lot of the rail corridors to support more freight than we have currently. Though it was added in 2016 and is still only in the 'potential investment options' phase
Yeah true I didn't even think about batteries or hydrogen as diesel replacements for trains. The up to 6MWh of storage your article quotes for the short distance hauls sounds like a lot of storage, but I guess there is a considerable amount of surface area at the bottom of a locomotive that could be filled with batteries, and if each locomotive can't hold enough storage to pull the load, you can just add another locomotive to the train to make up the difference.
Unfortunately we don't have a rail freight network that either works well or reaches every township in Australia, and until we do encouraging the switch from ICE road haulage to EV road haulage is the best way to reduce transport industry emissions.
For a lot of the more rural towns (or a least for the ones I know of) that do have rail connections, they are only accessible using diesel locomotives as there is no electricity network set up to power electric trains. So if we don't want to introduce more emissions from rail freight we would have to electrify the whole rail network.
Realistically we should be building rail and allowing EV trucks to be more accessible, but Australia is a big place, building all that rail infrastructure will take time. A good stepping stone would be to build rail connections to regional urban centres and then have trucks distributing it to the surrounding towns, but even building that much rail will take time. And that's just the construction. The amount of time it would take to secure the land corridors for the rail would be considerable alone. AEMO have been having a difficult enough time securing land rights to build transmissions networks across properties
This actually seems pretty positive, but I guess also demonstrates how responsible Howard is for helping set in motion Australia's apathy towards environmental destruction, especially when it gets in the way of fossil fuel operations.