Seems like we’re in a
HYDRO Tasmania’s admission this week that dam storages have fallen to “below the prudent storage level” got even better when the government told us there was no cause for panic.
Premier Jeremy Rockliff said our energy security was “not at risk”.
But imagine flying at 10,000 metres and the pilot comes on and announces, “Folks, there is no need to panic.” How would you feel?
And when the assurances come from a government that for decades has specialised in porkies, deception and doublespeak, what do you believe?
I mean, this is the same mob, when Forestry Tasmania ran out of your money, they simply changed the name of the old loss-making outfit.
Sustainable Timber Tasmania.
Mission accomplished. I decided to write about this subject when I was up at Bronte Lagoon early in the week. That lovely lake was once one of the finest trout waters on the Central Plateau, but the Hydro pulled the plug yet again, just days before the opening of the trout fishing season. Bronte had been reduced to a muddy bog stretching towards a distant residual lake.
The government still advertises Tasmanian trout fishing, but do they really give a dam(n) about it beyond the odd pic of a minister awkwardly holding a fish?
The apparent careless disregard for our once celebrated trout fishery shows.
Over the years fewer Tasmanians were buying licences to fish, and most of my mainland mates have been going to New Zealand.
It’s doubtful that the
Tattslotto-style release of 20 tagged fish worth $2000 each will attract the lucrative end of the angling market.
As you read, over your porridge this cold morning, I will be wading through the mud at Bronte Lagoon to find the water.
A glass-half-full politician might tell me, “What are you complaining about? There’s less water separating the fish.”
Sadly, it’s not like that. Even if they filled the lake last night for opening-day cosmetic purposes it won’t fish well for weeks, maybe months. And repeated draining will severely interrupt the breeding cycles of fly life and frogs.
Local fly fishermen say Bronte Lagoon never fully recovers because the dramatic draining happens too often.
This hurts related businesses at nearby Bronte Park. Accommodation, trout guiding and the local shop all suffer when they experience what Shane Hedger at the Bronte Store describes laconically as “the Bronte Tide”.
Then, even before I started writing this column, along came a cartoonist with a picture (Mercury, August 2, pictured inset) worth a thousand words and stole the show.
Jon Kudelka nailed it with his “Are you a ‘dam is 37 per cent full’ or a ‘dam is 63 per cent empty’ person?”.
NOT A LOT LEFT for me to say beyond, in the wake of federal intervention in the sorry affairs of the Tasmanian Labor Party, Opposition Leader Bec White seems to have taken off the gloves.
Actually opposing, she said: “The dams are low again, they’ve been pumping Tasmanian power to the mainland at a time when Tasmanians are paying more for their power here than they should be.”
Bec is obviously a glass-ishalf-empty kind of gal, and that’s how you should be in opposition. Meanwhile, the Minister for Energy, Guy Barnett, seemed to let slip last week that we need to pay a bit more for our power so that our public servants can be paid.
Well, that’s a good cause. I especially want to see that bloke who came up with the name “Sustainable Timber Tasmania” keep his job. I assume it’s a bloke because women generally aren’t quite so silly.
I want to know, at the end of this cold, dry winter and into a hot, dry summer, what reassuring new name he can conjure for a waterless Hydro Tasmania.
NICHELLE NICHOLS,
the African-American actress better known as Lieutenant Nyota Uhura, the communications officer on the Starship Enterprise, died this week.
In the US the Nichols sci-fi character is commonly credited with sharing the first inter-racial kiss in the television universe. In Season 3, Episode 10, of Star Trek, she kisses Captain Kirk, played by white actor William Shatner.
These days a starship commander committing such a sexual impropriety with a subordinate would be beamed down for trial or just tossed out of the ship’s airlock.
But it was 1968 and race was the issue.
Nichelle Nichols became a poster girl for the civil rights movement. Martin Luther King Jr was her biggest fan and watched the show with his young children.
Joe Biden was a fan too. This week, while zapping the al-Qa’ida leader Ayman alZawahiri with a death ray from space, the US President also had time to praise the late Nichelle Nichols, who