Aussie elections open thread

Here's a thread for anyone who wants to discuss the Australian election result. What does it mean?

Comments

[kellydown]

Fair enough. It does bemuse me how people living in a landscape crisscrossed by roads and railways, fences and hedges, with a network of pipes and cables beneath their feet, get so terrified of drillers making a hole in the ground which will leave less of a footprint than a couple of crusty caravans.

[johanna]

Athelstan - people who moan about a bit of mining in the Kimberley region have no concept of how vast and largely untamed it is. To give some perspective, a single, huge, open-cut mine up there has about the same footprint (relatively) as one of those little fracking stations has in the UK - probably even less. You can fly or drive for hundreds of miles up there and not see a single sign of human activity.

The anti-mining lobby really just hate mining per se, just like the anti-frackers in the UK. It's a matter of principle for them, quite unrelated to facts.

[DocBud]

We need 150 David Leyonhjelms in the lower house and 76 in the senate:

http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2013/s3844843.htm

DAVID LEYONHJELM: We're a libertarian party, a small "l" liberal. So we're in favour of low taxes, less bureaucracy, smaller government, less expenditure. So, the issues to us that matter are reducing taxes, government getting out of the way, getting out of your pocket and off your back. So we'll support anything that reduces taxes and we'll support anything that increases our liberty.

LEIGH SALES: So you would obviously then be in favour of the carbon tax being repealed?

DAVID LEYONHJELM: We would. We would definitely support that and the mining tax. But we are not in favour of the Coalition's policy on Direct Action on climate change, for example. It's just a large amount of money down a black hole which will achieve nothing.

[Hector Pascal]

Athelstan

I've spent a lot of time in the Pilbara, as well as a fair amount of time around Kalgoorlie, Broken Hill and Mt Isa. Some of the mines are enormous, but they are pinpricks wrt the scale of the regions, let alone the continent. In comparison, the WA wheatbelt is comparable with the area of western Europe, and has been essentially clear felled.

Johanna is right:

The anti-mining lobby really just hate mining per se, just like the anti-frackers in the UK. It's a matter of principle for them, quite unrelated to facts.

The anti-miners have a visceral hatred of "big business", mining is just the metaphor. The real environmental horror story in WA is agriculture: clearing and salination. However, farmers are "battlers", so that's OK.