Bradfield – Australia 2025

Perhaps it should be set as fixed 3-year terms, not 4.

One big difference between state constitutions and their 4 year fixed terms and the Federal parliament is that the states don’t have double dissolutions or if say in Victoria the upper house has a 4 year term then there is no need. A DD can’t be pegged to a fixed term – should there be a trigger, the government of the day needs the flexibility to call that election. Once elected the Senate does have a fixed term and this basically defines to a large extent when a Reps election can be called. No government now would want to have separate elections. A 4 year term would mean an 8 year senate term which is very long in anyones language. A four year term would hopefully lead to better public policy formulation – the term length is actually more important than whether the Reps term is fixed or not.

Personally, I would like to see the seats of senators who resign, die, take diplomatic posts, etc. in the first half of their six or eight year term go to election at the next senate election – not dissimilar to what happened before in 1977. So if Senator X resigns after 2 years, then 7 senators would be elected with the last have a short term. The political parties sometimes seem to treat senate seats like playthings once they have them. If you are elected for 6 years, stay for 6 years and then not run again if you don’t intend to serve the full term.

@Ben Raue: “North Sydney MP Kylea Tink has not yet clarified her intentions.” Kylea Tink has clarified her intentions, saying that she won’t run for a House of Representatives seat at the upcoming election. With neither Kylea Tink nor Paul Fletcher contesting Bradfield, “One of them could be a serious challenge to Fletcher here” should be updated to “Boele could be a serious challenge to the Liberal Party here”. https://www.facebook.com/KyleaTinkNorthSydney/videos/1691116374768566

@redistributed Why couldn’t we just change it so that Senators are elected for 3 or 4 year terms at the same time as the House of Reps with all 12 elected together each election, like how it works in the states. If that’s in the constitution, hold a referendum at the same time as one for fixed terms and hold them at the same time as an election.

The problem with fixed terms is you either have to endure a dysfunctional Government or you allow a method of dissolving the parliament and calling early elections that the current Government can exploit – see Boris Johnson having the Tories vote for a motion of no confidence against their own government to get an election.

@redistributed, my personal preference is that if you fill a casual vacancy in the senate, you can’t sit in the term after your term expires.

With the senate you u are primarily voting for the party not the individual person. That’s why they don’t require an election to fill the vacancy.

MLV – you can run an industrial plant plant on renewables and storage (pumped hydro and batteries), that’s what large users in central QLD and the Hunter are signing contracts to do. The grid will have gas fired generators as a back up for years to come – that’s the Labor Government’s policy and plan.
You are just repeating Dutton’s crap. Just because he says something repeatedly doesn’t make it true.

And there are lots of jobs in the renewables roll out – the cost savings come in because renewables have a close to zero operational cost – whereas anything that needs a fuel to be dug up, shipped and consumed has a cost. It isn’t that hard.

@ high fuel costs is negible compared to the cost of rewiring the nation with 10s of 1000s ok km of poles and wires. If renewable was so great why hasn’t the whole world jumped on board.

And why doesnt albo put these turbines on the north shore of sydney instead they choose to dump them in electorates that will never vote labor

That last question is a bit silly. You can’t put a wind farm in the middle of densely built-up suburbia. They are huge and require space which is why they are built in rural areas.

Fixed terms should be fixed with only one exemption where a government loses a confidence vote on the floor of parliament.
I don’t think the argument about a bad government holds… I would argue that the Morrison govt was a bad government.
Really that is a decision for the voters in any case.

Simultaneous elections was put to referenda in 1974, 1977 and 1984 an failed every time though in 1977 it only failed because it did not have the 4 states. Each case was that the Senate would serve two terms of the Reps. The fixed term in one house was replaced by no fixed terms for both. If the Reps was fixed – subject to no confidence and the senate was two terms, the senate is also effectively fixed. A DD trigger would also probably need to override the fixed term. However, a cynical government could still go early by calling a DD. who now remembers what the DD triggers were in 1983 or 2016? 1951, 1974 and 1975 were clear. 1987 was the Australia Card legislation or was that just a pretense?

john,
Most of the world has embraced renewables. The exceptions are small island states (e.g., Comoros, Sint Maarten, Trinidad and Tobago) and countries with huge oil reserves (e.g., Libya, Bahrain, Brunei, Saudi Arabia). In 2021, 28% of world’s energy generation was renewable.
In 2022, 83% of new electricity capacity worldwide was renewable.
Complete list of renewable electricity generation by country is available in wikipedia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_renewable_electricity_production#:~:text=China%20produced%2031%25%20of%20global,new%20electric%20capacity%20that%20year.

Lets start at the end – renewables have a huge operational cost. They have a near zero fuel cost, but that is not the same as operational cost which includes transmission, storage, maintenance (severely undepreciated) etc. At the moment, the wholesale price is determined, AFAIK, by the last generator required, and the most expensive of those is batteries. Snowy 2.0 (the grand daddy of pumped hydro) requires $4.8billion of transmission (upped from about $1.3billion when first proposed, god knows what it will actually cost) which is another cost that has to be factored in. I did a really quick and dirty calculation based on that and found the transmission costs to be $130billion – and that will be an under rather than over estimate.

I could go on, but maybe you can see I can think for myself and don’t have to repeat Bonehead Bowen’s crap – just because he says it often enough doesn’t make it true.

But I do take your point High Street regarding companies signing off on contracts for renewables and storage, I think Microsoft has a big one in place for their AI/data centre work.

@trent how bout converting acdog park in marickville to a solar farm then? Because nobody want them in their backyard so they are dumping them in places like Oberon. You could easily line sydney harbour with wind turbines but against they won’t. If solar and wind farms were the best option why isn’t anyone else doing it?

I think you’re clutching at straws with those examples. Green space in inner city areas is scarce, valuable and important for quality of life. Sydney Harbour is a major tourist attraction that brings tourist revenue into the country.

And of course nobody wants a giant wind turbine in their backyard, but that’s precisely why they are not put near backyards. That isn’t political, it’s nothing to do with Labor vs non-Labor seats (since when do Labor even win Sydney’s North Shore?), and it’s no reflection on the value of wind turbines themselves.

It’s just that it’s logical to place wind turbines and solar farms where there is a vast amount of open, unused space that’s away from people’s homes, and is exposed to the elements (wind, sun) that make them productive. And that is out in rural areas.

I’d love to see a dog park that can even fit a wind farm…

And green space in places like Oberon is somehow less valuable? And important for quality of life. I disagree d solar farm. Again they are placing them in if they were really so great people would be lining up to have them placed there. They are simply dumping them there to further their agenda.

Green space is much more valuable in the inner city Darth, basically since there is so much less of it. That is before we get to the fact that even in a very dense area a wind turbine would be the largest structure, and if a blade fell off, more common than you think, then the death toll might be in 10’s instead of at worst a few cows.

However it is also true that one of the big divides we will see in the next few years, in fact might be here now, is between those who agitate for action on climate change at any cost versus those who bear the brunt of that cost.

Who wants a nuclear reactor?
Dutton ?

I think the people in these areas they are dumping these these turbines and farms would disagree that their greens spaces are just as valuable and the best part of building reactors is the infrastructure to support them is already there. They just have to shut down the doal reactors and bring in the nuclear ones.

As I understand it, the wind resource is poor in cities because tall buildings cause turbulence, which dramatically lowers the efficiency of a wind turbine. Wind turbines are most efficient where there is relatively-constant, moderate-speed, laminar (i.e. non-turbulent) wind. Check out a map of average wind speeds at the height of a typical wind turbine tower (e.g., https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/09/Australia_Wind_Power_Density_Map.png), and you’ll probably notice that most of the best wind resources within cooee of major cities are offshore (hence the six “priority areas” declared by the federal gov), little dots on the ridgetops along the Great Diving and Mt Lofty Ranges, and the Western Plains of Victoria. So, I’d say wind power plants are where they are primarily due to economic reasons (good wind resource = higher revenue, cleared farmland = lower construction cost, and near population centres = lower transmission costs), but the ‘fewer people to object’ factor is probably a strong one too. Regardless, the social licence of renewable energy and transmission projects in the areas that host them seems to be a growing political issue that needs to be taken seriously.

John at 9:34am 16/1

That’s an idiotic comment. Firstly “albo” is not putting them anywhere. A statement like that just displays your overt bias. Energy developments (by private companies btw) are subject to the same planning and development approval rules as everything else.

Both this and the past governments have started a process of allowing off shore wind farms. If you can’t comprehend it – offshore wind farms are closer to coastal communities than rural communities in central and western NSW and VIC.

Much of the rest of the world are jumping on board – far more than building nuclear plants. And do you know where the highest concentration of transmission lines are and have been for 40 years ? On the central coast, bringing Hunter Valley coal fired power to Sydney. It hasn’t destroyed their communities…

Residential areas need roof top solar and batteries. If the LNP had actually encouraged that over 9 years we might have a few more by now.

@high Street but the thing is no one wants there except the government. These off shore wind farms are now even putting once safe Labor seat on the central and south coast at risk. Seats like Shortland and Whitlam which were once bankable seats for labor could flip due to the residents anger over these things. No other devolped country is aiming for 100% renewable simply because it is too expensive and realistically impossible to achieve

God, what a bunch of bone heads in above comments (Trent and Watson Watch excepted). its currently cloudy in Sydney yet central and western NSW solar farms are producing 2.732MW of electricity and the wholesale price is hovering between -2c and +3c per kwh because of it. That’s reducing electricity prices to you, the consumer. (btw If you are getting ripped off by your retailer – that’s not the fault of the generators).

Someone above said a battery is the most expensive generator. No – a gas generator is. And if you think renewables have high maintenance cost, what do you think is going to happen at a nuclear power plant??!

No-one is “dumping them” anywhere to further any stupid agenda! Private companies are seeing that current generation is about to retire and seeing the least cost way of installing new supply – I don’t know of one wind or solar farm that has had to be compulsorily acquired – its all been done with the agreement of the landowner. Many land owners thinks its a perfect use of what is, on a square meter basis, low value land – not all rural land in Australia is amazingly productive.

@John – that’s perverse logic. They are “at risk” because Dutton and Littleproud are frothing at the mouth about the windfarms (having discovered the sanctity of whales), when it was the previous LNP government that put in the framework to allow them. Many people in the Illawarra want the off shore wind farm there as is cheap renewable energy close to their industrial base.

And we aren’t really aiming for 100% renewable energy – the current target is 83%. The last 5-10% will be hard to achieve because yes, there are some system difficulties and it will be more expensive. Buts that’s a situation for 10 – 15 years time. By then, you know, smart people incentivized to solve the problems might have solved them – who would have thunked it?

I understand community concerns about the impact on amenity of a wind or solar farm. But I doubt they would prefer an open-cut coal mine, gas wells or nuclear power plant, which all pose significant safety risks (for example, coal mines poisoning waterways or gas wells accelerating bushfires) as well as being as much of an eyesore as a wind or solar farm. These anti-renewables campaigns are at best NIMBYism and at worst shadow fronts for the coal and gas lobby.

83% is effectively 100% without backups. Noone is saying we don’t want renewables we want a mixture of renewables and base load power in this case nuclear power. Noone power bill has gotten ne down since the Labor govt came to power and most peoples has gone ne up. It’s the least cost because the government is heavily subsidizing sloarand wind power while leaving old coal generators to fall apart and go offline. Recently on “Sydney hottest day” the nsw govt told people not to run their air conditioners and dishwashers because the grid could fail. This is the future under renewables in a first world country we will be rationing electricity because we won’t be able to produce enough electricity to provide around the clock uninterrupted power even during high demand and peak times.

@John, no seats on the Central Coast have ever been “safe-safe” Labor seats. Even the state seat of Wyong would be winnable and Wyong is relatively working-class.

Only Woy Woy is properly safe for Labor because it’s the poorest suburb on the Central Coast that’s full of crime.

No South Coast seats are safe either by the way. They too are bellwethers just like the Central Coast seats (except Terrigal which is a safe Liberal seat and Wyong which is a safe Labor seat).

@np seats in and close Newcastle and Wollongong at a state level are and the federal seat of Newcastle and Cunningham both these cities have key ports and I’d imagine a unionised workforce

If you have high level of renewables caseload is irrelevant – nuclear power is the last thing you need because it has to be kept running continuously at a high level regardless of what other power sources usually cheaper are available.

John,
Are you able to supply a source for your ‘Oberon solar farm’ claim?

@watson sry I should been clarified i said places like Oberon not Oberon itself. They are however wanting to place a wind farms there against the wishes of the residents

John,
Thank you.
Do you have a source for the Oberon wind farm story?watson watch

https://www.9news.com.au/national/blue-mountains-wind-farm-residents-say-wind-farm-proposal-would-ruin-blue-mountains-ambience/18c648e1-6fb1-4b5e-ba0a-3237a50d8d24

Is that windfarm going into one of Oberon’s dog parks?

John,
Thanks for the link – it is much appreciated.

That proposed wind farm has nothing to do with albo.
It is a NSW Liberal / National Party project.

The NSW Forestry Act was amended in 2021 to allow renewable energy projects in softwood plantations. Proposals were invited from industry in early 2023, when the local MP, Paul Toole, was Deputy Premier and Minister for Regional NSW.
The Oberon proposed site is called Black Springs in the following link.
https://www.forestrycorporation.com.au/sustainability/renewable-energy#:~:text=In%202021%20the%20NSW%20Government,energy%20projects%20in%20softwood%20plantations.

Doesn’t matter who. The people who it effects and have to live with it don’t want it. Another reason nobody’s sad Matt Keans is gone

I also find it highly unlikely that it was parroted as according to the website they only got their investigative per it from forestry corp of nsw in may 2024…….a year after the minns govt came to power

https://www.thepineswindfarm.com.au/about-the-project

The liberal party onlyamedndd the act in 2021 allowing the possibility

John,
It was the local MP, Paul Toole, who was pushing for wind farms in that area.
In the 2023 NSW state election, he received 79% of the 2pp vote in Oberon – a 15% swing towards him. Doesn’t look like the residents of Oberon were opposed to the Nationals proposed wind farms.
The opponents are: David Littleproud – MP for Maranoa in Queensland, and Ross Cadell – Liberal Party Senator from Newcastle.

Here is Paul Toole, when he was Deputy Premier, spruiking the benefits of wind power. The current NSW National Party leader, Dugald Saunders, also weights in on the benefits of renewables.
https://www.governmentnews.com.au/shortlist-announced-for-central-west-rez/

John,
Apologies, I was typing / searching when you made the previous two posts.

Here is an article from 12 July 2022.
The first sentence says:
“The New South Wales Forestry Corporation is now seeking formal proposals for large scale renewables and storage in its state-owned pine forests after receiving more than 2.5GW of proposals for wind farms alone”.
The Liberals & Nationals amended the act and then sought proposals to build wind farms.
https://reneweconomy.com.au/nsw-forestry-gets-2-5gw-of-wind-project-proposals-for-state-pine-forests/

If getting off topic was an energy source, we have enough in this thread to power Oberon.

@John, Newcastle and Wollongong are not on the Central or South Coasts.

Though as @Real Talk has said, this is getting off-topic.

Does anybody think that best the preselection candidate for the LNP in Bradfield, cardiologist Professor Michael Feneley can win? He would be a useful addition to the House of Reps with all those overweight Nationals from Queensland in the range for heart attacks? I understand Dan Repoli is a trained nurse who can use the infibulator under his direction?

If they pick Feneley Boele might as well start measur