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Read more about the article De-privatising the power industry
Liddell Power Station. Photo by Ron Morrison.

De-privatising the power industry

Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews is right about electricity generation and supply. The system built and maintained by the state with public money should never have been sold to private investors. And his conclusions hold true not just for Victoria but for NSW. I well remember sitting in the office of the editor of The Newcastle Herald, during the inglorious tail end of a long string of Labor governments, listening to ALP heavyweight Michael Costa trying to sell the benefits of privatisation. He wanted positive coverage in the paper, and when reporter Ian Kirkwood pointed out some…

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Henry Leighton Jones: more than just monkeys

Dedicated to my dear friend, the late historian Dulcie Hartley, whose long-time fascination with Dr Henry Leighton Jones led to many interesting discussions and many lines of research. By the 1920s when Australian doctor and dentist Henry Leighton Jones heard the news that, in far-off Europe, a highly respected surgeon was apparently revitalizing the energy of ageing men by grafting onto their testicles pieces sliced from those of baboons, chimpanzees or monkeys, he was himself already 60 years old, single, and missing a kidney. Not that he was, by all accounts, frail or sickly. Far from…

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Lost pipeline, lost lifeline

So the Nordstream pipelines were sabotaged. One of them, Nordstream 2, was pretty much brand-new, and was built with Russian and European money to take gas from Russia to Germany via the bed of the Baltic Sea, without having to pay transit fees to Ukraine. Nordstream 2 followed Nordstream 1, which was already providing Europe – especially Germany – with immense volumes of cheap gas and thereby underwriting European industrial production, energy security and prosperity. America hated Nordstream 2 from the start and tried hard to stop it happening. It argued that Europe was making itself…

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