Wong is certainly an improvement on Payne, who should never have been a politician, let alone a Minister: too 'shy' to talk to Australians, let alone actual foreigners.

But sport to engage with the region? Come on! We are not dealing with children. We might as well offer them beads and blankets.

While one can and does agree with the general tenor of the article, one also knows we are not a bottomless pit that is filled with foreign aid. Our continuing aid must help those who want to help themselves with hand-ups not ever more handouts. Chief among those is self-sufficient energy production that provides power for the next 100 years without refueling! That'll support new emerging cottage industries.

That for mine, means mass produced reactors in factories here at home! As SMR MSR thorium.

Every nation on earth has some thorium that they can recover in their shoreline sand or as mineable deposits.

Underground transmission via cling wrap thin under road Graphene, will ensure no future storm will wipe out electricity supply as well as reduce transmission and distribution losses!

China is the world's largest carbon producer with myriad coal-fired power stations! And that level of carbon production will ensure many Pacific islands will sink beneath the waves, even as she seeks new military bases on those that have some mountainous country!

Something that needs hammering home as we do something real to try and prevent some of our family drowning as the oceans rise due to climate change ice melts!

If we stop mining coal and selling to the world? And something forced on us not too far ahead in time! We will need to replace that export with something else.

That something else is super cheap energy transmitted via graphene cored undersea cables, doable if done off budget that could produce way better than coal, volumous incomes for us, rather than myriad price gouging, tax avoiding, profit repatriating, foreign investors! Think about that! Or just think!

Embrace change now or have it forced on us at the worst possible time, economically! Business as usual won't cut it! Nor will selling the proverbial sheep station to foreign investors at fire sale prices!
Alan B.

Correction >Will wipe out should read as will not wipe out<
Alan B.

Just about every pacific island has ideal sights & rainfall to power all their needs with hydro power, nuclear not needed.

Have you noticed Alan that we have considerable difficulty keeping the short extension lead to Tasmania working, as does the UK beeping their very short life line to French nuclear power running. Under sea cables carrying as much energy as we currently ship to Asia as coal is a pipe dream, at least for many decades.

If I were a cartoonist, here is the picture:

A fat Pacific Islander laying on his back in the shade of a palm tree. In his mouth is a huge funnel clenched in his teeth. Standing beside him, short butch hair cut and draped in a rainbow flag around her shoulder, is Penny Wong.
Penny Wong is industriously tipping generous streams of $A into the large end of the funnel.

Surrounding her are a cortège of Australian politicians attended to by a long line of bureaucracy leading across the sea onto the Australian coast and further across hill and dale and finally concluding through the front door of treasury.

On each side of the gravy train of bureaucrats, are camped scruffy hordes of beggars in tents, and behind them across an expansion of car parks, we see a Coles and Woolworths supermarket. At the front doors leaning casually against the glass, two fat industrialist types, fitted out in expensive suits, the CEO’s, smoking cigars and grinning back towards the hungry cold and homeless hordes of the dispossessed.

Dan

Hasbeen, I was a science assitant inside the power industry. You?Graphene is 200 times stronger than steel and is a superconductor. If the cable to Tas was graphene cored the problems referred to would not exist.

As for rainfall and hydro that probably works for the larger islands with suitable topography, i.e., sufficient fall and places suitable for dams.

I'm only referring to those islands that currently rely almost exclusively on diesel.

Back to that cable. We should replace former shut down coal fired power with our own MSR thorium and then enjoy prices as low as 1 cent PKWH.

Instead of miles and miles of transmission lines and problematic cables, place SMR as MSR thorium in the villages and suburbs. And given the inherent passive safety a better solution than the ubicutous transformer stations.

Hydro power requires miles and miles of transmission lines and transformer station that together can add up to around 75% transmission and distribution losses. Losses the average mug consumer pays for. Ditto prices forced on us by overseas situations. Prices we only pay due to foreign control inside our energy providers.

We are going to electrify our transport industry! That being so, why not power it with something we own and at prices we control rather then tax avoiding, price gouging, profit repatriating foreigners. As we try to cope with around a trillion dollars of debt!
Alan B.