The stupid thing is that SA could be the SA Saudi Arabia of energy if there was a concerted effort to replace coal and increasingly expensive gas with nuclear. That's not just the Pt Augusta and Torrens Island power stations but the whole eastern seabord. As young people leave Adelaide for the east coast our national emissions will be cranked up. Alternatively they could stay in SA help export clean energy and work in related industries.

Some might point out this is already done with wind power but that source is fickle and highly subsidised. Australia now needs low carbon baseload power and SA has got the goods. Olympic Dam is the world's biggest uranium deposit and now their operations are downsizing when you'd think they would expand if the world was serious about low carbon. For starters we need a national government that intends to phase out coal.

There is little hope for SA. A Labor government is still in power after 14 years. The Opposition is useless - one of its members was wasting his time speaking at, and participating in a rally for gay 'marriage' over the weekend held in Adelaide by a bunch of SA queers who don't know the state government has nothing to do with it. Football ovals and disrupted traffic - while still doing nothing to fix the worst roads in the country - noisy, disruptive car races and weird festivals at the taxpayers' expense are the only things happening.

Simply put free trade agreement that don't completely resuscitate our manufacturing arm are virtually worthless; as is relying on so called service industries!

In the advent of another crippling financial downturn we must get back to an economy that makes things!

The reasons state banks collapsed, is they were used as private ATM's by state governments! Who seemed to think, operating capital was their capital!?

We need two things to resuscitate manufacturing in this country, cheap energy and massive tax reform and simplification; that in the first instance makes tax avoidance/leaning on others undoable!

Cheaper than coal thorium energy needs to be tried and indeed rolled out with micro grids; that together would effectively halve the cost of industrial energy!

Half priced energy would allow us to make the world's cheapest. lowest carbon steel, created in thorium powered one step direct reduction arc furnaces!

Done and dusted tax reform/world's cheapest energy, we'd be almost overrun by the high tech manufacturers of the world.

Anxious to gain all the unbeatable advantages, those two would enable; rolled out necessarily as publicly provided not for profit essential service!

100% of our trade goods are carried by foreign shipping at a considerable trade harming profit!
We have some national shipbuilding expertise and need to build and own a national fleet, to end this harmful to us economic dependence.

And given it's a nuclear powered fleet able to compete successfully with the last vestiges of the fossil fueled variety!

And in so doing massively enhance our trade related advantages! Rapid rail linked to Asia via roll on roll off fast ferries!

We know what's needed? What we need and don't yet have are the imaginative Leaders willing to act to make it real!

The additional tax revenue we would create, would more than make up for running the power stations as competing for custom, break even service provision or shipping!

To sell our manufactured trade goods at a more than competitive margin they must first get to the market place; preferably free from the trade harming middleman profit taker!
Rhrosty.

Yep, the only reason politicians are interested in "service" industries is that most of our kids are too poorly educated, including a large & growing percentage of our university graduates, to be employable in real jobs.

Very few of our 17 year old senior high school graduates can actually undertake an electrical trades, or many other, apprentiship, with out taking a remedial math course first. This was once the route for 15 year old junior high graduates, & they needed no remedial classes to handle the little bit of math & reading involved.

The fact is 80% of our primary school teachers, & almost 60% of high school teachers could not do such an apprenticeship without remedial courses says it all about our future. We will have a nicely rounded sensitive new age population of beggars, not capable of earning a living except as a bureaucrat. Like todays school teachers, many will be proud that they, "don't do math".

Move over Greece, we are coming to join you, & will be there very soon. South Australia god help us, is the template, or trial run perhaps, for our future

Now it be true South Australia is going to hell in a handbasket, but there is always Build Submarines. Is not Adelaide the rightful, nay sacred, home of submarine building?

Like the simple islanders of Tanna, Vanuatu, Adelaide has its own John Frum Cargo Cult movement. "E submarine builder look like you. 'E got white face. 'E tall man. 'E live 'long." *

This is where Adelaidians build ramshakle structures with ramshacke arguments to attract the submarine project that will solve all their problems thereby avoiding the Valley of Shipbuilding Death.

But once the submarine build is underway it is essential to repeat the Air Warfare Destroyer over-time, over-budget standard of efficiency. Now 3 destroyers for the price of 9. Continuous build by misadventure if you will.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Frum

as a small business owner, I suggest dropping all the taxes on small business, I would rather employ another 1 or 2 people instead of the $50000 a year I donate to the state government and councils.

(land tax, payroll tax, council rates, ESL, business name registration, licences etc)

This is what is crippling this state, the highest taxes for the few who actually work.

My business needs at least another two employees, but with cashflow going to this labor government, I am reluctantly putting off the decision to employ more.

It is free enterprise that is the driver of the economy, not govt.

One in 4 on Centrelink, add 126000 state public servants, add 100000 local council employees, (meaning approx. 420000 of our 800000 adult population are not contributing to tax revenue) no wonder we are the poor sister to the other states

Highest taxes on business, yes. Highest power costs in Australia, yes. Most incompetent politicians, yes. Gerrymander, yes. Do South Australians care: not a lot.

Judging on comment here, and the informative doco's on SBS last night...the war against drugs...SA is set in the template for an ice epidemic.
I have not witnessed in my liftime, a period where people around me were so disengaged from politics, abandoning all respect for a political system which appears totally captured by corruption at all levels of Government.

I am not really in a good position to make much comment on Sth Aus but there
is one subject I feel strongly about.
We should not be obtaining 12 diesel submarines !
If we are stupid enough to go ahead, in the event of a real warlike incident
we will get one patrol voyage out of each submarine and they will be then
tied up at the dock for the duration.

Be aware that we import 100% of our diesel and petrol.
One threat to an oil tanker and we will have two weeks fuel supply.
All oil tankers will stop and there is no navy that could protect the 200
tankers that supply Sydney. I don't know how many supply other cities.

A better buy would be three nuclear submarines from the US. Probably cheaper
and would have more sea time.

Nuclear is not clean energy, look at waste definitely not clean. Wave generators, geothermal and solar farmers using sodium towers. Need to examine many options.

Indeed Lamp, I agree but time is not on our side so we do not need to waste
money on already failed systems such as wind and solar.

Obviously wind and solar have not saved SA's bacon. The state also pioneered hot dry rock geothermal which at one stage was supposed to supply large amounts of power. Now the trailblazing Habanero geothermal plant lies unused near Innamincka.

Like or not China and India are going full bore on nuclear yet they don't have much uranium themselves. That's where SA has the advantage. As they say if you've got it use it.

Tas, it was Origin that pulled out of that project.
The only problem I could find out was that there was a corrosion problem.
The government needs to take it up and try and make it work.

Taswegian, SA's electricity connection capacity to the eastern seaboard is very limited. The economic case for nuclear in SA is weak as it is; weaker still with the additional cost of transmitting most of the electricity we generate thousands of kilometres.

____________________________________________________________________________________

ttbn, the political system in other states is just as dysfunctional, but with more money.

____________________________________________________________________________________

Rhrosty, nuclear power (whether from thorium or uranium) would not give us the world's cheapest electricity. As I've told you many times before.

____________________________________________________________________________________

Hasbeen, you claim it's a fact that "The fact is 80% of our primary school teachers, & almost 60% of high school teachers could not do such an apprenticeship without remedial courses". What's the evidence for that?

Whether you like it or not, service industries are where a lot of the money is nowadays.

____________________________________________________________________________________

plantagenet, the federal Liberals promised the next batch of submarines would be built in SA. Now they appear to be trying to renege.

____________________________________________________________________________________

kirby483, cutting land tax would do nothing to help SA businesses; it would just make land more expensive.

____________________________________________________________________________________

diver dan, wasn't that on ABC2?

Ice seems to have hit country Vic and NSW hardest. What makes you think it would be worse in SA?

____________________________________________________________________________________

Bazz, nuclear submarines would be of no use to Australia. They can only operate in deep water, so are useless for espionage.

We could easily synthesise diesel and petrol from coal. It's more expensive than importing it, but technically it's not difficult.

And wind and solar are not failures.

Where Aidan says:

"plantagenet, the federal Liberals promised the next batch of submarines would be built in SA. Now they appear to be trying to renege"

Golly. That's news to me http://gentleseas.blogspot.com.au/2015/07/liberals-in-south-australia-nervous.html .

Pete
Submarine Matters