Canem Malum,

That “someone” would be me, only you have misinterpreted what I said. Just because governments have always funded large-scale products, that doesn’t mean they’ve funded EVERY large-scale project. Perhaps I should have said that governments have “historically” funded large-scale projects?

Some large-scale projects are unlikely to have ever happened if it weren’t for government funding. Transcontinental railway lines and bridges in particular come to mind.

By the way, your persistent use of emotive terms like "Marxists" and "Marxism" is language designed to evoke an emotional response. Personally, I haven’t encountered a Marxist since my uni days where some of my fellow naive and idealistic students wearing Che Guevara t-shirts would push pamphlets onto me as I passed them.

Hi CM,

Nuclear has an interesting history, but I find the economics of things complicated enough without weaving a whole lot of politics through it. I also find the Marxist thing a bit hard to swallow with keen supporters like Forrest, Holmes a Court, Cannon Brookes and Turnbull. What I can believe is a whole bunch of people beating up the climate change catastrophe in order to secure billions of taxpayer dollars to build massive projects without environmental checks or any due diligence to estimate what the cost might be or whether it would even work. It is like the idiotic and unchecked spending on the "grand project" of a dictator.

The ban on nuclear seems more about protecting the gravy train for the people building the crap than serving the interests of Australians and the environment. Nuclear would be expensive to build, but far cheaper than wind and solar. What is more, it works and offers a future for us and koalas. That's what really gets me: The thought of those greedy bastards destroying our heritage and clubbing koalas so they can get their billions in subsidies and send Australia up a creek without a paddle.

Fester,

Your last comment was disappointing to read. I never pegged you as a climate change denier. I would have also given you enough credit to assume you knew what Marxism was.

John,

No argument that the world is warming, but very skeptical of catastrophists and long term forecasts. History shows that catastrophes tend to come without warning. History is also replete with people warning of catastrophes that never happened. In those cases the harm came to people who took measures to avoid what never happened. You could make a much greater catastrophe attempting to avoid one. I see nuclear as a lesser of two evils, and probably a good thing in the longer term as the technology is developed.

Fester,

Accepting that the planet is warming isn’t saying much, these days. Even the most stubborn deniers now acknowledge this. Reactive positioning is one of the hallmarks of pseudoscience. When did you last hear that warming stopped in 1998, for example?

Catastrophes tended to come without warning throughout history because we didn’t have the knowledge or the know-how to adequately predict them for the vast majority of it. The same goes for catastrophes that were predicted but never eventuated.

Therefore, catastrophes that weren’t predicted at all are in no way analogous to the science of climate change. The same goes for catastrophes that were predicted by religious prophets that never eventuated.

The rubbish that these people read out weighs science. It’s a far right policy to deny. Dutton can do no wrong. After 40 years they still deny.
Abbott won an election built on lies, Nothing of what he said ever seen daylight again, stripped the guts out of internet and it still being patched up today.
Who could ever trust that mob ever.