It’s time for another Monday Message Board. Post comments on any topic. Civil discussion and no coarse language please. Side discussions and idees fixes to the sandpits, please.
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John Quiggin 
@Ronald Brak
Dunno who they are but they obviously have continuous links to NEM and others. I presume they use smoothing algorithms to get rid of micro spikes and dips. We’ll have to keep shooting the messengers until the right one comes along.
@Hermit
Hermit, actual grid demand according to the NEM can be found here:
http://www.aemo.com.au/
As you can see it is quite different from the empowerme site, or perhaps you can’t see as the empowerme site doesn’t appear to be working at the moment. So which one do you suggest we shoot? The AEMO or the empowerme site?
Thanks to the mysteries of eternal moderation this may be triple posting!
In the Mackay District Court yesterday two (white) guys were released on parole after pleading guilty to dr-gs charges and breaking into a milit*ry property and stealing six g*ns and ammunition. If they were brown……?
Or the (white) man from Derrinallum, Glenn Sanders, who bl^w up his house this April injuring 2 cops and obliterating himself. The news articles at the time casually mention that he often wandered around town with expl*sives strapped to himself. Like you do. Anyone remember the hysteria surrounding that story?
The double-standards are so obvious that one wonders whether we’ve just accepted them.
Thought so.
I couldn’t be bothered trying to work out what words sent the last 3 comments to eternal moderation. Does Jacques work for the NSA?
@megan
If you reply to someone with a hyperlink that’s one link. A second link gets it rejected as sp@m
Words like g@mble and soci@lism, som@ and t@b00 trigger the sp@m trap. A while backI discovered that the name Al|ce also did, which is weird. Strings count so if you said m@lice then the post goes into moderation.
HTH
Thanks Fran.
I know you’ve worked out a lot of the ‘cheats’ and catchwords, but this has me stuffed.
I was trying to “reply” to ‘Sunshine’ at #38 – specifically the first half of the comment about the differential treatment of people who are alleged to have done things, according to who they appear to be rather than the thing they are alleged to have done.
I made reference to a matter – on the public record and reported in the establishment media – in court yesterday in Mackay involving things that go bang and noting the ethnicity (or lack thereof, if you are a shock jock). Originally I tried to also make reference to an event in rural Victoria from April this year involving a man named Glenn Sanders.
My third attempt didn’t even include the usual – courteous – ‘reply’ thing, and none of my attempts included any links. I tried to ‘dumb’ it down and include so much stuffing in place of vowels that the comment was barely decipherable. But still they failed.
As I said, I can’t work out what the bad words were. I can only imagine that the thoughts were, what is the word Orwell would use….?
@Megan
I really think JQ needs to consider a better hosting system. That’s if he wants this blog to keep working. Also, a bit more focus back on economics would be interesting IMO. For example, is economic growth failing around the world? Where is it failing? Where is it not failing? Why? What is going on with all this? Like to hear JQ’s theories.
@Megan
Eventually they do get through so I should be able to see the naughty word.
Maybe I should add ‘gun’ to it?
Nope, that was fine. I can’t wait to see what it was.
Most of these are outside my control. I have removed “Alice” from the automoderation list.
People aware of my posting history here will recall that unlike most Greens, I’m not opposed in principle to nuclear power. That remains my position. I favour a technology-neutral ‘best-fit’ suite of options for each jurisdiction attempting the urgent task of decarbonisation. Where nuclear plants already exist, providing they are in good order and fail-safe then I am for leaving them be. My primary interest is in rapid decarbonisation or pre-emptive carbon neutral technology. I respect those who prefer ‘renewables’ and provided we can get to 100% decarbonisation rapidly by this route I support it.
I read though last night the latest on The EDF Hinckley proposal in Somerset. Since 2007 the likely time at which it would deliver its first power has been everything from 12 years to about 7 years, with each new review pushing back the date of the start. At one point, DECC proposed it starting as early as 2017. That was pushed back year on year and as I write these lines, they are saying 2023.
Imagine if someone keen on decarbonisation in 2007 had fancied supporting nuclear power in Britain, and had pencilled in 2017 as a start date. Jt’s not that hard to do because I was one such. Britain had an existing regulatory framework and engineering expertise in the area. There is no significant opposition to nuclear power. I fancied it being up and running well before that at the time. The head of EDF spoke of people cooking their Christmas dinners on its output in 2017.
Not only that, but the cost has blown out from about $1.10 per watt to about $8 per watt in this time. An inquiry is now in place to see if 2023 is realistic.
Now I never dismissed RE as some of the nuclear enthusiasts do, but had I done so, it wound have been embarrassing. During those years, Britain built massive quantities of wind on budget and on time. Call them intermittent, but they are abating emissions right now and fir at least nine years before Hinkley comes online — at 40% of the Hinckley cost (availability adjusted assuming Hinkley has no further overruns).
Transfer that to here and you can see why nuclear power proposals would need to answer some pretty stiff questions.
@Fran Barlow
Nuclear power is physically and economically self-limiting and those limits are operative now. The nuclear fission plant fleet is about as big as it will ever get. Indeed, it will reduce slowly over time. Nuclear fission power is not viable without massive subsdies and not sustainable due to peak uranium which is about now. Gen IV reactors if they ever happened in significant numbers (highly unlikely) would be at least 20 to 30 years too late to do anything about our energy requirements or GHG abatement. Fission power opponents really don’t have to worry. Fission power will wither away naturally now.
@Ikonoclast
Mantras must an effective way of drowning out facts.
1) I already gave you a link to WNA News about 60 reactors under construction worldwide
2) our own BREE thinks nuclear power will cost the same as gas fired in a few years
3) despite peak uranium some resource rich miners say demand is currently too low.
@Ikonoclast
I’m not convinced about ‘peak uranium’. Certainly it’s hard to imagine nuclear plants being constrained by want of uranium. As things stand, the price for U is low and if new nuclear builds stagnate, as you suggest, then the reserves will be adequate.
If the price of uranium is to climb it will only because new nuclear builds do indeed burgeon, but the cost if the fuel forms such a low proportion of the cost of the electricity that even if it were ten times as expensive, it would make little difference to the costs of running the plant. Interest rate variations are a bigger factor than fuel costs.
Nuclear plants don’t need a lot of uranium so pressure on supply or price seems unlikely in any event, at least on the timeline of the next 30 years.
And self-evidently, if there were pressure on supply and the price did burgeon then fuel fabrication from once-used fuel, or Th232 would be done. That would only happen if you were wrong on the rate of new nuclear builds of course.
These things aside, I do doubt that outside of China (possibly Russia who are reportedly bringing a BN800 fast reactor online in 2015) that new nuclear capacity will be more than a blip on the energy supply map between now and 2030. The build times are too long, and there is no certainty on capex either, so developers are going to find it hard, a decade out, to assess commercial viability. Essentially, short of guarantees by the state, projects won’t attract the capital necessary.
That’s why I strongly favour ”renewables” on the basis that costs and build times are acceptable and predictable and in concert with demand management, energy efficiency, energy usage avoidance and culture change could get us where we need to be by 2025 — mostly decarbonised in stationary supply, and substantially decarbonised in transport.
Many of the big coal fired baseload stations will need to be rebuilt between 2025 and 2035. It would be a massive turnaround to get from 2013’s 64% coal, 2.9% wind and 1.5% solar electricity to a mix that was predominantly low carbon. Some expect next year 2015 there will be more coal and less hydro and gas in the mix… a backwards step in carbon terms. The first of the US approved mini-nukes won’t be tested until 2023.
http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/NN-Federal-funding-agreed-for-NuScale-2905144.html
Perhaps prefabrication and modular construction could accelerate build times for large units.
I suggest there is an uncomfortable third possibility is that we have to keep the old stinkers like Hazelwood going for years longer. Compounding problems may be expensive gas, expensive imported oil and lack of real progress on large scale energy storage. Auto makers may not be able to get electric car price and performance down to fit the needs of average wage earners. Several improbable developments have to happen for all of this to go well.
Ah, the old Hermit is back. I was actually rather worried when you said something positive about renewable energy the other day. I thought you might have been unwell. 😉
Fran, uranium production probably peaked around 1980 at 67,000 tonnes a year or so. So peak uranium was about 35 years ago. Electricity generated from nuclear power is down from its peak and new reactor builds are below the required replacement rate so they will only slow its decline, which will become quite rapid as the existing nuclear fleet is quite old.
@Ronald Brak
Yes, but Ikono is using ‘peak uranium’ in a different sense — the way ‘peak oil’ is often used — suggesting that uranium scarcity will cruel interest in new plants.
If he’s not saying that then what he has posted above is ambiguous.
@Fran Barlow
The third attempt (no “reply” and full of vowel replacement stuffing) got through at #3 above.
The other two seem to have gone down the memory hole.
When eternal moderation is acting silly, i.e. always, I can usually see my “bad” comments (on my own computer) with a heading along the lines of:
your comment is awaiting moderation
But when they’ve been assigned to the hole they disappear altogether and even on my screen it is as if they never existed. ‘Orwellian’ is not hyperbole in this context.
I’m not positive that the wording on the comment that got through is the same as the first two failed attempts – in fact I’m sure it isn’t but not having kept a copy I can’t think of any significant difference apart from the stuffing and not using “reply”.
@Megan
How annoying!
FWIW you have my solidarity. I’ve found it frustrating. I do find the perverse ones interesting though. I wonder how they made the list … Why should som@ be tab00?
I can’t decide if the person(s) who owned, designed and coded this blog host are very odd or very incompetent. I think it is probably both.
@Fran Barlow
Thanks! I think tyr@nny is too.
Som@, in addition to its other meanings, is the brand name of a muscle relaxant. I suspect it’s on the automod list because of pharma-spam, rather like soci@l!sm, which contains the string c!al!s. I wonder if tyr@nny also contains a string that happens to be a pharmaceutical name?
So I’d get eternally moderated for using a word such as “specialist”, which contains that string?
Nope.
There must exist somewhere a list of bad words. Wouldn’t it be helpful to publish the list somewhere such as in ‘comment policy’.
Socialism
Interesting. That didn’t get automoderated. Maybe Prof Q sorted that particular one out.
Maybe he did sort out ‘socialism’. Has he fixed Leninism?
Cool … That one used to trip the filter at LP (same BlogMaster) all the time.
Somalia?automoderated
Well, Som@li@ still ends up in eternal moderation.
It was the use of that word that tipped me off to it. I identified it with a variant of a crudely iterated quasi boolean sort.
I excluded the parts containing words that had never tripped moderation before and divided the remainder in half, posting that alone. If the post passed the spam trap, then I’d post the first half of the remainder. If it failed then I’d divide the first string in half and post the first half of that. Rinse and repeat until only one word remains.
I eventually got down to som@ …
Fran, yes, Ikonoclast is using peak uranium in a different sense than I am. But the marginal new nuclear power plant is not constrained by a lack of uranium. The retirement and/or failure of older reactors wil see to that. Uranium prices are not that high and one additonal plant is not going to have much effect on them. For example, when the dozen or so nuclear plants that are actually under constrution in China are completed, and the not the extra ones that are underway in imaginationland, if they decide to build one more reactor it is not going to be constrained by a lack of uranium. If they decide to build a million more, then yeah, they’re going to have to consider where they’re going to get their nuclear fuel from.
@Ronald Brak
I have posted a lot of links to data on uranium reserves. That was in various earlier threads. The gist of the peer reviewed scientific data is this;
(a) The current fission reactor fleet will substantially deplete U reserves by 2050 plus or minus about 5 years;
(b) This holds true whilst most fuel cycles are once-through and a few are twice through (the current situation); and
(c) There is no realistic prospect of Gen IV reactors or multi-use fuel cycles in the next 30 years on a scale that would make any difference to these limitations.
Yes, I get that the economics of fusion reactors are bad now. I am just adding the point that U will deplete also with just running the existing fleet and having a few more finish building while a few also retire. It’s a double-whammy.
Prices of U are irrelevant in the sense that a final physical limit exists. Prices are relevant to the path to the final physical limit and are also relevant to possibly abandoning the fission path.
China is working on reactors, both molten salt and the heavy water type, that can use thorium, depleted uranium and reprocessed uranium fuel. Then there are the fast neutron or breeder type reactors such as Beloyarsk 4 in Russia. At some point the UK will have to decide what to do with its 120 tonnes of plutonium; current options include breeders, heavy water and diluting the plutonium to mixed oxide for conventional re-use. By the way there is a speck of a plutonium product in most smoke alarms perhaps just inches away.
Since fuel cost is only a few percent of reactor opex (compared to ~50% for combined cycle gas) depending on type it should prove economical to get uranium from dilute sources, some suggest even seawater. We’ll either have 4th generation fission, fusion or economic collapse by the time we’d get that desperate.
A refresher on the approximate numbers
current world power use 17 TW = 14 fossil + 3 nonfossil
mid century power use 25 TW = 5 fossil + 20 nonfossil.
Hermit, do you think the empowerme site might be including electricity exports by South Australia in its demand profile while the AMEO isn’t? This should be easy enough to check. We just have to wait until Victorian wholesale electricity prices are clearly lower than South Australian prices.
Ikonoclast, the deposit at Olympic dam alone could meet current uranium demand right now for around 40+ years. Since the nuclear fleet will be a shell of itself by 2050 Olympic dam could probably actually meeet the demand for uranium untill the end of the world. Of course whether or not the Olympic dam deposit is economical to mine depends upon the price of uranium and the associated copper. And the uranium price will stay high enough for someone somewhere to meet demand, whatever it turns out to be, unless you think the following situation is likely:
HINKLEY C CHIEF ENGINEER: Finally! After 32 billion pounds and 16 years of construction we’ve finally turned on the reactors!
HINKLEY C PURCHASING OFFICER: Madame! The cost of uranium has just risen from 0.3 pence a kilowatt-hour to 0.35 pence a kilowatt-hour!
HINKLEY C CHIEF ENGINEER: Okay everyone! Shut it down! We can’t aford to run it any more! Get everything stowed for the decomissioning crew and then I’ll see you down the pub for one final pint.
What about psychosomatic?automoderated
@Ronald Brak
Which peer reviewed scientific studies do you base your claim on?
Check out the Gauardian article: The coming nuclear energy crunch.
A study by Micheal Dittmar, based on an analysis of global deposit depletion profiles from past and present uranium mining, forecasts a global uranium mining peak of approximately 58 kilotonnes (kton) by 2015, declining gradually to 54 ktons by 2025, after which production would drop more steeply to at most 41 ktons around 2030. … a peer-reviewed study, published in the journal Science of the Total Environment, which concludes:
“This amount will not be sufficient to fuel the existing and planned nuclear power plants during the next 10–20 years. In fact, we find that it will be difficult to avoid supply shortages even under a slow 1%/ year worldwide nuclear energy phase-out scenario up to 2025. We thus suggest that a worldwide nuclear energy phase-out is in order.”
Study author Dr. Michael Dittmar is a nuclear physicist at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology.
Sorry, Ronald but I believe the specialist nuclear physicist working is his metier not you on matters of uranium supply. Heaven knows where you pulled the Olympic Dam claim from… probably from their managerialist propaganda.
@Hermit
Or maybe even renewables with storage. Who knows? 😉
WESTERN MINING 1973: We have discovered a small deposit of uranium and copper. Enough for one large mine that will beome one of the largest mines in Australia, but not large enough for any expansion beyond that.
BHP 1973: Lie and say it is a huge deposit!
WESTERN MINING 1973: Why would we do that?
BHP 1973: In the future we will become partners on the venture and we will continue to lie about how much uranium there is! It will encourage countries to build nuclear reactors and then we will make a fortune selling uranium to them! Uranium that we don’t have!
WESTERN MINING 1973: That is brilliant! But what about the geologists who know the truth?
BHP 1973: Let them know their jobs depend on toeing the company line.
WESTERN MINING 1973: But most of them will have retired by 2014.
BHP 1973: I’m sure they will have forgotten all about it by then. Nothing can stop our evil plan that makes no sense!
WESTERN MINING 1973: But won’t we be expected to eventually expand our operations if we say the deposit is huge?
BHP 1973: Don’t worry, we’ll talk big about expanding our operations, but then we’ll engineer a global financial crisis in say 2008 to give us an excuse not to.
WESTERN MINING 1973: Do you promise not to let anything slip when we buy you out in 20 years time?
BHP 1973: Not if you won’t squeal when we take over your whole company in 2003!
WESTERN MINING 1973: It’s a deal!
Michael Dittmar stated that world uranium production in 2009 would only be 44,000 tonnes. Brian Wang disagreed and so Dittmar made a bet with him that it would be under 47,383 tonnes. It was actually 50,572 tonnes. He lost.
@Ronald Brak
I haven’t seen any references to peer reviewed scientific data and analyses from you yet.
According to the partisan and pro-nuclear World Nuclear Assosciation uranium production has risen from 36,036 tonnes to 58,394 tonnes in 2012. (I assume they mean “tonnes” although nowhere on the table does it state the unit of measurement. That’s very poor in itself.)
However, what such a table VERY DISHONESTLY HIDES is that peak uranium mining production occurred in 1978-79 at about 66,000 tonnes. This has never been exceeded since. With a great effort and many new suppliers (Kazakstan etc.) this past peak MIGHT be briefly exceeded again, bringing peak uranium forward to about 2015-20. But as of writing peak uranium occurred 35 years ago.
The graph I got this from has a WNA stamp on it but I cannot find it on the WNA site now. I have seen other similar graphs.
Dittmar’s study stated “Using this model for all larger existing and planned uranium mines up to 2030, a global uranium mining peak of at most 58±4 ktons around the year 2015 is obtained.” He is obviously referring to the new peak after the saddle between the 1979 peak and now. His predicted peak has not yet been falsified by 58,394 tonnes in 2012. I don’t have 2013 figures.
The bet you quote is irrelevant. It’s a point-in-time bet not a trend bet. Production can “chatter” over individual years. The long term trend is what is important. Dittmar has rigorously examined world uranium reserve claims, their recoverability and has mathematically modelled the possibilities for the trend. It’s not a perfect prediction but it’s the most calculated and scientific prediction made on this topic that I know of as a layperson. You still haven’t stumped up a single study or source for your claims.
We are on the same page re solar power. Whether nuclear power declines for reasons A, B or C or a combination thereof is admittedly a bit academic. However, I find that the inability to conceptualise limits and thus to deny them is very broad based extending even into the ” enlightended left” and among the otherwise scientifically literate. This inability to conceptualise real limits is almost universal among economists.
@ RB at this stage I’m assuming the empowerme.org.au site is largely accurate. A test for over or under accounting would be annual graphs of state power production that we can add up.
@ TM I doubt that fast depreciating lithium batteries will store Gwh of electricity. It’s like needing to build something with bricks and only having marshmallows. Australia’s daily electricity demand is 249,000 Gwh/365 = 682 Gwh of which NSW pumped hydro can store ~5 Gwh I believe. If lithium batteries cost $150m per Gwh (Tesla’s objective) and we wanted to save a week’s worth of power (Germany’s objective) the required capex would be $716 bn. Then add the cost of a large overbuild of renewables then add 40% for electric transport. That’s why we’ll keep burning coal.
@Hermit
We don’t need a week’s worth of lithium battery power. We only need, perhaps, about 36 hours (which we’d do with pumped storage because other measures– demand management, V2G storage, and other conventional back up would be adequate to meet LOLP and even the conventional back-up would be used too infrequently to be a serious constraint on abatement.
You mention the cost of EVs in demand, but of course these are also, directly and indirectly, a potential means for storage of excess output from all sources, including intermittents. Grid-connected vehicles and their demurred batteries sitting in storage could themselves be adequate to extend unused PV capacity to the 16.00 –> 21.00 time slot, and thus preclude the need for either more grandiose overbuild or extra-storage. Assuming people hope to trade this power with advantage, it’s in their interests not to be frivolous with how much of it they use personally. So while there can be no doubt that EVs will increase the call on the grid greatly, there will be substantial cost offsets. Let’s also keep in mind that each of these will be displacing demand for refined petroleum which is a cost ultimately on each vehicle user. If they are being economical, taking public transport and using their EV’s to trade with the grid, they are probably going to spend less on transport than now, proportionately.
We could have our gas or coal plants at ‘black start’ for almost all of the 8760 hours per year, and wear the cost of maintaining them in readiness for a tiny fraction of the cost now and still be 99% decarbonised in stationary energy. We could then use a drawdown technology — like algae ponds, to such whatever emissions we couldn’t avoid right out of the atmosphere.
That’s why we won’t necessarily have to keep burning high volumes of coal, or do harm from the trivial amounts we did burn.
I do wonder why you insist on being so unnecessarily pessimistic about the options. Nobody pretends it will be easy or cheap, but it’s not impossible. The technology exists to do it and we can afford it, though we will need to reprioritise and rethink our connections with energy supply. The culture will need to change. Your ‘broken record’ on this sounds less like salutary caution or a desire for a hawkish decarbonisation stance (which as you’d know, I hold) than a rather maladaptive ‘we’re all doomed’ which only serves to diminish the will of others to press on in making decarbonisation their most important public policy priority.
Please understand that if we get this done, it won’t be because we invent some new technology or radically improve an existing set of technologies, as helpful as those things are. It will be because the demand from working folk has become nearly ubiquitous, incessant and strident. Carping and negativity are far more serious threats right now than woolly optimism.
I assume that Murdoch’s photoshop of Lambie here is supposed to humiliate her
http://twitter.com/MattCunningham4/status/536125597521821696/photo/1
Not sure it does. If I were Lambie, I’d frame this and stick it on the figurative mantelpiece. I might use it in my next election campaign.
What’s not to like about being presented as … um … an action figure who doesn’t take crap?
Normally you have to spend your own PR dollars to get publicity like that.
@Hermit
Hermit I agree with RB, the empowerme site seems rather strange. They provide very little information so it’s hard to know what the data means, but there are some obvious questions. For example, the so-called demand pattern seems to vary widely between states, with some having obvious troughs in the early hours of this morning, while others, like Victoria, have an apparent almost straight line of demand. Unless you think we’re all party animals who never go to sleep here, why would that be? Possibly it’s a graph of power generation rather than ‘demand’, which I would take to mean usage?
Also the list of market participants doesn’t include any solar, from what I can see, but they show it in the graph (usually very small amount) So is that an estimate of roof top solar, or what?
Also, Victoria, which has about 3 and a half times as many people as SA, is shown as having a demand six times as high as SA. Why would that be? A thought might be that roof top solar is suppressing apparent ‘demand’ in SA (which in turn would suggest that solar is not actually being fully measured in the graph, because it’s currently showing less than one MW of solar in SA)?
I think there are too many unanswered questions with the site to take is as a good measure.
@Fran Barlow
I was prepared to cut Senator Lambie some slack earlier on. I even thought her tongue in cheek comment about how she liked her men was funny, good satire and a back-at-yer to all males objectifying women.
Now though, power appears to have gone to her head. She is becoming quite erratic. Let me also say that power has gone to Tony Abbott’s head too and he has become extremely erratic. Actually, Tony was always extremely erratic and with a tendency to violence. His village idiot performance at the G20 was priceless in a hilariously cringeworthy way. I add the Abbott rider because I fear being flamed as a sexist as soon as I criticise any aspect of a female politician’s performance.
@Fran Barlow
What do you think we will use for heating in the southern states, Fran? Gas isn’t ideal from an emissions POV, and is predicted to rise in price sharply. Wood burners have improved I believe, but are still not ideal from emissions or health POV. Solar just won’t do it in winter in Victoria – huge fan though I am of solar (from my 1.5kw panels I generate more than I need for nine months, but not in June -August, and I am a careful user of heating). I have heard about heat exchange technologies, but I assume they are very expensive, and also unsuitable for retro- fitting.
Possibly wind might be the answer, but in Victoria that would necessitate a very large rapid investment in wind, to cope with the demand peaks.
Of course I am only talking about household usage here. I realise that’s less than half of the usage (about a quarter is it?), but I guess I’m influenced in my thinking by my belief that we will have to ‘de grow’ in some ways (even though JQ doesn’t accept it). My sense is that if we have to, we can do without a lot of stuff produced outside of households, but we can’t do without some kind of heating, without serious health consequences especially for the vulnerable groups.
Tony McMichael (RIP) thought that death rates in Victoria would actually decrease for a while with global warming, due to the reduced numbers of people dying in winter (though they would be overcompensated by heat related deaths in the not too far distant future). Similarly I guess a possible benefit of AGW for us in the southern states is that we won’t have to heat our homes so much in winter (but again, the way we’re going, that will be cancelled out by increasing use of AC in summer).
Anyway I guess the possibility of increased investment in wind power is one more reason to hope for a change of government in Victoria this Saturday. I really hope in fact that we see not just a change of government, but several Greens elected and perhaps holding the balance of power in one or both houses. Which is why I am definitely going to vote this Saturday in my inner north electorate of Brunswick! Definitely people should vote!
@Ikonoclast
Ikon, if it makes you feel better, the only time I’ve thought you were sexist was in your over-the-top criticism of Julia Gillard, and that was because (as I kept trying to tell you at the time), even if you disagreed with her, she is a decent person, and, the over-the- top criticisms you and others made of her were against your own best interests. All they were doing were increasing the chance of an Abbott victory.
One day you will understand. I’ll probably be dead by then, but I can but hope.