The steelworks at the top

of Spencer Gulf have been struggling for years. They are what has kept the town there alive for years too - but barely so.

We used to travel through it several times a year when we lived in a tiny rural community another couple of hundred kilometres to the west. It was the first "big" town we would come to on our way back to the city. It was where the sealed road began.

You could see it for some distance ahead because the country is flat and rusty brown. The town was big enough to have more than one primary school and a high school. In the intervening years it has grown in size but the steel works, perhaps always under stress, have not grown with time. 

There has been more than one attempt to "save" them but, even without our appalling record of industrial relations and overly high employment costs, the location is wrong. The government keeps trying because if the works fail then the town fails. It is one of the biggest towns in the state so the economic consequences will be huge.

Fling into this state of affairs an attempt to run the works on "green" energy and we could fail. This failure is so close to certain that we really do need to rethink the entire "green" energy strategy. It is all very well to suggest we can be "leaders" in saving the planet but the reality may be that we are losers instead.  

Someone I know who currently lives there is moving out. She no longer feels safe and is relieved her work is taking her to another part of the country. Parts of the town are, according to her, "lawless".

I wonder if the town will survive. I wonder why there has been no attempt to do two things. Why have they not diversified? Is it because of the union stranglehold on the works themselves? Is it really the case that there are no other possibilities there?  And why do we insist on trying to be "green" with things like unproven "hydrogen" technology when we could be doing it differently? It seems I do not understand anything at all.