In Australia, great policy takes years to formulate. Internationally recognised experts are often called-in to lend a hand.

Dear reader,

Imagination and the limitless breadth of human potential are utilised in making great decisions.

we return to our adventure, with Ces and Quent describing how much Australia had changed with the introduction of the decimal currency in 1966. Terry was both shocked and comforted to know that essentially Australia was the same insular complacent country he knew of, when we were set to become a Nuclear Super- power in the 1950’s. He breathed an audible sigh of relief when we told him that nothing had changed on any front except that the mining lobby ran the country more thoroughly than before and that it was impossible for any Australian kid below the age of forty to ever afford a house in a capital city. He was surprised again, and thought, that the Australian dream was under threat, we commiserated and let him know that at the very least, caravan parks offered a template for further accessibility. 

Whilst Sophie, who appeared to have turned back on her rebuttal and was now in furious negotiation with Dutto,  our duo took comfort in describing contemporary Australia. ‘Speaking of housing’, Ces pointed from beyond the rim of their tramcar, ‘ all of this”? Is this a city of the future’?

 Terry wiped his brow and reflectively stroked his chin. From his breast pocket he took out a packet of Craven A, offered us one each, and sighed, “I’m down to my last carton, just as well you showed up, otherwise I’d be down to tea-leaves and the menthol ciggies left behind by the research lab technicians’.. 

‘This’, he pointed below us…

Both men and women are encouraged to express their opinions for a better future.

‘Was to be the inland city of the future. Bigger than Alice, and the world’s first city powered alone by the splendour of NUCLEAR ENERGY! It’s name,  unknown to cartographers and tidy-town sub-committees, was to be called  ‘Radon Springs,’ the first ever integrated Nuclear township, powered by the world’s first ever completely underground reactor designed to last between replenishments for over a thousand years’! He emphasised the thousand years, with outstretched arms signifying what a leap of imagination this project was for Australia as a nation. ‘This was the biggest and it was gonna be bigger than anything ever imagined in public infrastructure’.  We sat jaws agape at the scale and sheer audacity of the vision. 

‘Tell us more Terry’? 

Terry, puffing away on the Craven A told us the story of how Radon Springs, bigger even than Canberra, was created. We could tell there was deep pride in his narrative, something for which he had devoted his entire life to. 

Great ideas are then worked and re- worked, work-shopped and refined into great policy!

Even cultural minorites are given a FAIR GO!

‘After Maralinga and the accidental nuclear fall-out cloud that descended on Adelaide in the late fifties and  early sixties, we started to think of how to create safe cities for a nuclear age.  We had all this stuff left over from the Snowy Scheme, tunnel borers, engineering skills, concreting, water storage, you name it we had all the skills and nowhere to use em. With Vietnam dawning, we needed to keep these skill sets operational, and it was Ming’s brainchild to do something closer to the tests themselves.  And perhaps with the super dynamic of nuclear bombs, we could build something unassailable far beneath the surface. A system of super sized underground cities in which natural light, the air we breathe, the water, food, could be augmented by the boon of Nuclear Energy. To create this vast underground cavern we let a few off. The Yanks detected the activity on seismographs, but we told em it were a few nuclear duds the poms had left over being detonated . After the original clearing of debris, we had a chamber, a couple of miles across and several thousand feet deep. We put the radio active material out in the desert where the Maralinga tests had made uninhabitable after we’d cleared it and all the other material we just shipped to the Nullarbor as ballast for the Indian Pacific Railway. 

Policy that reflects our capacity for innovation and the dynamic of LEADERSHIP!

After clearing the chamber, we set about building what you see below us, schools, hospitals, blocks of flats, housing, theatre, petrol stations and parks, and gardens. The whole thing was to be irrigated from the artesian basin and we even had BHP chip in with an offer to build a monorail from the central underground station, we called it ‘Essington Lewis’, and the other side we called ‘Hancock’, after lobbying from the WA government. 

Every square foot was mapped and detailed by the Australian Army in conjunction with the  British Atomic Agency and the Cheese Board. “The Cheese Board’? we enquired, “well that was a camouflage, after the EU stopped cheese imports from Australia and N.Z, we used a board of enquiry to trans- ship nuclear devices, reactors, plutonium, the whole shebang. Everything had a name to put off interfering troublemakers’.  

Sometimes, if the public imagination falls short, cash incentives are put on the table to stimulate ‘take–up”!

‘You mean journalists? 

 Yeah, that type off the scent. We even had a special development arm, ‘the agricultural implement testing facility’ to help us get larger items under the noses of state governments. It was a federal issue and we didn’t want getting busy body states and environmentalists involved either. For further intelligence, who set up a deep signals directorate fro that bunker over there. When it was completed the population of British and Australian service men and women would prepare themselves for a sub normality after the anticipated nuclear holocaust. They were selected for age, and fitness, and intelligence, for this , he swept his arms from side to side, and his face aglow with an inner rapture indicated his belief in this a new Australia would be born. A new Australian would emerge, he pointed to a distant mural of a native Australian meeting a man in a space suit, the orbit of a boomerang around the familiar stencil of an electron ellipse around a nucleus. The caption read, “re-emerge from the stone-age’!, With Boomerang and Woomera in hand to the space- suited astronaut ‘enter the nuclear age’. 

So that we get the best POLICY OUTCOMES! FOR ALL AUSTRALIANS!

Is this really the future, or is it back to the future re-visited? Find out in the next compelling episode, “The Time’s they aren’t a changing machine”, or; ‘Stuck in a rut, I feel another election coming on’?