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She became famous after Julia Roberts played her in a movie about her life called ‘Erin Brockovich’. In 1993 she took on the Pacific Gas and Electric Company as a legal clerk without much education. The case concerned the contamination of the groundwater in her home of Hinkley, California by Chromium 6 or Hexavalent Chromium which had been used to prevent corrosion in the cooling towers at the local Compressor Station where waste water had leaked into the groundwater…The case was settled for $333 million – the largest in US history. But that is not the end of the story. Clean up continues and we have our own ‘Hinkleys’ in Australia as well in the town of Oakey, Queensland and Williamstown NSW.

Interview from Adelaide Festival of Ideas

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Australia’s fall from grace as a global leader in the fight against dangerous climate change was rapid and inglorious…But any Australian business leaders who think they got away with sticking their heads in the sand should think again…Politicians who fail in their endeavours to combat climate change can simply retire on a taxpayer-funded scheme…For company directors who fail in their duties, the penalties are much more severe, including fines of up to $200,000 and disqualification from holding directorships…”It is likely to be only a matter of time before we see litigation against a director who has failed to perceive, disclose or take steps in relation to a foreseeable climate-related risk that can be demonstrated to have caused harm to a company (including, perhaps, reputational harm),” the advice, commissioned by the Centre for Policy Development and the Future Business Council, titled “Climate Change and Directors Duties” concludes.

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Just watch it, say no more, don’t wait to be nudged:

As the cover of the sixth edition <of The Lucky Country> says, “the book was a wake-up call to an unimaginative nation, an indictment of a country mired in mediocrity and manacled to its past”.  It described Australia as ‘a lucky country run mainly by second-rate people who share its luck’.

A 2015 United Nations report rated progress toward sustainability using a range of economic, social and environmental indicators. It ranked Australia 18th out of the 34 OECD countries: below New Zealand, Canada and even UK. We’re among the worst of affluent countries on such indicators as our per capita resource use and waste production, greenhouse gases released per unit of economic output and our obesity rate. We’re also well below average on social indicators such as average level of education, gender pay difference, parental leave provisions and percentage of women in elected office, as well as economic indicators such as the poverty rate and the degree of inequality… We also get a relatively small fraction of our electricity from renewables, as confirmed by a recent study finding we are twentieth in the world for the share of power coming from large-scale solar. We should be ashamed to see that cold, wet Britain ranks third…Interestingly, the top four countries when ranked by progress toward sustainability were the Scandinavian nations of Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland. The USA ranked 29th – ahead of only Greece, Turkey, Chile, Hungary and Mexico…We should be using the Scandinavian approach as a model for our future, rather than copying the much less successful US approach by selling our public assets and eroding the public provision of essential services like education and health care.

Horne called for a revolution in economic priorities, moving away from being what he called ‘a stupid country’ that exported minerals and farm produce, by investing in education and science so that we would be better equipped for the world of the twenty-first century. Instead we have further run down our manufacturing base, mainly by opening up our markets to cheaper imports produced by cheap labour.

Note – much more could be copied from this ABC show, strongly recommend you buy the book, antidote for John Howard wheedling about non-event  Menzies

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