A Reception For Mike Rann

This evening I attended a reception for Mike Rann at Australia House. And yes, I did bump into people I knew. John Kelly was there, as was Haroon Hassan. The Audreys put in an appearance too, being in town on their two and a half month tour with manager Alistair Cranney. What does it take to get a few folk in business dress to meet Mike? The promise of Vilis pies, Coopers Ale & Pale Ale and some Yalumba wines. For such treats we even stood through Mike’s speech (apparently a very slightly updated version of last year’s) where he told us ‘what was happening in South Australia’. So what’s happening?

Well, there’s a huge defence contract for starters. Woo hoo. Yep, millions of bucks building warships or some such. They’ve even managed to get a platoon or something relocated from Sydney to Edinburgh, which must have the pubs rubbing their hands together. I’m sure there’s plenty he left out which I will guess at rather than research: plenty of ‘incentives’ to land the contract such that its net value is probably negligible. But hey, it’s job creation, job creation, job creation. Retention? We’ll worry about that next time they vote. Somewhere in there was talk of a dedicated support area that started to sound suspiciously MFP-like.

What else? Mining and plenty of it. He rattled off all sorts of figures about the exploration potential having increased – there’s even a mine that’s bigger than anyone thought. Given the tout on the generic ‘mining’, could we help but speculate it was probably uranium he was talking about?

So the Premier on a junket (he’d just flown in from Cannes) comes all the way to London to tell us there’s plenty of defence and mining jobs in the offing. Oh and they’ll probably need lawyers too. A small snigger went round the room when he spoke of needing environmental lawyers – ‘guess they’re foreseeing a little trouble with that mining thing’.