Anti-nuclear poem written by Premier Jay Weatherill as a teenager

A PASSIONATE 16-year-old at Henley High in 1980 was stirred to pen a poem venting his fervent opposition to nuclear energy. Three decades later, he’s not only changed his mind — he’s the Premier.

SA politician Jay Weatherill (l) with his brothers Dana and Lea Weatherill in the late 1970s.

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A PASSIONATE 16-year-old at Henley High in 1980 was stirred to pen a poem venting his fervent opposition to nuclear energy.

The three-verse poem might have been buried forever in the school yearbook — except the burgeoning young leftie, Jay Weatherill, became Premier 31 years later.

Writing in Wednesday’s Advertiser, Mr Weatherill uses his personal turnaround on the nuclear issue to highlight how community views are “anything but static”.

Mr Weatherill, who established a Royal Commission which on Monday recommended South Australia create a dump for imported high-level radioactive waste, was a teenage opponent of involvement in the nuclear fuel cycle.

Like Bob Dylan said, the times are a-changin’. Back in the 1980s, nuclear disarmament activism was surging in Australia amid Cold War fears of annihilation.

In 1982, an estimated 100,000 people joined Palm Sunday antinuclear rallies in capital cities. The same year, Labor’s Norm Foster famously crossed the floor of the SA Parliament, voting with the Liberal government to enable the Roxby Downs uranium mine to go ahead.

This was the environment in which the teenage Jay Weatherill was writing about the 1980s’ anti-uranium mining movement in his Protest March poem, which he has retrieved from the Henley High School yearbook and supplied to The Advertiser.

SA politician Jay Weatherill in the late 1970s.

He describes people “chanting wildly through the night, stirring conscience and provoking fright”.

“If this proposal is approved, civilisation will be removed,” he wrote, in an argument he would doubtless now consider an overreach.

The young firebrand targeted “capitalists’ greed” and, in an anti-authoritarian line, condemned “the programmed police forgoing pity”.

“A march to oppose a government’s decision, And settle for the sun, not nuclear fission,” the young Jay wrote.

Obviously, he is hoping the last line is not somewhat prophetic, now urging a public discussion about the Royal Commission’s tentative findings.

“Community views about our involvement in the nuclear fuel cycle are anything but static. I know my own thoughts on the issue have changed over time and continue to change as the evidence is laid before us,” Mr Weatherill writes in The Advertiser.

“ ... More recently, many of the arguments surrounding clean energy and the economic benefits of further involvement in the nuclear fuel cycle have commanded my attention.”

He is not alone in this view, even in the Left — which once reflexively took a blanket antinuclear stance, just like a young Mr Weatherill.

But many are now convinced the risks of climate change, which can be curbed by the low-emission nuclear energy, outweigh the dangers posed by a nuclear accident.

The original poem from the 1980 Henley High School Year Book.