Strewth: size matters

Scott Morrison doesn’t like the big battery, but did he have to bash the Big Prawn?

Yesterday Scott Morrison belted the big battery being built by Tesla for the South Australian government. Tesla’s Elon Musk has promised to fix SA’s energy woes with a lithium ion battery that will store energy produced by windmills. The federal Treasurer is not impressed. “By all means have the world’s biggest battery, have the world’s biggest banana, have the world’s biggest prawn like we have on the roadside around the country, but that is not solving the problem,” he told reporters in Adelaide.

Now, now, Treasurer. Hit Musk all you want, but “big things” have been the backbone of Australia’s economy. The Big Prawn in northern NSW was sold for $21.3 million in 2014. OK, the Bunnings Warehouse (and carpark where said prawn lives) was sold for $21.3m, but the crustacean surely pushed up the price.

Precious giant crustacean.

Counting down

Musk promised at his big “big battery” announcement that if the battery wasn’t finished within 100 days after Premier Jay Weatherill ticked it off, he’d build it for free. He said that on July 7, it’s now July 28. You’ve got 79 days left, Elon. Quick sticks.

Artificial stupidity

The Treasurer will have to wait if he wants to have a fight with Musk; the Tesla chief is still warring with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg over killer robots. Yes, that’s right, killer robots. Musk has long argued that if the development of artificial intelligence goes unchecked, they will eventually rise up and destroy us. “I keep sounding the alarm bell but, you know, until people see robots going down the street killing people, they don’t know how to react,” he told the US National Governors Association about a fortnight ago. Musk also believes we’re all living in a computer simulation. Zuckerberg told Facebook Live viewers on Monday that Musk was talking mush: “I think that people who are nay-sayers and kind of try to drum up these doomsday scenarios are — I don’t understand it. It’s really negative and in some ways I actually think it’s pretty irresponsible.” Musk hit back on Twitter on Tuesday, saying Zuckerberg’s knowledge of killer robots was “limited”. The Australian’s technology editor Supratim Adhikari tells Strewth that robots are not going to rise up and kill us all.

Greens scream

When Greens leader Richard Di Natale’s team sent out a media alert saying their boss would be holding a press conference to discuss “dual citizenship”, nearly every reporter in Canberra lost consciousness for at least 30 seconds. But he just wanted to say ex-cabinet minister Matt Canavan should do what Di Natale’s ex-deputies Scott Ludlam and Larissa Waters did and quit parliament altogether. Next to him was his Greens colleague Sarah Hanson-Young, and they looked quite the pair . Could she be in line to take over from Ludlam and Waters?

Italian Job

Canavan’s shock revelation that he might be an accidental Italian has led to some of our leading journos declaring their ties to the home of pasta, priests and video game plumbers. Lateline host Emma Alberici and Fairfax political correspondent James Massola both took to Twitter to discuss the rigmarole they went through to get Italian citizenship (raising questions about Canavan’s claims that he never knew about his mum’s application). Herald Sun reporter Shannon Deery tweeted that he got Italian citizenship through an application but, like Canavan, his mother took care of it all.

Bye-bye, Boris

Julie Bishop and Boris Johnson’s joint press conference yesterday was such fun (Marise Payne and British Defence Secretary Michael Fallon also spoke, but they’re not exactly jokers). Boris exclaimed in Sydney that Poms and Aussies “speak the same language … more or less”. Though we’re sure the Foreign Secretary could easily add Aussie to his repertoire (which includes Latin, French, Italian, German and Spanish). He later thanked our Foreign Minister for the gift of “a very beautiful pair of compression tights … As worn by Hugh Jackman, I’m given to understand.” Boris and Sir Michael will now head home to London, where their boss Theresa May is still struggling as their Tory party tears itself apart. Maybe they’ll renounce their British citizenship and move here.

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