back to article Greens abandon science to tie down mobile towers

Why do the Australian Greens want to cut hospitals out of the country’s mobile phone networks? Their seemingly-benign notion that there should be no mobile phone towers within 200 meters of any hospital suggests that (a) Senator Bob Brown doesn’t understand how radio waves work, (b) he also doesn’t understand how people …

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  1. Tim Roberts 1

    Unfortunately ..

    it is the lunatic fringe of the Greens that gives the whole organisation a bad name. Who knows what Bob Brown actually believes about this matter, but the comment certainly implies complete ignorance combined with fear-mongering and a poorly thought through argument. I wonder how many "greens" have and use mobile phones?

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Greens publicly parading their ignorance again...

    Can't say I'm surprised that the greens are still targeting towers while giving all their kids mobile phones.

    If anything, more towers don't just mean more coverage but it's likely to reduce the output of near by towers...

  3. Neoc

    Greens have always been idiots

    ...better at FUD than FACT.

    Having said that, I wouldn't mind seeing a "low-impact" rule come in - with all the work being done overseas in creative ways to hide mobile phone masts, why do we still allow the eyesores that are the standard Australian mobile-phone installations?

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    "Why do the Australian Greens want to cut hospitals out of the country’s mobile phone networks?"

    Because they are attention wh*r... oh, nevermind, I just realised it was a rhetorical question.

  5. Headley_Grange Silver badge

    Fewer Towers Mean More Handset Power

    There's no evidence that RF causes damage (at these levels) but if we believe it might then it would be better to put the towers closer then the phone would cut its output power and the user gets a lower RF dose.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I propose

    a term for this kind of Green idiocy; "Greentarded".

  7. Arnold Lieberman

    Give them a taste of their own medicine

    No mobile tower or other electrically powered device within 1000m of the residence of a member of the Green party. It's for the children!

  8. Stephen Gray

    Strange

    I've always found our colonial cousins from down under to be a very level headed bunch of chaps and chapettes. I suspect this nonsense will go away when the ballot box is used.

  9. Tim Bates

    Rural areas

    Oh great... He's got one crackpot law enacted, one basically accepted by the party he's in bed with, and now comes up with a 3rd.

    Is he trying to prove the carbon tax is sane by suggesting even crazier ideas he could have had instead?

  10. Tim Bates

    Rural areas

    Has Bob been to a rural area? Some towns with hospitals will end up only having mobile phone coverage at the 2 ends of the highway through town if they go ahead with such a crazy scheme.

    And the way things work in most places I've been, you'd get Telstra at one end and Optus at the other. Imagine having to drive to the other side of town to make a call on your bloody mobile!

  11. david 12 Silver badge

    history

    Bizarrely, most hospitals in oz still sport "no mobile phones" signs, even while on-duty interns are required to carry and respond to the hospital-issued designated mobile: passed on to the next junior doctor at end-of-shift handover , continuously active, re-charged with rotating batteries.

    1. Reg Blank
      Devil

      I consider all those signs to be a personal favour to me. The one place left where I don't have to hear about what that slag Kylie said or what species of livestock Mark is screwing now.

      Today I was out shopping and having the kind of shitty time you can only have at a supermarket after school lets out and tired Mums and Dads get off work, when down the aisle came three young women in their early 20's.

      They were fat, wearing too much make-up and far too few clothes of the cheap and tasteless kind (probably with a fake D&G logo). All three of them were on their phones, and for one second I thought they were on the phone to each other, until I realised they were loudly having the same conversation to three other fat, cheap and tacky clones on the other end.

      I could be anywhere, couldn't I? Fat and tasteless knows no national or racial boundaries!

      Despite the fact I'm the child of the information age, mobile phones are the icon. They are killing good manners and too many brain cells. Some people have too few to risk losing them.

      1. Chris Parsons

        An amusing and lucid post, thank you. If I could uninvent one thing, it would be mobile phones, they have utterly ruined society.

  12. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Last week I was consulting a specialist registrar at the Royal Melbourne Hospital. The clinic where I had an MRI done a few weeks ago hadn't sent on the results so she spent a good 30mins phoning the MRI clinic, my referring specialist and the RMH administration getting authorisations arranged and sent off in order to have the written MRI report faxed to Outpatients and the scan sent electronically.

    She used both the fixed line on the desk and her mobile for the six or seven calls (I couldn't see a pattern to why she chose one over the other) while also receiving two calls and making one call on the mobile for consultation on other cases. No calls came in on the fixed line.

    If it wasn't for the mobile phone network, a dedicated network would still have to be set up so doctors can talk to each other as well as communicating with other agencies outside the hospital precinct. It only takes a minute of watching a doctor in a hospital actually at work to come to this conclusion, so my guess is this is a non-policy (of which the Greens have a lot) that is designed to appeal to certain flavours of Green voter but will never actually get put into practice, even if through some miracle the Greens ever achieve power.

    What is sad is that it is this kind of non-policy on the run with little actual thought being made that puts off voters who might otherwise vote Green. While I might be sympathetic to the progressive social agenda that many Green policies put forward, and I may be disenfranchised by the mainstream duopoly of Labor/Liberals and the self-interested corporatisation of my life, it is the ass-backward luddite mentality and slavish devotion to dogma by the Greens over sensible compromise and pragmatism that stops me from voting for them.

    Vote 1: Australian Sex Party at the next election!

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