The SA government has given the Royal Automobile Association and Chargefox a $12.35m grant to build 536 fast EV charging stations across 140 locations (26 metro, the rest in regional/rural SA). Here's a map of locations, with the rollout to be completed within 2 years. Meanwhile, the first bi-directional EV charger has been approved for sale in Australia. The Wallbox Quasar has a CHAdeMO plug that goes into your EV and can power your home, turning your Nissan LEAF (pretty much the only car with a CHAdeMO plug and a decent sized battery) into a residential battery on wheels - for $10,000 plus install.
Elon Musk gave a 75-minute presentation about what's going on with SpaceX's Starship late Friday afternoon. There doesn't seem to be much news around it as unlike a typical Musk dog and pony show, there was nothing weird to talk about. It was primarily Musk giving a rehash of his 2016 "Making Humans a Multiplanetary Species" speech, saying we should be colonising other planets and how space exploration will bring people together and so on. However, he did say "I feel highly confident we'll get to orbit this year" regarding Starship and that the Raptor 2 engine has 230t of thrust (i.e: almost 5x the J-2 rockets used in Saturn V). Here's the full presentation if you want to get up to speed on Elon's big shiny rocket.
Federal MP George Christensen crawled out from under his rock and introduced a private member's bill titled "Social Media (Protecting Australians from Censorship)". It would create types of "prohibited censorship" (aka deleting disinformation, banning an account) against "protected persons" (aka politicians). It'll go nowhere. A private member's bill that might go somewhere (but still relatively unlikely) is the "Telecommunications Legislation Amendment (Faster Internet for Regional Australia) Bill", introduced by Helen Haines. It wants to force NBN and other telcos into speeding up service levels for non-metro users. Site faults and new connections must be actioned within one business day and mandating a minimum 25mbit/s NBN speed on average, not "twice a day".
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