Mountaineer

linked to fluoride emissions created during the production of aluminium

This is disgusting, even if you don't care about the cuddly wildlife, it's clear this plant is spewing a toxic amount of waste into the surrounds.

This is the wrong headline for this story.

Engie, who own the Hazelwood site (with some partners) are on the hook to "rehabilitate" it when they are done burning coal.

And they are definitely done burning coal, because it's no longer cost effective to maintain the old equipment and it's definitely too risky to build new burners.

So here's what they plan for the site long term: https://www.hazelwoodrehabilitation.com.au/

And in the short term, they are still a power company, so why not plonk their new batteries there, the site they own and which already has big connections to the power networks.

The state governments implication here is that hospital wait times are largely due to people incorrectly using the ED as a free GP.

Whilst there is an ED missuse problem, the story is misleading.

The reason the EDs are overflowing is due to a lack of beds, which is due to a lack of staffing. They have to have a certain ratio of staff to beds (patients in beds). The ED already can and will send people home if they turn up with a runny nose.

So how the hell is opening these new bulk clinics going to actually address the issue?

As for the people who are turning up with the aforementioned runny nose because they can't afford the copay at their local GP?
Opening new bulk clinics staffed with med students as poorly paid indentured servants is not going to "solve" that.
Someone who can't afford a copay isn't going to commute across town to the bulk clinic to still make a (smaller) copay.

ED waiting times (and the corresponding ambulance ramping) are a policy failure as hospital administrators are forced to cut costs.
They need more budget flexibility.
Centralised mega slave shop walk in clinics are also not the solution to GP's "overcharging", the unpalatable solution is to raise the medicare payout in line with inflation.

I personally use a bash script triggered by cron on my server to first determine my external IP address: curl http://v4.ident.me/ then if it differed from the last check, would update one of my dns entries via the godaddy API.

This can be a simple or as complicated as you like.

Absolutely possible.
The key to simple self hosting is to have a dns record that points to your externally accessible IP, whether that be your real one or an external one hosted at a VPN provider.
If that IP changes, you'll need to update it dynamically.

It's becoming increasibly common to be a requirement to do so as CGNat becomes more widespread.

One of the newer ways to do that is with a Cloudflare Tunnel, which whilst technically is only for web traffic, they ignore low throughput usage for other things like SSH.

I hate the idea of legislation forcing things like this because I can already see the problems like the pink bats scheme - shoddy cheap systems that immediately fail, untrained contractors falling through roofs, installing in impractical locations like full shade...

But the slum lords will not do something that only benefits the tenants (the improved value of the property isn't of great concern to this group, the rest of the house is no doubt collapsing).