How about a guarantee, Telecom?

Well, you could pin a ponytail on me and call me Sally the Cynic, but Telecom turning corporate good guy and backing down from a scrap with a couple of preschools? Sounds like another contract for the Tui graphic artists to me.

How about this for a more likely scenario: Telecom plays for time, pours more lobbyists than all the beef farmers in Texas into John Key's ear and waits for the year-end change of government.

Sometime in 2009, out comes a tweak to National's communications strategy declaring mobile broadband technology to be in the national interest, meaning the development of cellphone facilities are not bound by the usual planning constraints.

If Telecom really is prepared to give priority to the welfare of the little kiddies of Atawhai and the concerns of their parents and teachers, how about it does the following:

Write a letter, personally signed by the chief executive and board chairman and delivered to everyone in the land, unequivocally guaranteeing the safety of the technology, confirming absolutely that there is no possibility of anyone, ever, being harmed by it;

Promise to pay compensation of, say, $10 million to anyone proven to the satisfaction of a court to have had their health compromised, at either a cellular or sub-cellular level, by the radiation from a cellphone tower;

Promise to compensate landowners if the presence of adjacent cellphone towers can be shown to have reduced the value of their properties, in the event of health problems surfacing in the future.

The same position ought to be demanded of the Government, whose first duty is surely to protect its citizens from harm.

Like most people, I don't know for sure if cellphone towers do threaten or compromise health (except of course for the stress and anxiety they obviously cause).

I do know, as an editorial stated in the Nelson Mail last week, that there is a tremendous amount of information and misinformation on the subject available to almost everyone (courtesy, it might be said, of our telecommunications advances).

I do know, after we had to carry a grandchild into Nelson Hospital, unconscious and in anaphylactic shock due to a severe peanut allergy, that some people are more susceptible to a wide range of things than others.

And there appears to be no clear picture yet from the raft of tests that have attempted to determine the safety or otherwise of the towers' radiation. In the face of such uncertainty, any attempt to place a tower between two preschools is surely unprincipled, unethical and inexcusable even if it were the only place on earth where one could be built. Which obviously it is not.

Why is our government not applying the precautionary principle and banning the towers anywhere near schools, preschools, hospitals and the like?

The issue brings to mind the smoking debate. When I started puffing away aged 8 in the early '60s, flogging a packet a week from an ageing great-uncle, not only was it a cool, if slightly naughty thing for youngsters and teens to do, there was also considerable adult support for the view that fagging was good for us all. As well as being relaxing and calming (no one really talked of "stress" back then), "they" declared that nicotine actually kept us healthy by killing bugs and germs. Apologies to the tobacco diehards, but clearly, "they" were wrong.

There have been too many other examples where corporate greed has triumphed and compliant governments have failed to protect and care for their citizens - thalidomide, asbestos, Agent Orange, the Pacific nuclear test guinea pigs, DDT, toxic timber treatments to reel off a few.

Now, cellphones and the low intensity microwave signal-radiating towers that support them are being linked to potentially very serious health issues - or not, depending on whose report you read.

The towers are the classic symbol of not-in-my-backyardism; the inconvenient ramification of the undoubted convenience the mobile phone brings.

The pervasive march of the towers is to reduce "dead spots" - an interesting phrase, given the fears of some that their signals might be responsible for a range of health problems, from sleep issues and attention deficit disorders to leukaemia and brain tumours.

Among the current battles in the United States are moves to locate the unwelcome facilities in church towers and even a graveyard, along with a range of neighbourhood disputes exactly like the one that was building in Atawhai, where Telecom seemed hellbent on placing its 22m cellphone tower right beside the playcentre and across the road from another early childhood centre, before last week's reversal.

The company says it will spend more time seeking alternative sites. Well, good for it. It should never have tried to play the corporate heavy in the first place although that's what multinationals, do, isn't it.

We can't expect it to have a conscience or care about anything other than the narrow interests of shareholders, which is where we would hope that the Government might come in.

I wouldn't count on that happening among either of the main political parties, but have been enormously encouraged that Nelson Mayor Kerry Marshall and Cr Ali Boswijk, in particular, have fronted up on the issue. Hopefully the district's two councils will use the Telecom moratorium to fast-track robust bylaws banning the towers or dishes from sensitive areas.

I'm no Luddite and recognise the need for this country to get back on track technology-wise, after losing considerable ground due in no small part to the Telecom monopoly.

However, I fail to see the importance of advancing already outdated 3G mobile broadband technology to the economy. It's as much about gimmicks and profits than meeting the needs of businesses, which have had access to mobile Internet services for years: the Nelson Mail first transmitted a photo via a camera plugged into a cellphone around the start of the millennium and was far from the first to do so.

By all means encourage network providers to accelerate the rollout of fibre-optic cable to bring broadband speeds up to speed. But don't gamble with our health - particularly that of our children, whose low body mass could well make them especially vulnerable to radiation - by siting cellphone towers inappropriately.

- © Fairfax NZ News