STT is not sure whether it’s just an Australian thing, but about 30 years ago capital cities around the country set out to find an international doppelgänger somewhere else in the world, willing to be referred to as their ‘Sister City’.

Adelaide, the capital of that beleaguered economic backwater, South Australia has four of them: Christchurch in New Zealand; Austin, Texas in the USA; Himeji in Japan; and Georgetown, Penang in Malaysia.

However, thanks to an obsession with wind power, apart from siblings spread far and wide, Australia’s so-called ‘wind power capital’ also has the dubious honour of having the highest retail power prices in the world, and a well-earned reputation for statewide blackouts and mass load shedding. Rather than being a sibling to be proud of, Adelaide is more like one of Cinderella’s fat and ugly sisters; an object of derision and the subject of pity, all at once.