Local councils in Sydney have struggled to respond to growing resident action about the placement of mobile phone towers across their municipalities. Recently I received a letter from one informing me about decisions regarding minimum distances towers can be located from people.

Note here that it is “distances” not “distance”. If you live in the council district, the council will not allow a tower within 300 metres of your house. But it you work in the area, the towers can come as close as specified in any deal struck between your employer or a landowner and a phone company. They can plonk one right outside your office or factory window, in your car park, wherever.

The council wrote that it had taken “potential health impact” into account in fashioning its resolutions. From this, we can draw one of two conclusions: that the council believes people at work are somehow more robust than people in houses in resisting the alleged health effects of radio frequency radiation (RFR) emitting from the towers; or that it finds this a preposterous idea and instead believes that workers are less uptight about exposure than residents and won’t mind a cosier acquaintance with a tower or two. What the thousands who work and live in the area are supposed to make of this is anyone’s guess.

But wait, there is more. If you are in a school, any sort of childcare facility, a hospital or, most intriguingly, an aged-care centre or “any recreational facility”, you won’t find a tower within 450 metres of you. Observe that yet further layers have now been added to this emerging hierarchical model of radiation susceptibility.

Someone playing golf, bowls or having a picnic apparently cannot resist RFR like a worker can. Along with infants, children, the sick and the elderly, those taking recreation get to enjoy an extra 150 metres buffer zone. Or at least while the kids are in daycare or school. When they go home in the afternoon, the council thinks it’s OK to locate the towers up to 150 metres closer. Given that children spend more time at home than in school, the two different minimum distances cannot reflect any rational concern to minimum exposure.

If, and this is a very big if, there is any demonstrable health risk from phone tower RFR, this risk is almost certainly not acute, but medium to long term and small by any ordinary sense of the word “risky”. If there is any group which would escape the health consequences of exposure it is the very old, who, to put it bluntly, won’t be around to suffer any consequences. So lumping the elderly in nursing homes in the same category as infants in daycare suggests the intriguing possibility that there might be a hotbed of reincarnationism inside the council. Curiouser and curiouser.

During the 1995 debate about the towers near a kindergarten in Harbord, an angry parent jabbed his finger in the air at hapless Telstra officials and told them, “There’s no way that even if there’s [RFR at] even one hundred millionth of the Australian standard that I’m going to let my little girl go to that place and be exposed to that sort of risk. No way!”

This vignette says a great deal about the debate on phone towers. It suggests that when it comes to anything industrial, imposed and close to populations perceived as vulnerable, many in the community demand zero risk – a notion that of course does not exist anywhere but in the minds of totally risk-averse people. These dimensions to the debate have nothing to do with the actual hazard but are in every way as “real” and measurable as the RFR itself. Just ask the nervous members of local councils struggling to accommodate them.

In all probability, this particular council’s bizarre resolutions may go some way towards assuaging community concerns, in that it has incorporated distinctions between domestic and industrial exposure and between population groups generally considered “vulnerable” and the (residential) population at large. Many, on hearing that towers can be located nearer factories and homes than childcare centres, will assume this to be a sensible policy despite its rampant internal contradictions.

Instead, the misplaced precision of the guidelines reflects a confused interpretation of both what we know about the true level of risk over the long term (not much, but equally, not a cacophony of ominous warning bells either) and of risk communication principles. The starting point of any sane policy would place the towers equidistant from any residence, workplace or gathering place.

But the unsung side of the health debate about mobile phone towers has nothing to do with any possible effects from radiation. There are countless examples that can be given of mobile phones being used to call for help – breakdowns on freeways and isolated roads where danger was imminent; calling ambulances to attend the injured; people fearing assault and rape; families who give an elderly relative who is prone to wander a phone so he or she can be traced – not to mention the health-promoting aspects of allowing ordinary, often unexceptional contact between people. “I just called to say I love you”. Any decisions by governments that reduce the reach of the mobile phone net which claim to be driven by public health concerns must factor in the loss of such health benefits, and balance these against the estimates of what even the doomsayers calculate as modest rises in dreaded diseases like cancer.

The prospect of the farce I have described being repeated in different versions throughout Australia cries out for leadership from Canberra and from the phone companies. With Australia having the highest rate of mobile phone ownership in the world and indecent levels of profit being made by suppliers, would a major public consultation and education campaign be too much to ask for?