Guest essay by Viv Forbes
To compete in today’s world we need to score well on resource availability, capital assets, energy costs, tax burden and workforce/management. It also helps to have secure property rights and a sound currency. Today’s Australia scores poorly on all counts.
In 1901, the year of Federation, Australia was the richest country in the world per capita.
The Pioneer generations, with freedom to explore and invest, had developed valuable mineral assets – gold, silver, lead, zinc, copper, coal, tin and iron. And they had bred up large numbers of sheep and cattle on our native grasslands.
Energy was abundant – wood, horse power, kerosene, gas, hydro and coal powered electricity – we were among world leaders in cheap energy. Sydney had gas lights in its streets as far back as 1820.
The Pioneering innovators also invented game-changers such as the stump jump plough, the Ridley-Sunshine Harvester and froth flotation of minerals, and they developed better Australian versions of Leviathan coaches, Southern Cross windmills, Merino sheep, Shorthorn cattle, Federation wheat, Kelpies and Blue Heeler dogs.
The Builder generations who followed the pioneers invested heavily in productive capital assets like flour mills and wool sheds, mines and collieries, smelters and saw mills, power stations and electric trams, trans-continental railways and overland telegraph lines, orchards and plantations, stockyards and abattoirs, breweries and vineyards, dams and artesian bores, factories and universities, exploration and research, pipelines and harbours, railways and roads. There were no “Lock-the-Gate” signs.
Governments were decentralised with minimal taxes and red tape, creating new business was easy and union power was minimal and generally beneficial for workers.
But then the Termite generations took over, and for much of the last forty years taxes, handouts and green tape have been smothering new enterprise. We are sponging on the ageing assets created by past generations and building little to support future Australians. The monuments left by this generation are typified by casinos, sports arenas, wind-energy prayer wheels, sit-down money and debt.
The trendy war on carbon has already inflated our electricity costs – this will hasten the closure of more processing and manufacturing industries. Green tape is shutting-the-gate on new investments in exploration, grassland protection, dams, power stations, fishing, forestry and coastal development. Taxes are weakening existing industry and the savings that could build new industries are being wasted on bureaucracy, delays, legalism, subsidies, climate tomfoolery and green energy toys. Finally, union featherbedding is crippling any large survivors.
Australia’s future prosperity demands cheap energy, more investment in productive assets, reduced government costs, more productive labour and the freedom to explore and innovate.
We must change, or more jobs will follow Holden.
More at carbon-sense.com
Pompous Git…
You say…
‘ Most of the calumnies you make upon the Labor Party can equally be made on the Coalition.’
That’s simply not true, but I can see now why you feel the need to pretend that’s so—why you resort to the ‘pox on both their houses’ in order to spread the blame that rests with Labor and the Left.
And by the way, I know the word ‘Communist’ is one the Left would like to airbrush from history, since so many of them and their nefarious party were great supporters of that monstrous ideology in various forms, and it’s embarrassing for the word to be in the lexicon at all—-but I won’t be intimidated from using it—lest we forget.
You are a Leftist true believer —or a disaffected true believer who can’t bring himself to support the conservatives, no matter how well they do—so you’re on that tunnel vision kick , blinkering out all of the objective truths—the heinous anti-Australian, anti-worker record of your party.
The ‘they’re all the same’ option, is the resort those on the Left take when the the truth about Socialism in all its iterations is too painful —when to support the Left in all of its criminality and brutality on the local scene, and its record of mass murder of innocents in the scores of millions, gulags, forced famine, enslaved and imprisoned populations historically , internationally—-has become a bridge too far.
You can delude yourself as much as you like, and label the truth a ‘Big Lie’, but the facts are on the record.
The Howard government paid off Labor’s $96 billion government debt, rejuvenated the apprenticeship system, restored funding to the depleted armed forces, turned successive and increasing Labor deficits, into successive and building Coalition surpluses, reformed the waterfronts, which was an enormous help to all business, reduced unemployment enormously and left Labor in 2007, with a bountiful legacy which it squandered in no time flat.
Are you claiming that Howard opposed the GST when Keating wanted to introduce it?
If that’s what you’re claiming, then there’s your ‘Big Lie’.
The Labor comrades opposed Keating’s push for a GST—his own mob whom he despised.
John Howard supported Keating in his moves—-diametrically opposite to your claim.
Maybe there were some in the Coalition who didn’t support it in principle in the 80s, but that’s irrelevant when you’re talking about government decisions to implement it.
The Coalition introduced it only —only—after going to an election, putting it to the people and virtually asking their permission to implement it and thereby risking losing power on the issue, don’t forget.
That’s a party that respects democracy and the people—something that is absolutely foreign to your erstwhile party.
Jim Bacon was a Communist or Marxist or whatever most of his life, while many who flirted with the wildness and rebellion of university Leftist political mayhem , later grew up and recognised the full horror of the ideology they’d signed up to, and became conservative to varying degrees.
Frank Hardy was a full-on , set-in-concrete Communist, and ironically, what he pointed out long ago, was the extent and methods of Labor’s corruption of the electoral system, where dead people and otherwise uncontactable people, inevitably vote Labor—at least once per election—-especially in the election of 1987.
That revelation by Hardy is on the record.
Your deep concern that business should be completely unencumbered by any pesky government rules at all, makes me think you must be the full unmodified ,laissez-faire , unfettered capitalism, Ayn Rand acolyte extraordinaire.
Could that be?
Some one asked who Holden was: it is General Motors’ Australian brand, with Holden being the same as Chevrolet in the USA, Vauxhall in the UK and Opel in Europe. The point Viv was making is that Mitsubishi, Ford and now Holden have closed their Australian manufacturing businesses. In spite of what “ClimateAce” says, this is not a tiny part of our economy, and is a proxy for the whole manufacturing sector. Wealth is created by growing things, making things or by mining things. The parlous state of agriculture and manufacturing in Australia has been masked to some extent by the mining boom, which appears to be coming to an end. ClimateAce would be happy if all mining stopped, as iron ore and coal are used to provide steel and cheap power, while generating helpful amounts of the CO2 he so fears. He would be happy if agriculture ended as apparently it is responsible for “degrading our soils” and for “23 birds, 4 frogs, and 27 mammal species strongly believed to have become extinct since European settlement of Australia”. Manufacturing uses electricity, gas or coal, right? So it’s got to go, too. Only subsistence farming, bureaucracy and living on a benefit are acceptable occupations in his brave new world.
Someone else asked if Termite was the correct term for the parasites eating away at our economy: In Australia the White Ant termite is a fearsome scourge, eating out all the inside of a house frame, while the structure continues to appear strong (as on some measures Australia’s economy does), yet the underlying strength is eaten out, so the whole edifice will one day crash to the ground. Termite exactly explains the parasites white-anting our civilisation from within.
One of the greatest evils of government is paying sit-down money to those who will not work. Ask Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain how this worked out for them.
By helpful, I mean CO2 helps plants and crops grow faster.
metro70 said @ur momisugly December 30, 2013 at 9:45 pm
Oh dear, now Bernadette Black’s a commie too. Eric Abetz and Mark Textor will be upset! Got any evidence?
No, I’m claiming that John Stone persuaded me it was a crock. I have said this several times now. Can’t you bloody well read?
Well, I’m off out to a New Year’s party… Have fun with your fantasies metro70.
There are currently nine billion – and counting – members of the human species on Earth. All need food and somewhere to live. Our society has developed to provide more ample supplies of food and is attempting to address the problems of war arising from unequal benefiting from the development of resources and different concepts of law and order around the world, to say nothing of religious differences (I.e. strongly held beliefs that cannot be accepted universally and hence require submission and subjugation of those opposing). The ‘United Nations’ has an unenviable task ahead.
The high and increasing level of the world population is a fact.
The inability of humans to come to common, lasting agreement is a fact.
Industry’s essential support of modern society is a fact – it is absolutely essential, society as we know it will collapse without it.
Change wherever it is, and of whatever it is, causes disruption to the status quo. Maintaining an undisturbed environment is impossible. Flora and fauna will be the casualties.
The answer is clear then…If we are to maintain our environment as-is we must immediately stop expanding our population and live within our current means.
The chance of that happening is ……………… ‘Buckley’s’!
The only practical answer is to use our ingenuity to sustain and develop our use on Earth’s resources and to use them with respect for the future. The bigger the population the more development must take place and if we do not use the cheapest sources of energy to achieve that we must expect the worst.
Hungry people scavenge without respect for the environment and they fight very hard for survival!!!
We cannot afford to cast out carbon until a competing resource is developed and for each competing energy source there must be a truthful energy and carbon audit. Currently those checks and balances are not being properly evaluated. Merely “predicting” (for which read guessing) the future based on ill-defined difficulties of continued industrial development, based on carbon, without proper substantiation is not acceptable.
The human race has come a long way since emerging from the jungles of the world. If we are to continue our existence EVERYONE must cooperate in HONEST AUDITS and put greed, self interest, and power-mongering out of their minds. The consequences are otherwise daunting in the extreme.
Well done, Viv, for airing the issue so succinctly
People on the ice boat need to learn self-sufficiency, like the rest of us who are being priced out of reasonable energy.
Where are their oars? Why aren’t they paddling for their lives? Why are they worrying about fresh coffee and dry rations and battery life, rather than imminent death? It’s a distinct possibility, but they still think they’re on twitterverse..
I’d be fairly bothered in their situation, having already been at death’s door quite intimately.
metro70 said @ur momisugly December 30, 2013 at 9:45 pm
metro70, you become increasingly hilarious. You tell us communists are all liars and then tell us Frank Hardy, a communist, must be believed. Which is it? Do you not understand contradiction?
Yes, I am an economic libertarian, though certainly not an acolyte of Ayn Rand. There’s a bit more to it than smoking cigarettes with a dollar sign printed on them. True, when Keith was a Trot, and Jim was a Maoist, I was a… Randian; in more ways than one. However, I’m with Matt Ridley in that I believe in unfettered trade of goods and services and regulation of the financial sector. IOW I’m not a complete anarchist.
BTW how do you reconcile calling me a communist and a free-marketeer?
mareeS said @ur momisugly December 31, 2013 at 2:49 pm
They are media oars and consequently useful for little other beyond complaining about the coffee 😉
Assume “Creating and keeping up appearances.” It’s what they do, it’s what they are. It predicts their actions to a T. Try it.