In 2025 we have a falling standard of living, civil unrest and incompetent governments unable to capitalise on the vast fortunes of natural resources with which this country has been blessed.

In place of wealth we have debts, personal, State, and federal – and there seems to be no answers in the heads of our leaders except more of the same.

THROWING

Our Prime Minister has already started throwing money around; it’s our money and our debt.

Global politics is becoming discombobulated; Socialism is on the decline. Hungary, Italy, Germany, Argentina, New Zealand, Holland and France have dismissed the socialists and the Marxists.

The world’s gravy train, aka the USA, is undergoing a metamorphosis; there is change afoot and confusion reigns in corridors of governments around the world.

So great is their concern, political leaders are queuing for an audience with the man who is keeping his promise to America when he told them he was going “Make America Great Again”.

They laughed in Westminster and Bonn, in Paris and Ottawa and there was more than a snigger in Canberra as the brash billionaire Donald J Trump criss crossed America in his private jet telling ever increasing crowds how he was going to do it.

The American people believed Trump and elected him the 47^th President. Since his election last November, his approval rating has increased.

His inauguration was on January 20, 2025. After a month in office there has been more change in Washington and around America than there was in the four years of the Biden administration.

The world is watching for Trump’s next move and holding their breath.

Do we need a Trump in Australia? Yes. We need a leader who can rattle the complacent cage of Australia and shout, “Wake up Australia before it is too late, and you become the ‘white trash of Asia”.

Lee Kwan Yew is the leader who, after WWII, built a world leading industrial complex on Singapore island; a place devoid of natural resources but filled with people with the desire to make a better life for themselves, no matter the odds.

Last year we imported just over $8b in fuel oils and some $3b in other goods from Singapore.

Including $38m in flour, starch and milk products and nearly $7m in fish and meat products.

Last time I looked, Singapore didn’t grow a lot of cereals, meat or fish, yet they have found a market in a country which has an excess of all three.

BENEATH

About fifty years ago, this nation – after having lived off the sheep’s back for so long and having developed out of sheer necessity a range of industries that got it so close to being self-sufficient – gradually realised that wealth beyond measure lay beneath the surface of this vast continent.

After the pioneer’s gold rush and the merino sheep that funded the building of so much of metropolitan Australia, and after the devastation of WWI and the Great Depression, Australia was confronted with WWII.

Out of sheer necessity Australia learned new skills during those war years as it was literally forced into manufacturing a range of goods to support the war-effort and replace those goods it had previously imported, mainly from Europe.

Those new skills found expression in the post war years with the emergence of an Australian engineering industry; from making motor cars for transport and tractors to clear this land, to building both war and merchant ships to keep the sea lanes open for the critical export of wool, meat and grain. By the 1970s, Australia was close to being self-sufficient.

It was capable of making and growing almost everything it needed and, to a large extent, imports became luxuries.

As Australia matured industrially and as thousands of migrants from all over Europe settled in, Lang Hancock and others moved Australia into the next phase of its development; they discovered enormous mountains of iron ore in the Pilbara region of Western Australia.

The timing of their finds was both fortuitous and sweet; it happened just as the new world of Asia was waking up and demanding steel so that it could grow.

Over the following decades – from Whitlam to Fraser to Hawke, Keating and Howard, right through to Albanese – we can now see the only thoughts that entered our leader’s heads have been to devise policies to maximise profit for investors (much of it for overseas companies); and for themselves in the form of buying elections.

IGNORED

Phrases like “comparative advantage” and the opportunity to “value add” to the plethora of riches that were being discovered, were ignored by both federal and State governments.

Paul Keating continued what Fraser had started. Keating believed in a “level playing field”, so protections, tariffs, which had been built into Australian industry by Black Jack McEwen and others, were progressively removed.

What Keating didn’t appreciate was that there is no such thing as a level playing field in the blood sport of world commerce; he didn’t know, and nobody told him (why would they?) that the big boys choose the game, determine the rules and decide who will play their game, with their ball, and who will get to kick it.

Gradually two things happened which changed the face of Australia. As protection came off a range of goods manufactured in Australia and so-called cheaper imports flooded into the country, Australia lost sight of the strategic importance of being as self-sufficient as possible.

Secondly, this policy heralded the beginning of the slow death of Australia’s highly skilled manufacturing industries and the start, once again, of its increasing reliance on others for goods vital to everyday life.

Keating was naïve. He didn’t know that cheaper goods were always available somewhere in the world, and quite often those “cheap” goods were subsidised by governments eager to their keep industries moving forward and their people employed.

As Australia bought cheaper goods, like clothing, shoes, furniture, washing machines and electrical appliances, it lost the skills to manufacture in Australia.