The Australian Labor Party has drifted a long way from its roots and is now more about the welfare of trees and union power structures than the welfare of working-class Australians. Without thinking about the basic needs of warcraft, Labor is attempting to build a war machine. Despite seemingly good intentions, its MPs don’t appear to understand how things work well enough to realise that their policies are self-conflicted.
Ignorance is bliss and Labor is apparently unaware of concepts like net present value and how it relates to the military ‘rubber meets the road’ bit of blowing stuff up. While the American-owned military-industrial complex is better than the communistic state-owned version, the ‘future made in Australia but American-owned’ approach is leaving us ripped off. We are spending our ‘valuable’ present-day dollars for war machinery that is set to arrive in 2040, a date well after the fireworks are expected to be over. We should be begging or borrowing a second-hand, fixer-upper, US nuclear sub and getting our heads around it in a way that is presently valuable.
The law of present value means that when government-induced inflation and interest rates are high, your money is worth a great deal more than your future money – so you should spend it wisely. This is doubly true if Labor intend to keep inflation and interest rates high to pay for public service expansion.
I used to play a bit of the original Warcraft computer game as a kid back in the late 90s. The present-day Labor Party would do well to dust off their floppy disks.
The game starts out with a small group of peasants and soldiers. You have to lead them to cut down trees, mine gold, plant crops, and build houses. Think of it as providing the basic human needs of food, clothing, shelter. Then you have to ask yourself, how do I get them to farm, manufacture, and cut down trees? This stuff costs money, which you pay for with gold, which you mine.
Eventually the game allows you to build a town hall, create the equivalent of government, and construct a barracks which functions as an army. In order to survive and stave off attacks from neighbouring tribes you have to build up power quickly by being smart and strategic with where you put your energy, how you minimise waste, and what you spend your money on.
The thought of criminalising farming, banning the cutting down of trees, and stopping the mining of gold did not enter the mind of a Warcraft player, yet ominously, these things are a priority for Western politicians. Labor has drunk the Kool-aid by attempting to outlaw hardwood tree felling and sensible sovereign energy production. The neighbouring tribes of Xi and Vlad can’t believe their luck.
Energy production is the new gold – it’s what makes the world go round. If you don’t believe me, ask yourself why oil-rich, non-fundamentalist Muslim nations have a collection of Mercedes G Wagons and don’t pay income tax.
We are sitting on a veritable gold mine here in Australia, but we aren’t allowed to use our own coal, or gas, even at horrendous Singaporean prices. We sell our resources to China at baked-in Howard-era garage sale prices, and can’t use them ourselves because of the environment. Meanwhile, China is using Australian resources to make warships.
The Neanderthals got the basics right, and yet Labor can’t wrap their heads around these ancient truths. Chop down a tree, mill timber, make a house, make a baby, get the new teenager to chop down a tree, repeat. Or you can dig a hole, get some black stuff, make fire, melt metal, make a sword, defend your land, repeat. Ironically, this stuff built the working class. It is honourable work, which is something Labor used to advocate for, but now attempts to kill off.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that it is going to take an ‘awful lot’ of German windmills to make steel. I was offered a job with the Bluescope BHP Port Kembla steel mill as an engineering grad. During my job interview, my prospective boss and I stood on a steel mesh gangway, high above, watching an entire car body get dropped into a boiling vat of red-hot liquid metal. The heat convecting from the ladle was enormous. Getting metal to liquify takes a lot more energy than boiling a kettle. Regrettably for Labor, submarines, warships, and tanks are made out of steel.
The Labor Party, thinking it can be all things to all people, has effectively outlawed coal. It plans for us to suffer blackouts while making nuclear subs with Chinese-made steel.
The windmill brigade assume that by transplanting the problem of emissions the world will be a better place. They stick their heads in the sand while Australian rubbish set for recycling is shipped to Thailand using diesel engines where it is thrown in landfill or washes into the sea. Meanwhile, offshore steel production in China operates on lower environmental standards and regulations than Australia.
Mining coal for the Australian energy market would stop the blackouts and enable us to make steel submarines. Sure, it isn’t as powerful as nuclear, but it isn’t radioactive and it’s a damn sight more efficient than solar. We have all of the infrastructure in place and it produces energy that is made entirely in Australia. Previous generations thought about these problems before setting off on ambitious projects. Even crazier, previous generations could actually make the stuff instead of buying it from China.
The climate leadership of the e-car-driving elite cuts us off at the knees geopolitically. Their ideology has given China a competitive advantage over us. Imagine if we had the foresight to industrialise, rather than unionise Australia’s industries… We could have been a global powerhouse if we had figured out a way to use robots to make steel or keep unions in check. Instead, we sell dirt and buy back Chinese steel to build nuclear subs.
Rather than lamenting the past, the Labor party could learn from Don Quixote – taking a trading post jousting stick to their un-environmental, un-sovereign, un-sensible windmills. Dropping the raised fist, ‘Future Made In Australia comrades!’ rallying cry, and the American-owned Australian-made plans, they could allow local industry to flourish by cutting back on bureaucracies, red tape, and outdated unionisation. In defence of the environment, they could analyse the entirety of the supply chain, the total energy consumed, and make sensible, environmentally conscious decisions, realising that Australia cares more about the environment than strong manufacturing countries do. Finally, they could learn from countless lessons in history that show that centrally controlled, communistic industrialisation doesn’t work. Instead, it eventually causes mass slaughter. The market does a better job of deciding than a government department, and industry does more to support the working class they purport to support than dole cheques.