by ROGER CROOK – I SOMETIMES wonder if we will ever again have a leader who believes there are lessons to be learned from our past.
Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it, according to Winston Churchill.
- Instead, we rely on China – the greatest threat to this region – for the fuel to keep our planes, military and civil, in the air.
- Australia is well on its way to becoming the “white trash of Asia”.
- No one can take Chris “Blackout” Bowen’s advice seriously.
That view has been attributed to many men over the years, the first time I can find it is in the writings of Edmund Burke in 1790, when he commented on the French Revolution.
Burke was an 18th century Irishman and a founder of modern conservative politics in Britain.
POSTERITY
“People will not look forward to posterity, who never look back to their ancestors,” he wrote.
First though, let us settle once and for all which federal governments were responsible for the security of Australia as multi-national oil companies closed down the oil refining capacity of this country.
- The first refinery to close was Port Stanvac in Adelaide in 2003 when John Howard was Prime Minister.
- Nothing happened for nearly a decade and then the rot began. In 2012 Clyde in Sydney was closed while Kevin Rudd was prime minister.
- Kurnell in Sydney closed in 2014 when Malcolm Turnbull was PM and in charge of national security.
- Bulwer Island in Brisbane closed in 2015 and we can blame the same Labor-lite Turnbull.
- In 2021 both Kwinana in WA and Altona in Melbourne closed during the reign of Mr Net-Zero Scott Morrison. The man who believes in miracles.
It is worth noting that the minister responsible for our oil security or lack of during the Morrison era was none other than current Liberal Leader Angus Taylor.
He placed our crude oil reserves in Texas. Crude oil mind you, at the time the two remaining refineries were due to close. Presumably, our strategic reserves were to go from Texas to maybe Singapore and then to Australia!
If that’s “strategic thinking Angus Taylor-style”, then God help us.
Malcolm Turnbull and Scott Morrison and to a lesser extent Kevin Rudd are guilty of a dereliction of duty to the Australian people.
They deliberately ignored the international agreement and convention that all nations keep at least 90 days fuel supply in reserve.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and his team of fools may be the worst government we have had in Australia in my lifetime (and that’s over 80 years) – but to be fair, they inherited a disaster waiting for its time to strike.
Labor has kept two refineries open but only with subsidies, aka tax money taken from the people.
That money is being used to subsidise (or is it to bribe?) the vastly rich multi-national oil companies to remain operating in Australia.
It all became even more ludicrous when we learned that, until this crisis evolved, the refineries were producing petrol with a high sulphur content that could not be sold in Australia. So they exported it!
Does that mean Australian taxpayers were subsidising the multi-national oil companies to export fuel?
For the past two decades successive Australian Governments have ignored the bitter lessons of the First & Second World Wars.
The First World War was “the war to end all wars”. Then in 1939 it happened again.
Australia, just like Britain, is an island. Don’t our prime ministers and their cabinets know anything about modern history?
Did they not know that after the declaration of war in 1939, Germany blockaded Britain, and Northern Ireland, with their famous U-Boat submarines.
With their U-Boats they successfully closed the English Channel and all of the ports on the south coast of England which Britain relied to survive.
BATTLE
That one decisive move by Hitler started the longest battle of the Second World War, The Battle of the Atlantic.
Hitler’s aim by blockading the Atlantic was to close the ports of Liverpool and Glasgow on the west coast of Britain and so starve Britain into surrender.
When the battle ended in 1945 the allied forces had lost 3500 merchant ships and 175 warships and about 72,000 sailors.
The Germans lost 783 U-Boats and about 30,000 sailors.
The Battle of the Atlantic saved Britain from starvation and enabled the allied forces to build the power to invade France and eventually defeat Germany.
Like Britain, Australia is an island and just like Britain in 1939, Australia in 2026 is in no position to defend itself.
Unlike Britain in 1939, Australia in 2026 does not have a British Empire and a United States of America to come to its aid.
Unlike Britain in 1939, in Australia in 2026 we are blessed; we have all that we require to be a self-supporting nation, but when push comes to shove, as history now shows, we just can’t be bothered to harness it.
During the past 20 years Australia has been strategically and militarily rudderless; governed by lazy politicians more concerned about their own power and place in history, than the defence, security, and self-sufficiency of Australia.
How bat crazy is it that work has already commenced to make Western Australia the home for nuclear submarines when it has to import every litre of petroleum products to keep the construction going to build for the future defence of this nation?
The oil refinery at Kwinana, just south of Fremantle, was one of the most modern in the country.
Built, I think, in the 1970s it was closed five years ago without a skerrick of protest from the WA Labor Government.
Now fuel oils imported into WA have to either come from the eastern States – a distance almost the same as between London and Moscow or Tel Aviv, or from refineries in Singapore, Malaysia or even South Korea. If you need AV gas, then all the way from China.
We rely on China – the greatest military threat to this region – for the fuel to keep our planes, military and civil, in the air.
BLOCKADE
How difficult in the 21st Century would it be to blockade Western Australia and how difficult would it be to fight to keep those sea lanes open?
Fear not, at the time of writing there is just one Collins class submarine fit for service in Australia, and as luck would have it, it is in WA waters.
The only air force we have on the west coast is a squadron of RAAF training aircraft at Bullsbrook – no guns but they do make a noise.
Fear not though, the SAS lives in WA; so she’ll be jakes!
Where does that leave the defence of the West and the security of whatever it is that is going on in Exmouth and at Pine Gap at The Alice?
We know that both installations, clouded in secrecy, and operated by both America and Australia are vital to the security of the region to our north and north east. They must be on the radar of any potential aggressor.
We can only hope they have a few bulk tanks or 200 litre drums stashed away to cater for this monumental defence stuff-up that is taking place right now. They can’t take Chris “Blackout” Bowen’s advice and work from home!
In Australia we have a vast wealth of all the raw materials and the land to grow all the food we require to satisfy our own needs and could and should export raw and finished goods to the rest of the world – but we don’t.
We have millions of litres of natural gas, but we don’t make nitrogen fertilisers which are vital to the growing of food for ourselves and for export.
We rely on China, to whom we export the natural gas, which they use to make the nitrogen fertiliser for us to import after they have added value to it. How rich and stupid are we?
We are one of the biggest producers of natural gas, but we refuse to be an industrial nation; we don’t want to be seen operating what those on the Left consider “dirty” industry.
Emissions are global. The burning of fossil fuels in the world is increasing every year and Australia’s contribution to world emissions is less than 1.5 per cent – or equal to what China emits in less than a month.
DIRTY
We don’t burn coal because it is “dirty”, but we are happy to live off the coal “hog” when it is exported to China, Korea and Japan to burn. We then buy from them what our coal and iron ore produces.
Now in the 21st Century, we can look at the development of countries like China, South Korea and Japan and consider where they were and where we in Australia were, at the end of World War II.
In 1945 our leaders knew that we had everything except people to make Australia a great and powerful nation.
Chifley and Menzies blazed the highway for Australia to capitalise on the lessons and skills it had learned during the war. The progress was startling and as the population increased, the world envied our standard of living.
For a while we cast off the apron strings of the old world and showed what we could do from and with our resources – both our incomparable natural resources and our deep well of personal ambition.
Now as I write, there is a hint of panic about our national countenance.
Our leaders are mumbling; there are rumours of petrol and diesel rationing; it seem inevitable that our costs will once again accelerate beyond our ability to pay.
Was Lee Kwan Yew right in 1980 when he predicted that we in Australia could well become the “white trash of Asia”.
He said then, with our vast resources, that unless we diversified we risked falling behind as the region surged ahead.
How right he was and how stupid we were.PC
This Time the U.S. Attack on Iran Will Be for Real – and for Keeps.
Global Research – 25 March 2026.
First of all, the Strait of Hormuz has remained open.
Iran is letting ships from India, Japan and other countries use it.
So there is no need to “liberate” it.
That’s not what the imminent U.S. attack is about.
And it’s certainly not about Iran seeking an atomic “weapon of mass destruction.”
That’s been the cover story to distract attention from the long-term U.S. plan that’s underlain its foreign policy for the past century.
The aim is to control Iran and the oil trade behind it – who can buy this oil and who can be denied access to oil and gas – and even more important, the export revenues from this oil trade.
This is the “final” conquest in the U.S. game to control and weaponize the world’s oil trade: To seize Iran’s oil and turn it over to either a client regime (Trump has said that he wants to select the new ruler personally) or to U.S. companies – and then to use the chaos in the Arab OPEC countries to impose the same control over them.
See Full Article >
https://www.globalresearch.ca/us-attack-iran-real-keeps/5919952
EU militarizing by turning civilian factories into arms manufacturers – Global Research – 25 March 2026.
Excerpt >
On the other hand, the troubled European Union keeps suffering one geopolitical flop after another, whether it’s the self-defeating support for US wars of aggression against the entire world or the suicidal confrontation with Russia.
In both cases, the Brussels bureaucratic dictatorship is suffering the consequences while its Anglo-American thalassocratic overlords continue to make enormous profits.
Meanwhile, European economies keep suffocating under the combined pressure of their own “anti-Russian” sanctions and the US aggression against Iran.
See Full Article >
https://www.globalresearch.ca/eu-militarizing-by-turning-civilian-factories-into-arms-manufacturers/5920121