by ROGER CROOK – BEHIND the headlines that make us sit up and take notice – like the trillion-dollar national debt or Albanese’s grubby melon joke – there are some unpleasant truths for this nation to absorb.
The first truth is that Anthony Albanese is a lout and should never have been prime minister. He cannot count and does not care to learn about income and debt. For him, money grows on the bountiful taxation tree.
- This mess was created by people we elected to manage the county and its finances.
- The bitter pill is that the debt is not theirs, it is ours.
- Yet, Albanese and the numerically illiterate Treasurer have told us they going to continue the spending spree.
The other is far more serious. We are all too familiar with the size and the impact of debt on our lives.
In just 20 years we have gone from being a nation of 19m people and no debt to 27m people and a previously unimaginable mountain of debt.
TRILLION
Actually, $1.6 trillion if you add on the State’s debts.
What these dreadful figures tell us is that all of the income our governments have received from taxes and charges for the past 20 years, plus what Peter Costello left in the bank for Kevin07, has been spent, it’s gone!
Not content with spending all of their income, consecutive governments and again these Labor governments across the country are no exception, have grabbed hold of the national credit card and spent another $1.6 trillion.
The bitter pill is that the debt is not theirs, it is ours. It has been incurred by people we elected to manage the county and its finances.
Now, too late, we realise they have made fools of us and have put us deep into the merde. Productivity is stagnant and inflation is obstinate – so interest rates must go up again.
Albanese and the numerically illiterate Treasurer have told us they going to continue the spending spree, so there’s nothing we can do about it until we get rid of them.
As I watch a totally irresponsible Labor Government and a lame Opposition, the only solution to get out of this hot mess is to give Pauline Hanson and One Nation a go.
Those from both sides of the House – who have told us they’re the only ones fit for the task – have, for the past 20 years, failed.
So here we are. A very big island, with 27m people mainly of Judeo-Christian values in the middle of a big ocean on the edge of a booming Asia – and we’re broke.
We should now consider what the Deputy Prime Minister really meant when he addressed the National Press Club on April 16 this year.
Richard Marles told the Fourth Estate that Australia faced “its most complex and threatening strategic circumstances since the end of World War II”, as “international norms that once constrained the use of force and military coercion continue to erode”.
What that means in plain language is that our part of the world is more militarily fragile than it was in 1945, or, we have China as a neighbour, on whom we rely for almost everything, and China’s belligerence in the region is growing.
We had an experience of that belligerence recently when Beijing sent a small fleet to do a circumnavigation recce on Australia and practice some live fire drills.
Not only didn’t we know they were there (a passing commercial airline captain raised the alert), when we did learn, we didn’t have a ship of any kind that could keep an eye on them.
And worse, we didn’t have a refuelling tanker that could keep our war ship at sea had we had one capable of keeping an eye on them.
ADMIRAL
The Chinese navy did their sight-seeing, mapped what they wanted around our coast, found out where all the under-sea cables are that connect us with the rest of the world, and went home with their Admiral on his bridge quietly humming Waltzing Matilda.
At the time I enquired about our Collins Class submarine fleet and was told there was only one out of six in service. The rest were, and still are, in pieces around Australia.
The terrible truth we all have to face is that during those 20 years we have not only racked up $1.6 trillion in debt, we now don’t have a navy worth a cracker.
Which means we have lost our ability to keep our vital shipping lanes open. For a trading nation living on an island, that is a serious problem.
We are well on the way to being in the same position to what Churchill and Britain found themselves in 1939, and that is being reliant on others for our food.
National Party Leader Matt Canavan has just woken up to something I have been writing about for at least the past five years, maybe longer, and that is we are no longer self-sufficient in food.
Do not believe the claims that we grow enough food to feed many starving millions because it is a false claim.
What Australia grows are sufficient calories to feed millions of people. Our two biggest rural exports are grain and meat. Both are what the statisticians call unimproved.
That is the grain is as it was harvested and the meat is frozen and in bags and boxes, both have to be processed one way or another before they can be consumed.
About 16 per cent of our imported food, worth $27.6b landed, now comes from Singapore and China.
That does not mean Australia would starve without them, but it does mean that any disruption in those supply lines would be quickly felt— on supermarket shelves, in food factories and around kitchen tables.
UNCOMFORTABLE
That is the uncomfortable point we now have to face. No one sensible is saying Australia is about to run out of food next Tuesday.
We are still a great producer of grain, meat, wool, dairy, sugar and other staples. But food security is not simply a question of how many tonnes of wheat or beef leave our shores.
It is a question of whether a modern nation can keep its people fed, week after week, when the shipping lanes become uncertain, the supply contracts become political, fuel becomes short, fertiliser becomes scarce, or friendly suppliers suddenly have problems of their own.
That was Britain’s lesson in 1939. Britain didn’t go hungry because there was no food in the world. It came close to starving because the food it needed was somewhere else, and enemy submarines stood between the British people and the ships that carried it.
The sea, which had made Britain rich and powerful, suddenly became its weak point. The same geography that protected an island nation also made it vulnerable once its daily bread depended on other people, other ports, other ships and other navies.
Australia should study this example very carefully. We are not Britain in 1939, and China is not Germany in 1939, but the strategic principle is the same.
An island continent that assumes the supermarket will always be full is an island continent that has forgotten what war, blockade, sanctions, fuel shortages, cyber-attacks, port strikes and shipping disruptions can do.
The modern supply chain is marvellous when it works, but it is brittle when everyone wants the same ships, the same fuel, the same fertiliser, the same medicines and the same food at the same time.
Department of Agriculture, Fisheries & Forestry figures show the scale of the issue. In 2024 we still imported tens of billions of dollars’ worth of food, and although the bill was lower than the previous year, the trend over time has been upwards.
A single year’s fall should not comfort us if the longer trend is to buy more of what we eat from somewhere else.
That is how dependence grows: not in one dramatic act, but by quiet increments, year after year, until a country wakes up and discovers that essential parts of its food system exist outside its own borders.
That is why the next part of the story matters. Singapore and China raise obvious questions because of geography, trade routes and strategic risk.
But the more interesting and perhaps more dangerous question is our reliance on New Zealand and the United States, our two largest food suppliers.
They are friends, allies and familiar trading partners, which makes the dependence feel safe.
Yet friendship does not unload ships, end droughts, reopen ports, manufacture fertiliser, replace lost cargoes or guarantee that another nation’s food will always be available when it is needed at home.
If Australia is to avoid Britain’s 1939 predicament, we have to think about food security before the crisis, not after the convoy has already sailed.PC
