My birthday this year, April 17 as usual, was met with the announcement of a new coastal ship. Never mind that it will be five years after Albo promised 12 new ships, and it’s a 15-year-old clunker that can’t get near most coastal communities…
It is a less-than-promising start, but a start nonetheless!
‘You’re too critical of Albo,’ said my wife. ‘He had the Voice referendum that soaked up most of the funds for 12 ships, but his other policies have resulted in hardship, censorship, union comradeship, ABC championship, socialist fellowship, political brinkmanship, lazy workmanship, so there! You managed to get seven new ships, be grateful!’
As usual, she was right. Happy wife, happy life.
As a keen participant in the shipping industry, I had, for decades, presented my simple sailor philosophy of ‘copy success’, such as the ‘Motorways of the Sea’ (MOS) adopted in Europe 25 years ago, which removed 60 per cent of truck traffic from the coastal roads within two years of the system implementation.
Why take most of the trucks off the coastal roads on our island nation of Australia, you may well ask?
We consistently kill 1,300 Australian every year on the roads. 80 per cent of these accidents involve trucks. According to the ABS, that is worth around $3m per death based on complicated assumptions. Trucks, according to most studies, are the major contributing factor in road deaths and serious injuries.
We continue to have 18,000 serious road accident injuries. This is more costly to the community, as the injured survivors need ongoing medical treatment, NDIS carers etc., so multiply this number by $3.5m according to the ABS and we get into some serious finances.
Road repairs and maintenance. Three years ago, the cost was $30 billion per annum on the maintenance, upgrade, and expansion of Australia’s 875,000km road network, which then equated to $34,000 per kilometre, according to the Bureau of Infrastructure and Transport Research Economics. Again, according to transport studies, trucks are the major cause of road damage.
Road congestion – and we all know about that, don’t we? The curious formula that assigns the cost of this is bewildering, but trust me, it’s in the millions.
Road emission. Using a simple exercise by taking a 1,000 TEU (20-foot containers) feeder ship will use just 8 per cent of the fuel consumption and emissions of a truck-mounted container over the same distance. The ship, of course, doesn’t create potholes, nor will it jackknife, or contribute to congestion. This is a no brainer!
Now that you are totally convinced about the need to copy success on our island nation, with most of the population living around the coastline, yes, let’s get trucks off the road! Let’s get an Australian Motorway of the Sea, let’s call it OZMoS! This could easily implement savings of $35 billion per annum, check for yourself!
Well actually, I have done presentations on OZMOS for the last 25 years, at bipartisan Coastal Shipping hearings federally, in several states, and with all key political figures. Yes, even the Greens who should have embraced coastal shipping for its amazing environmental advantages. I don’t think the Greens are interested in the environment and instead just want to bring Australia down, like the socialist Labor troglodytes.
The unions are a close second bunch of bedwetters, with no vision. When I went to sea out of Geelong in 1963, the Seamans Union of Australia was under an avowed socialist and outspoken member of the communist party. There were 135 coastal ships at the time, and now there are just nine. The fleet has almost perished, confirming the results of lack of vision. The last Secretary of the Maritime Union did nothing to halt the demise of coastal shipping and the number of Australian seafarers. He and I exchanged our different views several times. Know a man by his works.
Time to tell the unions to take a hike. The engine room of Australia, small businesses, could never have union participation, as it would be the kiss of death. Burke’s IR policies are already burdening small businesses. It is only the big, financially overweight companies, and the dead hand of government bureaucracies that can afford unions and tolerate their poor performance while working from home.
The only genuine spark of interest in coastal shipping from politicians was from Pauline Hanson and Malcolm Roberts of One Nation and Katter Party’s Bob and Robbie Katter. All four of them have been guest speakers at the famous Marine Therapy Group. Yes, we had speakers from Labor but never the Greens shipping spokesperson, Senator Janet Rice, despite repeated invites and giving her a signed copy of Bluff Your Way to Sea.
Visionaries for the nation who have proposed extending rivers into canal waterways to access our immense mineral wealth, again have included Bob Katter during his tenure as a Minister in the Bjelke Petersen Nationals Government. The Greens and the burgeoning EPA/EPBC bureaucratic empires already put the blockers on that, as they have done to most initiatives to access and mine the enormous economically trapped resources since then.
Surely the visions of our forefathers, including John Bradfield, had merit? Repeated attempts to turn the northern rivers back into the headwaters of the Murray-Darling and create a huge food basket for us and our neighbouring countries, always met with the bleating of finance ministers and Treasury bean counters.
Iin 2009, when Kevin Rudd declared to the nation a $42 billion stimulus spendathon to provide jobs and long-term prosperity for the nation against an impending economic storm, I immediately jumped to the conclusion, ‘This has got to be the Bradfield Scheme, or a new coastal shipping service?’ Alas, it was neither, just another Labor raft of ‘free stuff’! Ill-conceived promises to get votes, including the already technologically outdated NBN, so you could download porn at a faster speed, $950 cash per person, pink batts to insulate your roof, and rapidly the money was frittered away. Not one single visionary project.
I was on a cruise ship at the time and never saw my $950, just alongside the $275 Albo promised me off my electricity bill. These promised amounts are mentioned in my Last Will and Testament so my grandkids can get them when they come through, after all, a promise is a promise.
That was the moment that I realised the enormous wealth, potential, and future of Australia was tied down like Gulliver by a multitude of Lilliputians. Thank you, Jonathan Swift!
So how do we untie Gulliver, eliminate debt, remove enemies already within our gates, regain prosperity, our national pride and values, and release Australia’s vision to become the Lucky Country again?
Spot the cancers and remove them!
Albo and his whole Cabinet would win gold, silver, and bronze in the Destruction Olympics. They have tied down Gulliver and cancers are spreading all over the body. Even the dimmest of Labor supporters can now see that they are not incompetent; they are actively and deliberately bringing the country down, spreading the cancers of division, violence, unhappiness, fear, and poverty to every family. They have destroyed any remnants of the ability to defend ourselves from seriously motivated, jealous, and well-armed neighbours.
Albo’s team are hermetically sealed within the Canberra Bubble and ministerial chauffeur-driven Com-cars. Like cancers, they need removing as a matter of urgency.
Repealing 85 per cent of EPA/EPBC regulations would be another Day 1 start, along with punishing the dunces that take great delight in thwarting exploration and mining licences.
Pull Canberra’s head out of their posterior, by repealing the remaining eight national bans against nuclear and incentivising the development of a nuclear industry by restarting nuclear engineering courses to handle this amazing, nation-building technology. Copying successful Finland, we should, with the aid of nuclear, get electricity at 10 cents per kwh instead of 40-50 cents/kwh, depending on where you are in the country at present.
On the second day we should remove other bureaucratic shackles and allow all of the population to get on with their own dreams and visions, whether small or large.
Where there is no vision, the people perish. – Proverbs.
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