Title: Oh woe!
Tags: australia ills problems solutions
Blog Entry: As Australia’s federal government grinds on, putting Australia’s future at risk financially, socially and irresponsibly; and it’s state counterparts contemplate even more asset sell-offs to outspend the feds in an effort to shore up their social engineering programs I got to thinking. “Where do I really stand on some of these issues?” Having seen much of merit in the Workers’ Party platforms of the 1970s, and John Singleton’s ‘Rip Van Australia’ book of the same era, I despair at the lessons of history that continue to roll along decades later in stony silence – unlearned. So where do I stand? I straddle politics to a large degree, believing that between them Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser stuffed this country - to the point where we’ve never recovered. It’s about time as a population we started to take care of our ourselves, take responsibility for our own actions and wear the consequences of our decisions (good or bad), engender respect in our youth, and ceased expecting the ‘government will take care of it,’ whatever ‘it’ on any given day is. Communications. Essentially, the wired and wireless infrastructure should have remained a national asset. Defence and security considerations (and huge they loom), alone demand that the national interest would best be served by all telecommunications infrastructure being vested in a government authority. As a private corporation that covets the public’s investment in telecommunications infrastructure over hundreds of years – forcing its competition into unrealistic pricing models – Telstra as part of its government instructed breakup, should be divested of it all. They would then access the networks on the same basis as all other players, and then we would really see some low prices and market innovation. Water. Disband the corporations. All water catchment, distribution and treatment should return to public ownership, under a federal ownership scheme that ensures adequate development and delivery to population centres around the country ignoring artificial state borders. Power. All generation, infrastructure and development again, like water and communications should be returned to public ownership and at a federal level to ensure stable production and delivery. The ‘Big 3’ of communications, water and power are essential for Australia’s future growth, prosperity and quality of life, and defence and security of the nation are on over-riding imperative. States. With twenty-odd million people on a landmass roughly the size of the continental United States, we have to be the most over-governed population on the entire planet. Duplicated governments, duplicated authorities, conflicting laws and jurisdictions, state-based agendas that jeopardise the efficient utilisation of resources and assets – the sheer number of governments in this country is way past their use-by-date. The car sticker that proclaims “Shed a Tier” is a concept that deserves serious consideration; and action. I’m an Australian living in Western Australia – not a West Australian living in Australia. With a moving population we need a national approach to law and order, education, health and service provision. Fractured approaches by states with their own agendas and vested interests will continue to hold us back. Thank your god the states don’t run defence!
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