Sickening, stomach churning pap

Two months ago when cautiously praising the Abbott Coalition government, I singled out Tasmanian Senator Richard Colbeck, the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Agriculture, for criticism. It seems he still hasn’t learnt much.

Indeed, his December 20 press release headed “All I want for Christmas is Australian Seafood”, is a classic example of a parliamentary secretary being led by the nose by his bureaucrats. This offensive tosh which, sickeningly, is re-cycled every Christmas, is a classic example of the hypocritical nonsense that emanates from the Australian Fisheries Management Authority’s (AFMA) ivory tower in Canberra.

Perhaps we should ask Senator Colbeck, what fish? Thanks to the politically correct depredation of AFMA and its pompous, parasitic “public servants”, it’s damned difficult to obtain a feed of Australian fish.

Senator Colbeck would be well advised to sit at the knee of his colleague Senator Ron Boswell and learn some of the facts of Australian fisheries life that Senator Boswell is so well versed on. He and the Australian fishing industry would benefit from his listening to Senator Boswell’s advice rather than AFMA’s fantasising.

Welfare or warfare? – The ASC conundrum

Australian governments of both stripes are experts at killing winners and rewarding losers. Pandering to parasitic sectional groups such as the Greens and unions like the MUA, CFMEU and AMWU, they continually favour noisy, privileged zealots over the great majority of working Australians.

Successive governments have practically destroyed our economically and environmentally sound export-earning fishing industry while simultaneously molly-coddling our uncompetitive, over-priced car industry, for example. The AMWU has proved to be an enormously successful lobby group.

Now that Messrs Abbott, Hockey and Robb and their colleagues have finally shown sufficient backbone as to knock General Motors Holden (GMH) and its pampered employees on the head, we can only hope the Coalition government will be sufficiently encouraged to do the same to the many other “rent seekers” such as Qantas and SPC Ardmona that ride on the backs of Australian taxpayers.

We continually hear bleaters from the left wing press, the ALP and, most particularly, the hopefully soon-to-be-defeated South Australian Labor Government of the importance of further protecting the Adelaide-based ASC (formerly Australian Submarine Corporation).

Indeed, those same fellow travellers are loudly advocating the ordering of an additional multi-billion dollar air warfare destroyer (AWD) with the prime objective of providing highly paid, cushy jobs to workers displaced from Adelaide’s GMH plant. They also, completely ludicrously, demand that we should build a dozen new large long range and insanely expensive submarines there.

If the Coalition government falls for that one it would be a classic case of substituting welfare for defence policy. Indeed, there is a pressing need for the federal government to be rid altogether of the ridiculously inefficient, wasteful and hopelessly uncompetitive ASC.

Governments should never be in business. They are hopeless at business. The misfortunes of ASC and the inadequacies and cost overruns of its products – among many other examples – prove that conclusively. The best thing to do with it is to start closing it down immediately. Finish the AWDs that are past the point of no return and scrap the rest. Outsource the submarine maintenance to Singapore or wherever – they certainly could not be anywhere near as expensively hopeless as ASC.

Little Singapore, incidentally, while home to a much larger shipbuilding industry than Australia’s, has very sensibly decided to import all of its submarines from Germany. It has also unashamedly imported many of its other warships.

If Australia is then unable to inspire the development of a completely unsubsidised, free enterprise warship building industry, we should simply import our warships. I suspect, however, that if they were given a fair go, without the heavy hand of government interference, free enterprise Australian shipbuilders such as Austal and Incat could do at least part of the job.

If they are unable or uninterested then we should simply import our warships complete and outsource their maintenance to competitive overseas yards. At the same time we should abolish the Defence Material Organisation and replace it with something far smaller, more streamlined, more efficient and about ninety per cent less expensive. Anything would be an improvement on that bloated self-serving bureaucratic outfit.

Australians, like most people, are very poorly served by many of our government operations. They almost always end up as self-serving bureaucracies that cost taxpayers very dearly and provide far fewer benefits to the taxpayer than they are intended to do.

Once governments start to dabble in business, either as direct owners as in the case of the ASC or as providers of protection as in the case of the car companies et al, they and the taxpayers who have to pay for their folly are on a slippery slope to disaster.

South Australia is not very important in the overall national scheme of things. The Prime Minister and his government should beware of buying votes in that ever-mendicant state by being seduced into offering further support to the ASC. It will be less expensive in terms of both dollars and votes, to close it down now than at any time in the future.