My birthday this year, April 17th 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's 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?
1. We consistently kill 1,300 Australians every year on the roads and 80 per cent of these accidents involve trucks. According to ABStats, that is worth around AU$3 million (US$2 million) per death based on complicated assumptions. Trucks, according to most studies, are the major contributing factor in road deaths and serious injuries as you could image, when a 40-tonne truck collides with a two-tonne sedan and its occupants.
2. We continue to have 18,000 serious road accident injuries. This is more costly to the community, as the injured survivors need lots of ongoing medical treatment, being pushed around in wheelchairs, NDIS carers, etc, etc, so multiply this number by AU$3.5 million (US$2.5 million) according to ABStats and we get into some serious finances.
3. Three years ago, the cost was AU$30 billion (US$20 million) per annum on the maintenance, upgrade and expansion of Australia’s 875,000-kilometre road network, which then equated to AU$34,000 (US$24,000) per kilometre, according to Bureau of Infrastructure and Transport Research Economics. Again, according to all transport studies, trucks are the major cause of road damage.
4. 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.
5. Using a simple exercise by taking a 1,000TEU feeder ship will use just eight per cent of the fuel consumption and emissions of a truck mounted-container over the same distance. The ship, of course, doesn’t create potholing, 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, and let’s call it OZMOS! This could easily implement savings of AU$35 billion (US$25 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 and in several states and with all key political figures. Yes, these include even the Greens who should have embraced coastal shipping for its amazing environmental advantages. Thanks to Matthew Sheahan and ADVANCE, he has clearly shown that the Greens are not interested in the environment and just want to bring Australia down, like the socialist labor troglodites.
The unions are a close second bunch of bedwetters with no vision, and when I went to sea out of Geelong in 1963, the Seamans Union of Australia was under Vic Elliott, 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, Paddy Crumlin, 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 evil 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.
So in 2009, when Kevin Rudd declared to the nation a AU$42 billion (US$30 billion) stimulus spend-a-thon 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, AU$950 (US$680) 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 AU$950, just alongside the AU$275 (US$200) 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?
Simple: 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, and that 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 chauffer-driven Comcars. Like cancers, they need removing as a matter of urgency.
Repeal 85 per cent of EPA/EPBC regulations would be another day one start, along with jailing 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 incentivise 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 to 50 cents per 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 29:18)
