Where

[Yenn]

Where are we going? Not you and I, but Australia.

We seem to me to be heading for oblivion.

Our current aim seems to be to get rid of coal. No burning it or using it and definitely  stop mining and selling it.

Our biggest income earner seems to be coal, so what are we going to produce in its stead?

Another big earner is agriculture, but our government has so pissed off our major buyer that many ag. products are not acceptable there. Another case of primary productions big drawback. The buyer sets the price.

Education was touted as the big earner, but I don't know where it is now, post covid.

Tourism seems to have dropped out of the picture, again because of the pissing off of the Chinese.

Manufacture. Whats that? Do we manufacture anything nowadays.

The booming industries seem to be health care and that is not what I would call an income creating business for the country. The same can be said for the biggest growth industry, namely disability, which again contributes nothing to the country money wise.

We don't seem to have any direction, nor does anyone seem to be worrying about it.

I forgot the military, we have been first to raise our hands to join any fight in the past so long as the USA has been the leader. Sadly most of those fights have been started on spurious grounds, and one of them is still going on after 80 years. Viet Nam, Iraque and Afghanistan we should not have been involved in. All the while we sit back and do nothing about what is happening in Ukraine, a place where we could have done some good if we hadn't listened to Joe Biden.

We seem to be like s headless chook, looking for handouts, but doing nothing to look after ourselves.

We will end up rather like a mixture of South Africa and the worst parts of USA.

Please tell me I am wrong, I would so like to have something for my great grand kids to look forward to.

[pmccarthy]

We need to produce lots of military hardware, drones and shells and so on. Then we will need to find someone to fire them at before their shelf life runs out. 🥴

[facthunter]

It COULD be worse Yenn. Where else would you prefer to be living at the moment?  It's easy to get depressed though.   Nev

[Bruce Tuncks]

Good onyer Yenn. I just saw a vid that said how Russia was the main supplier of aluminium to Airbus and how it was bauxite from Australia which the russians used.

[facthunter]

Which is just clay. Takes a lot of electrical power to make it into metal. .Ukraine has the biggest nuclear generators in the game.  .  Nev

[spacesailor]

Wait a moment.

She-ll be right ! , as we zoom back to the forties ! , go to work on yer bike, catch the tram for the meeting in the big smoke.

spacesailor

[Jerry_Atrick]

It's easy to get carried away with the doom and gloom, but our reliance on coal for income, pi55ing off our biggest trading partner, and general consumer and servce-led economy is the result of years of lack of government (both sides) and private enterprise vision.

 

If we look at coal, we had a golden opportunity to lead the way in R&D of renewables.. squandered it thanks to corrupt governments pushing to fossil fuel barrow. OK, so we missed that, but we still could have deployed it to exploit the surplus renewable energy sources to sell power to SE Asian nations.. Nope.. and now a Singaporean conglomerate is doing that. FIRB allows foreign (mainly Chinese) investment into percentage-sized tracts of arable and fertile land; At least the Albo government is trying to repair the damage the previous governments have wracked upon Australia by going after the Chinese. Of course, no country should allow its sovereign interests to be risked, and of course, all nations should be exerting pressure on those who violate all sorts of international laws and human rights.. However, there are ways of doing it, and it looks like the previous Aussie governments managed to pick the least effective ways. 

 

Also, at least this government is trying to buy Australian (exactly what that means when so much is foreign owned, I am not sure): https://www.finance.gov.au/business/buyaustralianplan#:~:text=The Buy Australian Plan will%3A,decoding and simplifying procurement processes. As an example, say the government want to have some engineering work done somewhere. Jacobs Engineering Pty. Ltd. is an Australian company that is wholly owned by Jacobs Engineering Group of the USA. By using Jacobs Engineering Pty Ltd to design and manage the construction of whatever engineering it is, they have purchased Aussie made.. but the equity benefit is retained by the US. 

 

BTW, most western countries, emerging markets countries are heading the same way. The other countries are not great to live in, and, as communism is not socialism, the power and wealth wrests in an even smaller concentration of people, rather than shared equitably and fairly with the nation. 

 

What Aus (and the UK) need is leadership with balls... that will set a development agenda to rebuild national ownership and wealth rather than rely on inward investment. Until political donations are capped, and real punishment and admonishment for breaches of electoral funding laws is administered, it will be continue to be a corporate gangsters' paradise: https://michaelwest.com.au/foreign-fossil-fuel-juggernauts-dominate-the-annual-mwm-top-40-tax-dodgers-chart/  (as an example). 

 

At least you don't have a 99 hour wait for A&E (casualty) in public hospitals yet. 

[pmccarthy]

Most Australian engineering firms have been absorbed, over the years, by US companies and their specialty skills have been lost. For example, Hardcastle and Richard’s was a Melbourne firm that was the go-to for bridges, mine shaft hoisting, structural timber and other things. Long gone now.

[old man emu]

I was making a dessert for Christmas lunch. I needed sweetened condensed milk. I had the option two brands (one was Nestle). One brand came from Lithuania, and the other from Spain. I thought we had dairy cows in Australia.

 

Remember when you were a teenager and your parents bought you a really good pair of trousers or suit from Fletcher Jones? Your school shirt was made by Bissley in Australia. Now they have the "Made in China" label. Up here at Gilgandra, they remember the inventor of the Howard rotavator. As a 16 year old teenager Arthur Clifford Howard began working on his invention in Gilgandra New Wales. In 1912 Howard built a prototype hoe. It used rotating discs driven by a tractor engine to cut weeds and plants roots and mixes these with the soil.

 

In Victoria, Ronaldson Bros. & Tippett was once one of the largest manufacturers of small stationary engines and agricultural machinery in Australia and operated from 1905 right up till the early 1970’s.

https://salterbros.com.au/ronaldson-bros-and-tippett/  And don't forget the Furphy water cart.

7 hours ago, Jerry_Atrick said:

Until political donations are capped, and real punishment and admonishment for breaches of electoral funding laws is administered, it will be continue to be a corporate gangsters' paradise

That is so true. The average Australian citizen is not corrupt, but its leadership is. "Power corrupts ..."

[pmccarthy]

3 hours ago, old man emu said:

In Victoria, Ronaldson Bros. & Tippett was once one of the largest manufacturers of small stationary engines and agricultural machinery in Australia and operated from 1905 right up till the early 1970’s.

In the early 1980s I used to sit with EJ (John) Tippett in his kitchen and he would tell me the some of the company history over a cup of tea. He went to England in WW2 to set up manufacture of portable generators for the military, so Australian expertise was then sought after. 

 

I also knew Jim Morgan who worked for the company for 50 years as their field agent servicing machines. He had the record books by serial number of all the machines. He travelled from the 1920s by motorbike and sidecar with his tool kit and spares.

Edited January 2, 2023 by pmccarthy

[Old Koreelah]

10 hours ago, pmccarthy said:

Most Australian engineering firms have been absorbed, over the years, by US companies and their specialty skills have been lost. For example, Hardcastle and Richard’s was a Melbourne firm that was the go-to for bridges, mine shaft hoisting, structural timber and other things. Long gone now.

Losing locally-owned companies is very disappointing, but there may be longer-term benefits. Global firms pay good money to employ the best talent- wherever it is- and many Aussies now work overseas. America’s education system is far behind many advanced nations; the US imports most of it best talent.

 

Australia may have lost good people temporarily, but most will return, with greater skills and capital. NZ’s experience with their film industry is instructive.

 

As long as Australia remains a stable, safe place to live, we will attract people with skills and money.

[facthunter]

WE shouldn't rely on taking people from countries who need those skills and have probably paid for them to be gotten. We should PULL OUR WEIGHT in all thing s and even contribute to the rest of the world's welfare by educating many of them. Educated people breed less and have higher living standards.  Nev