Wednesday, January 12, 2011

“WHY DON’T AUSTRALIANS WANT AN INDIGINOUS DEFENCE INDUSTRY?” More specifically – Q - Why doesn’t a certain comfortable set entrenched in regional Australia want any sort of new, high level, value adding, technology based industries queering their grotty little pitch? A – ‘Cos they’d be shown up for the braindead counterproductive mob they are!


VIDEO – Some of us are stupid. Years of argument with 'authority' followed by years of frustration, more argument and huge expense to do project work for the defence of this blind and benighted country. Here is being trialled a prototype for project Land 40-2.

Authors – The Team.
Another long-winded diatribe beginning with a potted history of a very insignificant part of regional Australia leading towards a theory (based on fact) as to why a select few intend the district shall remain insignificant into the foreseeable future.

Some geezer from academia (or was that macadamia) was on the radio the other day discussing with his peers the way Australia might best improve economically.

He pulled out of his hat his best example of how Oz might resist improvement by citing this part of regional Queensland inhabited by our team at Calligula’s Horse.

Now, we know it’s the armpit of the universe here – flat, boring, flood plain landscapes, swamps and no offshore islands to pretty up the beach but it suited the mindset of the original settlers who wanted an easily navigable port approach and otherwise mostly wanted to do little more than grow sugar cane and oppress slaves from the nearby Pacific Islands.
Their other pastime was posturing about all day outside church on Sundays gossiping pettishly and backstabbing their more prosperous neighbours with unremitting bile.

Indeed, those were the days and nowadays we are stuck with the outcomes they, perhaps unintentionally, forged.

For, you see, despite being somewhat dour, well scrubbed once a week, and narrow focused – they were too successful at converting scrubland into sugar plantations and amazingly innovative at introducing new agricultural and industrial technology toward value adding: converting their favourite monoculture into saleable product (their favourite product being firewater rum).

Their success and the enforced eradication of blackbirding (essentially slavetrading of a sort) eventually led to mechanization of harvesting and milling technology which naturally morphed towards ‘big farming’, industry regulation and exploitation of the original exploiters of humanity by financiers, banks and middlemen.
All of which meant that over a century of hard labour under the blazing sub-tropical sun let to ownership of the district’s kit of assets by absentee entities and its eventual dispersal overseas to locations with lower labour costs.

The best, most recent, example of that was the removal of a huge harvester factory to Brazil.

The entire intellectual property and machinery contents of a couple of acres was packed up and shipped out in a few weeks with the tacit agreement of a few local ‘gentlemen’ whose morals and code of conduct floats at about at the same level as sharkshit.
Naturally they’re still good mates with our local politicians.

There, in a nutshell, is described about a century and a half; the futile history of a region which having faced depredation (more like old-fashioned predation) has for years now desperately needed imagination,  more innovation, meaningful occupation and industry replacement.

Which brings us back to the profound comments of our erstwhile academician who asserts with some justification that our region lately is apparently being intentionally overpopulated with southern immigrants who mostly lack the least occupational skills and precious little social skills whatsoever. (and so says the ABS)

His concern that such an underemployed population cannot create wealth when fifty percent of the regional population employed part-time in bargain barns is doing nothing more than selling on cheap imported tradegoods to the other unemployed fifty percent.

He submits that this situation being economically and socially unsustainable is most definitely the sort of no-brainer that should have occurred to the masters years ago.

What our expert failed to mention is that our little oligarchy not only want it that way but made it that way by gulling locals with a spot of cash into believing that ‘family tourists’ and the white shoe brigade (old farts in caravan parks) might be interested in eternally watching turtles lay eggs on a beach. (It is true that some experiments were attempted at nightlife but drinking hot, flat beer in a locked tin shed ‘til 2.00 am while listening to scratched Michael Jackson records is twice as boring but infinitely more painful than watching paint dry.)

The next grand experiment was to con southerners to relocate here.

As noted by our academician a certain societal set were targeted for their lack of employment skills (didn’t matter from the angle that there was no bloody work for the poor buggers anyway) and resultant inability to repay a usurous mortgage.
A twice yearly cycle. A few weeks before the beginning of summer and then again at the beginning of winter out came the real estate signs touting the same old blocks of ticky tacky adorning our streets.
A huge southern migration exploited to the hilt by the same set of lazy bludging capitalists that sold off the few remaining employment opportunities a few years before.
Now they’re sucking ‘em in; sucking them dry; then spitting them out off farther north.

The latest refinement of the nouveau riche is somewhat of an old twist.
In order to ensure that there is absolutely no work here for our mortgage encumbered southern friends we’ve established a series of ‘backpacker hostels’.
We mightn’t have had Kanakas to bash about for many years but thousands of mostly oriental kids locked into monopolistic, hermetic, working holiday packages is perhaps even more fun.
For one thing they can’t usually hang around to complain about exploitation – but surely the best bit is that they are mostly youthful, healthy, good looking – and very available.

Jeez – and they reckon the American Civil War was theoretically fought over exploitation and slavery!

But what happens to a local lad who is into engineering and chronically out of work in a region subsumed to the machinations of self interested idiots who sell off industry for fun and profit and a bit of a good ol’ So’ Caroliny lifestyle?

Well if you are a mug and believe the advertising you invest your savings and energy towards setting up your shingle as a government condoned and approved defence supplier.

And if you are a persistent mug who spent all his money gaining accreditation, licenses and developing products matching government specifications for approved defence projects you soon learn that all our tiers of governance are infested with factionalism and corruption.

Then if you are a furious mug who sees this going on you raise official complaint through ‘correct channels’.

That is when they send the ‘thought police’ along to threaten your family with violence, close you down and steal your projects.

Makes you wonder why they ever bothered to swear the Oath of Allegiance.

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