Enemies of the People

According to last Friday’s issue of the Daily Telegraph, NSW Roads and Marine Time Services have a software contract for tender which specifies that 30% of the workforce must be based offshore within two years. And more thereafter. “Three-hundred jobs are expected to go overseas in the first three years alone,”  the paper reports. What a complete sell-out of Australian workers by government bureaucrats safely ensconced in cushy jobs.

Workers unite, you have nothing to lose but the sanctimonious imposition of job-killing regimes by well-heeled elites – the modern-day bourgeoise. People who worry themselves about Donald Trump’s personality might do better to concentrate on what led to his rise. Working people – enough of them at any rate – were fed up.

I was fed up the other day. I contacted by power supplier by phone to say that I couldn’t seem to get its website to change my billing from paper to email. The computer kept saying ‘no’. I used the opportunity to ask about various bewildering discount plans which seemed to be on offer. I queried why his employer didn’t simply give me an appropriate discount on my inflated bill rather than present various obscure alternatives on its website. Knowledge of which I discovered only serendipitously. Tout de suite he gave me a discount of 28%, provided I listened to a banal two-minute message. I complied and apparently will now incur lower power bills. What a lark! In the course of our conversation I made it clear that I was unwilling to pay a cent for ‘carbon neutrality’, which the website was relentlessly pushing.

However, other people, working people, do pay for carbon neutrality – through the nose. Those working in coal-power stations pay with their jobs. Those in industries dependent for their competitiveness on cheap reliable power pay with their jobs. The small businesses in the communities within which they live pay with their livelihoods. The people in those communities pay with immiseration.

Who doesn’t pay? Inner city elites don’t pay. In fact, they feel virtuous for being so environmentally sound. Political elites don’t pay. Many of them live in fancy houses with taxpayer-subsidised solar panels on their roofs. Some live-in fancy inner-city suburbs without a blue collar in sight unless their plumbing springs a leak.

Not in sight, also, are numbers of refugees bussed into outer suburbs. Large numbers of non-English speaking Sudanese, Iraqi, Syrian, Afghani, Eritrean, Somalian, Burmese refugees, and others, with clashing and inferior cultural values – particularly so if they are Muslim, as so many are from benighted parts of the world. Working-class Australians become strangers in their own country. White flight is the desperate response, as Luke Foley perceptively put it before being slapped down. Ditto for Western Europe and for parts of America.

It’s more than time to find politicians who will rise up against this offence. The US found Donald Trump; the UK Nigel Farage. Marine Le Pen (France), Frauke Petry (Germany), Victor Orban (Hungary), Geert Wilders (Holland), Sebastian Kurz (Austria), and Matteo Salvini (Italy) are among other politicians now taking the fight to the elites. And to fight for patriotism. And for nationalism, which isn’t a dirty word. Without secure borders and shared values civilised nation states will not be able to protect freedom and prosperity. Here, we have Pauline Hanson who has a good heart but we need someone, with all due respect to Ms Hanson, with her convictions but with more intellectual fire-power. I suppose we might have Cory Bernardi but when did you last notice him?

Not content with imposing soaring power prices and alien cultures on workers, the elite globalists crow mindlessly about free trade, buttressed by economists who have no idea what they are talking about. Again, Trump to the rescue. There is, of course, no such thing as free trade. There are so many tariffs and other less obvious rorts governments use to protect their own industries, that to talk of Trump undermining free trade is akin blaming the last porker in the pigsty for creating the mess.

Australia, as America, needs to protect its manufacturing industries as a matter of national defence, to preserve industrial diversity and the cultural richness this brings, and to ensure communities dependent on particular industries are not ripped apart. I would not have thought this when I bought the classical-liberal paradigm but now I think it is a great pity that the car industry was allowed to disappear. True. Protection creates featherbedding and inefficiencies. Freer trade brings material gains. But it is balancing act. Economists should not be allowed to get away with promoting free trade only on crass material grounds. There is more to a country’s national life than toting up national income.

It is time, comrades, as Gough so charismatically put it, even if he was a cock-up merchant, for Australia to have political leader who will unashamedly put Australia and Australians first. Who won’t give away our advantage in cheap power. Who will only allow those into Australia who can demonstrably bring benefit. (Fear not, those passionate about helping the disadvantaged will find no shortage of need among Australians.) And who will ensure that Australia’s industrial diversity is not hollowed out by trade deals. Don’t see him or her in view. Perhaps things have to get worse. MAGA – Make Australia Great Again.