Energy Efficiency

With talks about bringing one million more people to Australia, it’s a certainty. It is the safest bet you will ever make and never want to be less right about something.  Federal bureaucrats currying favour for jobs post government employee status seem unable to recognize the concept of lateral thinking.

We talk of rising food costs, pollution of air, water and soil and shortage of water and telling farmers they may have to go without … buying and selling of water rights laws against collection of rainwater … but allowing cotton farmers to steal away our children’s very future for an extra million dollars or so in exports.

We humans have always competed for food … to eat, but now we have to fight machinery for what little arable land is available with even that governments are discussing placing dams in catchment areas where more fertile soil is also captured.

We’ve sold off most of our industry and now its our food self sustainability; and don’t get me started on the fact that oil is running out and that will likewise also cause upward pressure on food costs. Japan withdrew food off shopping centre shelfs as more contaminated ‘edible’ products arrived from China. How can we expect healthy food to be grown in one of the most contaminated growing fields in the world ?

But its also going to be a matter of disposable income. Will we see shelves like those in Russia in its heady hay-days of being one of the ‘superpowers’ or like Cuba, oil starved in the 70’s when the USSR collapsed and the average weight loss was some 12 kilograms ?  Who will save us ?  Bill Mollison (credited with Permaculture) has never been Australian of the Year yet one day, just as in Cuba, the Farmer will be the most respected profession.      
 
But it won’t just be the ‘yellow hordes’ competing for food; it will be Europeans and every other country that has let its farming industry slide. Of course America will crack a tantrum and beg, borrow but more than likely steal for anyone and everyone like the bully boys they’ve become, but inevitably, when you don’t have petrol in the tank to go on an excursion to beg, borrow and steal, there will be anarchy that will eat even hardened troops; Americans – probably quite rightly -  claim that most countries would question invading a population that carries more weapons than their whole defence force combined; it won’t be short, it will be a protracted survival of the fittest holding a gun.

We Australians have been disarmed by a government more content to part of an occupying force – in an administrative role of course – then retain our sovereign rights, however, distance – while to our detriment now – will be our greatest strength.            

So I say again, learn about Permaculture, write to me and I will direct you to places where you can learn these necessary skills; children wont be half as pleased with a Barbie doll or a BMX bike as a full tummy, a loving kiss goodnight in their own bed and safe will be a dream come true.

As a population, our fringe people react more quickly to perceived injustices; in Columbia, the poor have spawned kidnapping groups; don’t think for a moment that that won’t ever happen here. With an overloaded justice system and wide distances, just as in the old days when it most prudent to live as close as possible to the GPO (because that was where the government protected itself and its own), that with shortageos of resources (read fuel), only some laws – read closer to ‘home’ – will be enforced… It will not augur well for politicians or their children.