Rudd and Wong's buyback of land in order to claim water rights disturbs me greatly. Every farm they buy is a farm taken out of production.
This story in the OZ tells of how a town thinks they might as well buy the whole town, because if the farms dont operate there is no economic basis for the community. And they are serious!! Offering themselves up lock stock and barrel for $3 or so billion. Where will the people go?
For the left human beings are something of an inconvenience. We use up the sacred water of mother earth. Farms in outback Australia have to close, producing less food for us to eat, so that water can be channeled back into the river. All the while the city dwellers can sip as many latte's as they like.
I take the Murray river's ecology seriously, but I dont think we need to take Australia backwards to fix it. Efficiency, not downsizing is the key. Also the media seems to be whitewashing the fact that the Murray lakes were originally salt-water and were made freshwater my people for irrigation purposes. The current ecosystem is man-made! Flooding those lakes with salt-water is not a crime against nature, but a restoration of nature as it was.
But Labor are too terrified of upsetting the urban romantics to talk about this. Rudd's invested too much in farming their over-ripe guilty consciences, and their fast-growing resentment of the success of ordinary Aussies under Howard. (gotta love fruitful agricultural metaphors)
This creepy land buyback policy highlights how Rudd thinks that Australia needs to do less, to be less, because we deserve less. Our economic prosperity and national pride under Howard was against the natural order. We were confident, we were happy. That was wrong. We need to be humbled.
To Rudd and Wong (androgynous Asian version of Rudd in dress sense, haircut, speech, mannerisms and Maoist tendencies) Australia is a weak small and self-indulgent nation that really needs to keep it's head down or the mighty China will lop it off. This is the vibe I get. How can i not get it after what they have said and done?
Australian farms are being destroyed. Australia's economy has been deliberately brought low by negative rhetoric (and the RBA's hasty rising of interest rates before the election). Those of us who are Anglo-celtic in origin have to hang our heads in shame and say sorry our ancestors ever came to this continent and created the unified, developed country in the first place. Australian risk-takers and go-getters in business have to be taxed by an ETS, and tied down by 19th century IR values, so they can have shit kicked out of them by union thugs, all because they dared to pay people the market value of their labor.
"How dare you have ambition. How dare you put your ideas in motion. How dare you hold you head up high. How dare you go to war for democracy. How dare you love your country. You are Australian. You are scum" So says Rudd.
Australia must be put back in it's place, by it's own Prime Minister. Labor PMs have a history of hating this country. Rudd is doing his best to keep up this legacy.
He's never even here!
