The future for everyone is grim, not just for boys. It is all part of the decline of the West, which some people living today will see first hand.

Peter you gave the answer yourself, with out even noticing, when you wrote, " When I taught in South Coast schools, many a kid sneered at teachers, saying "I'm going to get twice what you get when I join the steelworks"." This is the story of our loss of industry.

As in the UK before us, with union activity, wages for low/unskilled workers were continually forced up in car & other heavy manufacturing to unstainable levels. Car making became a loss industry in Oz, without huge subsidies from the taxpayer.

Years ago a bloke I knew, working at the New Castle steel mills was complaining of boredom. He only actually got to do any real work, as distinct from watching work, about once a week, such was the overmanning, with those overpaid workers. We know what happened to that steel mill.

Another mate, in 1973 told me he had just lost his job. Not that day, but within a few years. He was a radio operator on coastal shipping, & the day the one when unions won the 6 months on 6 months off award conditions. He knew then that no company would replace ships as they wore out. The business of shipping had just become unviable on the Australian coast.

It is our own bullet in our foot, & our working men have got just what they worked for so hard, but could not see coming. Of course they have been very thoroughly assisted by woman's libbers, who now might just be starting to see what they have done to themselves with their anti men programs.

Testosterone levels in the male of our species, is reducing at one percent PA. IE; twenty percent in the past twenty years.
One theory is obesity. Boys are turning into girls, while they stuff their fat faces with hamburgers, and increasingly hide normal male traits behind Mummy.
No job means no money, which puts boys in a negatively protected home environment, longer than in the past.

The increasing acceptance of homosexuality, projected as alternate life choice, through the education “process”, ensures femininity trends, and a rise in effeminate males in society.

If you wish to save your male offspring, kick them out of the house at fifteen, to fend for themselves!

Seems like a well written essay to me and it does not necessarily blame anyone or political party for the situation described.

Re the demise of the car industry wasnt this the result of decisions made by the champions of unlimited "free" enterprise and competition, namely Abbott and Hockey et al.
And aren't they the champions of "opening up" every aspect of Australia industry to the "discipline" of unlimited world-wide market competition - wasnt this the intention of the now defunct Trans Pacific "Partnership" Agreement, which would have given overseas business interests more legal "rights" and powers than local businesses and especially Australia governments and both the federal, state and local government levels.

And aren't they the champions of casualizing the entire work force too. And aren't they the principal drivers of the forces that have demeaned both public schools and the now very difficult (and increasingly so) efforts of teachers in public schools in their attempts to educate their students.

It's not just boys facing a future on the scrapheap of a post industrial life, but significant number of women as well, as automation replaces all sorts of occupations.

But back to boys and meat pies, football and Holden cars?

The new words are, wind, solar, hydro power and golden coal And repeat until the cows come home!

None of which seems capable of supporting heavy industry any time soon or affordable!

There is however a solution and a renaissance of heavy industry, even if heavily automated?

And that is with safe, clean and very affordable, peaceful purpose only, nuclear power! And here I'm talking about successfully trialled, walk away safe, molten salt thorium nuclear energy!

Taswegian is likely to join this debate with his preference for a light water reactor?

Even though such monstrosities are monstrously expensive, need a huge 9 inch thick single piece containment vessel, free of weld seams. And an equally expensive building designed exclusively to contain the nuclear contamination to that site if and or when the containment vessel ruptures, allowing all manner of pernicious problems to present!

Moreover, thorium is around three or four times more abundant than uranium, needs no enrichment and is fertile not fissile and therefore cannot be compressed to create a thermonuclear explosion!

A 350 MW Light water reactor need 2251 tons of fuel as rare and expensive as platinum for the life of the plant. Furthermore, such fuel must first undergo expensive enrichment and fabrication. And needs to be moved every eighteen months. Then replaced every four and a half years.

Conversely a walk away safe molten salt thorium reactor. like say the molten salt 350 MW FUJI would burn just a single ton of vastly less expensive fuel for its entire operational life! T.B.C.
Alan B.

Professor Hargreaves is on the public record saying that the price for thorium produced energy is 1.98 cents P.K.H, as the median! Quote unquote.

Imagine what industries we could resuscitate even now, with energy so cheap and could even be made much much cheaper! If we built them as waste burners, very safely burning other folks nuclear waste and being paid annual billions for providing such service?

All while becoming the world's leading producer of alpha particle Bismuth 213? And reaping the whirlwind of a vastly expanded medical tourist trade? Plus exponentially expanding economic opportunities! Steel/aluminium smelting/car manufacture etc/etc?

One ton of abundant thorium fuel for an entire operational life, means 200 times more energy than an equivalent uranium burning light water reactor, and 2,000 thousand times less waste! TWO THOUSAND TIMES LESS!

Which as alluded to previously, eminently suitable as long life space batteries!

What was that about a new aeronautic industry? More Jaw flapping, by the coal fired, jaw flappers?

Finally, I simply cannot overemphasise, the inherent safety of walk away, built in passive safety of molten salt, nuclear technology!

The time for talk/prevarication is over, least we are not only beaten to the punch, but knocked silly and out cold on our collective ass? By Indonesia, South Africa, Brazil and many others even much smaller and significantly less well resourced, nations than we!?

Hard to believe what disbelief as ingrained culture, is capable of achieving, isn't it? e.g. a 6,000 year old flat earth in the centre of a universe that revolved around us?

Today, has morphed into a coal fired and coal dependant economy regardless, come what may!?
Alan B.