America became great when she started to make steel and industrialise! We did likewise and even more so when war forced our decision-makers to get stuff made here!

After that with visionary nation-building projects our current brand of visionless career politicians to a generic man to timid or financially conflicted to consider, let alone do!

If we want to have a robust manufacturing-based economy and steel smelting to underpin it?

Then we have to embrace nuclear energy, namely MSR thorium, to power it! And the big steel smelting arc furnaces that make steel making a single step process.

Single-step steel smelting was invented here, but, I believe, purloined by former Blue scope executive, Chip Goodyear and given away to our American competition! And some our American former steelworker can sock as much as he likes!

MSR thorium used as nuclear waste burners, burning up the world's stockpile of nuclear waste will make the provision of industrial electricity virtually free and not very much for domestic consumers!

As we accept and store this waste/unspent energy. We could earn annual billions for providing the burial service. (eventually) And given we burn it up in MSR thorium, reduce the half-life to just 300 years and in perfect safety.

Power that potentially free, coupled to new space age, deionisation dialysis desalination would enable desalinated water to be Pumped anywhere and economically used in broad-scale irrigation/drought-proofing.

But only if the current roadblocks to it and progress are also removed, i.e., the current mob in Canberra, squabbling like noisy seagulls fighting for a chip! And almost as productive in their decision making or lack thereof!?
Alan B.

When steel is made in a single step using huge arc furnaces, the electricity used in them is the difference between a viable unsubsidized one and a virtually crippled and subsidised one.

The same can be said for aluminium smelting and all the products, white goods, car bodies tinnies and cans etc,. that flow from that much cheaper and mostly automated production!

Nonetheless, creating thousands of permanent full-time jobs in mining, manufacture and endless recycling!

All very doable and absolutely reliant on ultra-cheap energy as proposed And by no less a luminary than Labor legend and visionary, PM, Bob Hawke! Who is on the public record as saying, we should become a repository for the world's nuclear waste for the economic benefit that rationality would provide, and here I paraphrase rather than quote.

And sanity would also suggest that if this nuclear waste or rather massively unspent fuel can be tasked with providing this nation with virtually free power for centuries in reactors other nation's dollars build and pay for along with all the essential R+D!

Who are the geniuses currently refusing to accept the economic realities and quite massive economic growth on offer and deal with climate change with a carbon-free remedy, other nations will have little choice than emulate!

And with carbon-free fuel into the bargain.

If someone needs a sock and a bloodied nose!? Then logic's rites dictate it has to be the numbskulls resolutely standing the way, with their moronic activism or decision making. It's high time the nation and her prospects took precedence over the business as usual politics and power struggle/bun fight in this country!

Don't just do something stand there!

Alan B.

Unfortunately, this is not a forum for airing the plight of the worker, and his social malady.

I find the comparisons between the steel worker, ( emphasis on worker), and the plight of aboriginals, wrestling with their losses, by a system forced onto them by colonial occupation, to be irrelevant.

But there is a relevance on another level between the two incompatible groups, that of humanities self inflicted suffering.
The article correctly correlates needs in regard to harmonious co-existence: Without which all is lost.

What is lost in reality, is a commonality loosely described as community. At the base of community must be a common and accepted standard for living.
That common standard must exhibit authority through morality and ethics, geared towards nurturing the occupants of a particular community, which is bound together by mutual suffering, aspiration and respect.

Of old, this thread was religion. Unfortunately for community, the replacement model is proving an abismal failure. The replacement is a club for individual advancement.
It negates a need for community by the act of rendering.
Tradition is rendered valueless. Family of no importance, and finally, by the imposition of personal rights as a superior model, falls flat for the future of a total population.

What's left is vaporised into insignificance. Every man swims for himself, in a sea of careless disregard of the other.

Dan.

Diver Dan.
Our new prime minister is apparently of the cloth that you would like, but I don't see much coming from his leadership which would give us any hope that the moral compass of the nation might be turned around. Its lack of compassion for those seeking refuge in our country, from wherever and however they got here is not encouraging.
David

Tom, getting back to your piece.
I was working in the Territory when Vincent Lingiari and his mob staged their revolt, aided by the NT workers Union and other do gooders from the South. If you look back at what has happened to aboriginals since then it seems, particularly in the NT, that it has been largely down hill in many areas, particularly with regard to alcohol and its effect on family violence. The advent of people like yourself and Jacinta Price and the like who are prepared to speak out and encourage aboriginals to put the future into their own hands is to be applauded. I hope something can also be done to overcome the problem of excessive gambling as well.
David

David.

It's nice to see you've landed on my air-strip.

My proposition is simple.
Reduce drastically the immigration level, and increase drastically the refugee intake.

There is a selfish reason behind the proposal.

Refugees hold the potential of gratitude, and while working hard for their own ambitions, may have a sense of gratitude for the "gift" which was made to them of citizenship.

It's a move which undermines the greed factor of capitalism, by dilution of a gift economy. There are no guarantees, outside of the gift of faith, that the offering towards a better life for refugees, will be reciprocated by them.

Dan