You live in a strange world Vivian.

For example: mining today is a high technology game that can and too often does, cause huge environmental damage if not regulated.

If you wish to own land in this country, its tradional to front up and buy it with your own money.
On one hand you criticise hand outs, then you suggest a hand out for yourself...really.

As for home generated power, which as we know, is subsidised by the tax payer, read hand out; it's a grossly inequable welfare benifit for the wealthy, which leaves those landless and homeless renters of wealthy property owners, paying full price for their power.
We actually need less of that hand out mentality.

Wilderness areas are a huge asset for the populace generally, and not for selfish reasons of the landed class: Allowing them to plunder these areas for capitalist gain is a big no no.

Farming today is a corporate enterprise on the most part. There is an efficiency in that set up which small over subsidised and pandered to family farms can't compete with.

Small farming is a life style choice. Running them as a business model mostly fails.
Propping them up with taxpayer dollars is what should stop.
And giving them special privileges should also stop.

That's enough for the moment.

Dan.

Just as we are coming out of the 'lockdown' the media is bellowing about a "second wave". No wonder people who still think the media is a positive force for good (instead of the malevolent social engineer that it is) are feeling depressed and frustrated.

Viv Forbes says it all; he has described Australia and Australians to a tee. The only thing that he has missed is the China threat, and what so far has been a lack of will by our parliament (both sides) to do something about it.

Here w go again! Another farmer who can ever think past stone age land management and fire!

That way is allowing grazing herbivores to keep the weeds down everywhere! Got a farm overrun with woody weeds, put goats on it and cell graze as intensive cell grazing.

Where that isn't possible the herd graze with shifted watering points and overnight corralling. How our vast national parks have to be managed, given just how much the fire seasons have shortened and how difficult cool burning has become! Due to denied climate change! Which creates increased global convection and therefore, averaged, increased wind speed.

Ignore wind speed at your peril when trying to manage country with traditional fire.

Fires do other things as well, kill everything that can't outrun it and all non-fire-tolerant species. As well as spew voluminous CO2 into the atmosphere long with rare, irreplaceable trace elements.

Hot fires that started time and again as allegedly cool burns, bake the soil, making less and less pervious to moisture as the rains fall, which instead runs off instead of soaking in, contributes to flash flooding/erosion. Not to mention billions of dead animals,11 million hectares burnt, thousands of homes destroyed as well as, hundreds of lives sacrificed to the primitive, stone age, god of fire.

If management teaches just one thing? It teaches, there is always a better way!

Me? I like to lay biodegradable plastic on hilled cultivation, allow it to kill all the weeds and vermin. Then sow directly through it in the in-between valleys. and allow the plastic to stop most of the evaporation and direct such rain as falls directly to the crop!

Manage to grow wheat and good tonnage on quarter of the average rainfall, with this more modern, no poisons no burns, method,

Try native wisteria to outperform grain as feedlot grown seed but only after you extracted a few tons of ready to use, biodiesel from the high protein seed. Which will, support any famed protein, like fish, fowl or all the domestic herbivores/omnivores.
Alan B.

Great article Viv, telling it as it really is.

These city based clowns in bureaucracies & left/green activists & voters have no idea of where the money they live on comes from. It most certainly is not from paper shufflers in major cities.

Allan tells us to stop dealing with china, but doesn't even realise his welfare would have to stop if we did.

Dan tells us "Wilderness areas are a huge asset", but neglects to mention they are mainly an asset for feral pests, weeds & motorcycle hoons. & only 1 in 10,000 has ever been near one, let alone actually found them useful or enjoyable. The garbage scrub that takes over any badly managed area, & national parks more than a few miles from a major city are the worst managed land in the nation, is a disaster every time a hot summer comes along.

Self interest in a bit of land owned & loved by a man or a family is the only way land is ever properly managed. The mostly bone idle park rangers of our bureaucracy will never get off their back sides long enough to do anything of much use.

Without miners, farmers & tourist operators the city lot would starve, & would never see anything but buildings & roads.

Phil,

I know exactly where the money comes from: cashed up Chinese migrants.

That's what has been keeping the Australian economy afloat for the past 30 years.

And it's the cashed up Chinese migrants who will get us out of the Wuhan Bat Soup recession.

There is going to be a lot of wealthy Chinese in Hong kong wanting refugee status soon so grab them asap. Then we can start bringing in millions from the PRC. Now that Victoria has signed up on the Belt and Road Initiative I reckon the CCP will be able to start reuniting millions of their nationals with their families in Australia.

It's the future Phil. I expect your grandchildren are all looking forward to becoming Chinese. You have told them the happy news about their future, haven't you?

Hasbeen you as always misrepresent me! I just don't believe we can first, bag the hell out of a communist totalitarian state, then hold out the begging bowl for their trade and their en mase migration.

I don't care if you want to sell the country/ your integrity.uour soul and have your own kids, tenants in their own land, but I don't.

As for my pension my money invested for me in Telecom, Qantas, various power companies, our bank and various insurance companies more than paid for all of our old age pensions! And I'll have you know it was the taxes we old folk paid that bought and paid for all those income-earning entities/amenities!

And ex-politicians/party members like you who sold it and our economic sovereignty/heritage, down the river!

As for China, I believe we should not sell raw unrefined minerals to them but finished steel and aluminium and value-added products/produce

. Or to their steel and aluminium markets at prices they cannot compete with.

Unless they sell at a loss. And given the right production and transport paradigm, we do not need to emulate their fatuous debt growing example!

This is how one wins in a cold war, by just making too hot for the adversary

I don't care to be ground under the Chinese communist heel, nor should the west stand idly by as it's allowed to happen to the decent folk in Hong Kong!

And I get you just don't give a rat's for any of that, just the mighty yen or put another way, your forty pieces of allegorical silver!
Alan B.