Forrest ruminated.

It was interesting remembering Tirath Khemlani.

Once, many years ago, some Federal Executive Councillors were thought to have been intending to circumvent the requirement for the voting of supply by borrowing lots and lots of petrodollars, but ultimately nothing came of the plan.

How they were going to satisfy the lenders that it was an official borrowing by the Commonwealth of Australia without the funds being first deposited and receipted into the Treasury was beyond Forrest. Once deposited into the Treasury they would be caught in the net of the Section 83 provision, surely. The funds could go in, but not come back out.

Not that Ozzians need have any worries about the country being able to be run under executive authority without a Parliament for an excessive time. Section 6 of the Constitution provided "There shall be a session of the Parliament once at least in every year, so that twelve months shall not intervene between the last sitting of the Parliament in one session and its first sitting in the next session."

Forrest didn't really see that there would necessarily be problems with supply with respect to the coup, but it was nice to have a plan should it prove necessary or advantageous to use the full amount of time that the Constitution otherwise might allow between any prorogation of the Parliament, its subsequent dissolution, and the election and sitting of a new Parliament.

It seemed nobody had ever thought of giving or lending unsecured on trust to the Governor-General as an alternative source of funding of executive government to that of making withdrawals from the Treasury. That would be the ultimate voting of supply! Direct from the people. Imagine if many of them were prepared to do that! That would be the ultimate referendum on keeping the Constitutional Monarchy.

There would be little problem for the Governor-General in having such a fund properly overseen. Section 68 covered it. As Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces she could second any number of defence force officers to actually administer and audit the fund.

Forrest had not exactly been pleased to see the greatest-ever one day plunge in the Dow, but even the blackest of clouds were liable to have silver linings. The wind still blew, in South Australia.

The music still played inside Forrest's head.

"Like a clock whose hands are sweeping
Past the minutes on its face
And the world is like an apple
Whirling silently in space
Like the circles that you find
In the windmills of your mind"

In the real world the giant blades of the wind turbines kept turning, cranking out the electricity hour after most hours. And Forrest had a 20 year government contract for the supply of a lot of electricity. Even if demand collapsed badly, there would still be need for some electricity, and Forrest had access to the cheapest there was, electricity that might get even cheaper as the Wind Gardens of the now Doubly-Dispossessed, that had no government contracts, desperately sought markets that could actually pay their electricity bills.

Huge numbers of people stood to be badly let down in the fallout from the seemingly likely world-wide financial crisis. There were already coming aplenty the glib attributions of all this impending dislocation of lives and livelihoods to good old 'greed'. It was far more complex than that. Greed had always been an aspect of human nature.

In Gert-by-Sea, which was a Constitutional Monarchy, it had long been the case that laws were made to mitigate the effects of unrestrained greed. In the making of such laws for the peace, order, and good government of the Commonwealth, there existed a guide to the law-makers, the Constitution. In recent decades, law-makers had been neglecting the Constitution.

Forrest reckoned deception, of both the law-makers, and the people who elected them, had a greater hand in bringing this crisis upon the land.

Planning of the coup in Gert-by-Sea would now be seen to be of greater relevance than it might heretofore have been by the more dismissive and less perceptive of viewers of the OLO firmament.

It was shaping up to be the sort of day NEMMCO* dreaded. A real stinker. The forecast for Sydney was 37 degrees Celsius, That was on the coast. Inland it would go over that. People everywhere would fire up the airconditioners for the first time since last summer. Electricity demand would go through the roof.

Forrest rubbed his hands vigorously, as was his frequent habit.

It was the sort of day Forrest lived for. Spot prices for electricity would go through the roof, too. Forrest ran his eyes over the anemometer readouts permanently displayed on one of the multiple desktops his Ubuntu system allowed him to have. Forrest had taken a leaf out of Sir Sidney Kidman's book, having anemometers, and webcams, just about everywhere in the country there were wind turbines, and then some. The computers to which they were all attached constantly fed this information, via the internet, to both the office and the penthouse. All those computers had their stand-alone uninterruptible power supplies for when it was dead calm. Very 'green'. Very environmentally responsible. Bootlick, bootlick, bootlick.

The wind might well blow where it would, and most might not know whence it came or whither it went, but one way or another Forrest would, and how fast it was moving, too.

For all that the anti-actinic glazing reduced the heating load in the penthouse, it was getting a little warm. Forrest turned the airconditioning up several notches. The two big Caterpillar natural gas powered emergency generating sets in the basement of the building had been test run only a week ago. One started automatically if a blackout happened.

The mouse clicked on a windmill near Port Augus-ta,
showing at a glance how much money'd been made.
Forrest reflected "How lucky we are",
to be living off windmills in South Australe. Ja!

This privatised electricity game was really all very much like SP bookmaking. Forrest was starting to quite enjoy it.

Forrest's other name was Jack, and he was doing alright.

* National Electricity Market Management Company, for the acronym detesters. A QANGO.

It was three o'clock, and Forrest had not yet been for his daily 'Constitutional'.

Just idly glancing through Part V, the Powers of the Parliament, Forrest's eyes lit upon sub-section (v.) of Section 51. It read:

"51. The Parliament shall, subject to this Constitution, have power to make laws for the peace, order, and good government of the Commonwealth with respect to:-

(v.) Postal, telegraphic, telephonic, and other like services:"

Interesting.

Electricity grids used poles and wires to transmit power, similarly to the telephone network. In some places the electricity wiring was actually used as a carrier for radio communications. There was a degree of interest in electricity distributors becoming internet service providers because of this synchronicity of capabilities.

Forrest thought that that would bring electricity grids within the ambit of the "other like services" of sub-section (v.) of Section 51.. That would have meant that when it came to setting up the National Electricity Market the Commonwealth did indeed have the power to enact the co-ordinating legislation required in order for that market to function.

Why had the Commonwealth abdicated from its powers in this area in favour of South Australia being given the defining say in determining how the NEM would operate? It would have been good to be able to put this question to the comments thread to Gavan McDonell's OLO article 'Fencing wire and Mirrors: the world of the National Energy System' ( http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=7585&page=0 ), in the hope of an informed response, but still nothing had been heard from OLO management regarding re-opening of archived discussions to moderator-vetted posts.

In the absence of explanation, Forrest could only conclude that the Commonwealth had something to hide that could not stay hidden if it legislated in this area. Given the proportion of generated power in Victoria that was consumed by the aluminium smelters, was NEMMCO effectively favouring Victoria at the expense of other States by farming out the subsidised supply obligations to that industry? Such would certainly run foul of Section 99.

It was amazing what one could learn on OLO, not only from the responses from users, but from the articles and the links therein. One link contained in the Article 'Peak oil and retirement', by Michael Lardelli, see: http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=7981 , was to an essay, “Peak Oil and the Preservation of Knowledge”.

Forrest had finally got a handle upon some of the Middlekingdomian population statistics that he hadn't had when he had last spoken with Hu. It provided some very convincing argument in support of the sustainability of public order by Middlekingdomian policemen in what might come to be known as the General Gouvernement of South West Asia, that area stretching from the Pamir Knot to the Mediterranean and Red Seas, of which it was considered the Dalai Lama might become the Governor-General.

The essay had revealed "There are almost 120 boys for each 100 girls being born in China, due to the one-child policy leading parents to prefer boys to girls. Historically, this skewed ratio has meant big trouble, and one of the ways societies coped was by starting wars. .... Women are being kidnapped and sold as brides. From 2001 to 2003 China's police freed more than 42,000 kidnapped women and children. And it's only likely to get worse; one estimate puts the number of bachelors over the next decade at 40 million."

A Middlekingdomian intervention in that notoriously badly-behaved area could digest quite an attrition rate of its forces with inscrutable equanimity, Forrest thought. There'd be no more carrying on up the Khyber. Forrest wondered what the Hajj tax might be, but promptly left off worrying about it: that would be the Dalai Lama's problem.

All the more reason to get moving on the coal-to-liquid fuels project and renewable energy sourced electricity in Gert-by-Sea in a big way, thought Forrest. Liquid fuels could become extremely valuable stock in trade within a few short years.

Ozzians had best quickly resort to their notable propensity for effective team play, Forrest thought.

FG, there is a lot of interesting stuff for me to catch up with both here and elsewhere.

The key to getting through our crisis, if it can be done is to reduce our consumption of natural resources by both directly reducing our per capita consumption and by not increasing further our human population.

Only after we take that on board, should we consider coal liquefaction, nuclear, etc as a means to get us out of the difficulties we find ourslves in. If we only use the promises of new technology to allow our complacency to continue, the we will only dig ourselves in deeper.

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An article which I recently wrote, which may be of interest is "How decades of privatisation has impoverished NSW" at http://webdiary.com.au/cms/?q=node/2570 http://candobetter.org/node/823