Vikki Campion: Empty shelves a sign that Australia’s national security is vulnerable

Empty supermarket shelves across Australia is a sign that our resources industry is being seriously hampered by activists who have no idea how things are made or where it comes from, writes Vikki Campion.

Homemade laminated signs are newly plastered around the check-outs at nearly every major supermarket. “Staff abuse will not be tolerated.”

It’s not the fault of kids stacking shelves that they are empty. They didn’t design the border rules or the AdBlue shortage, a chemical we rely on other countries to supply, leaving trucks stranded rather than allowing them to drive and release gases into the atmosphere. It’s not their fault trucks couldn’t get meat to market, but they cop it. You apologise that they went through that, and they shrug. It happens every shift.

We don’t see the repercussions until we get smacked in the face with it at the supermarket.

We should be learning from the UK and Europe. They frittered their way out of national security for fashionable energy minimalism, now at the mercy of Russia, which coincidentally doesn’t have a Greens-equivalent party and didn’t sign up to the Glasgow net-zero agreement.

It’s not just about our energy and jobs and export dollars – it’s our national security, and the lesson is to be careful once you outsource your energy to other countries.

Empty shelves at the supermarket is a sign our national security is vulnerable, writes Vikki Campion. Picture: Delphine Touitou/AFP

Like the UK and EU are now learning, fashionable philosophies are irrelevant when there is no food at the shops or power to the home. They will have to turn to others to supply them with gas. But Australian corporations, who have swallowed Greta Thunberg’s thundering, are hellbent on this notion that we should stop fracking and mining, with no real understanding of how things are made or where they come from. And the upshot is a kid Thunberg’s age, stacking shelves instead of globetrotting, gets abused when stuff stops appearing on shelves at the supermarket.

Never before has the world needed what we have so badly, but our resource export sector now has to go to foreign-owned lenders to get capital. This leaves international investors, who may not care as much as we do about Australian jobs, from having undue influence on our companies, resources and security.

In the final sitting week of parliament last year, a report was quietly tabled into how our banks, who were happy to take a $120 billion taxpayer bailout during the Great Financial Crisis refused to fund the industries that kept us going through Covid. We allowed them to borrow a record-setting amount using the taxpayer guarantee.

They needed taxpayer dollars for their economic survival, and they got it, but now they are capping funding on our export future, refusing to finance even small family businesses that rely on mining just to appease vocal activists. The only reason legitimate businesses should be refused fair service is if they are unable to meet financial commitments, but the Committee heard that over the past decade the Australian mining sector had been subjected to “an increasingly sophisticated campaign to disrupt investment flows into key areas”.

Saturday Telegraph columnist Vikki Campion. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Gary Ramage

You can’t move to a net-zero carbon footprint without investing in lower-emissions technology, particularly if the banks won’t fund you.

The Committee called for a Treasury review into the extent of the influence of activist pressure on the decisions of financial institutions concerning the resources industry, which the Greens described as “simply baffling”.

What’s baffling is the Greens are on the side of the banks, predominantly made of board members from well-to-do “Voices Of” communities, refusing to fund projects they find morally wrong.

Labor members of the Committee claimed adoption of the recommendations would create capital flight from Australian debt and capital institutions as “the global shift to low carbon sources of energy will over time impact on price and volume for coal export”.

Instead, the UK and EU have turned their power down and off and are relying on gas from a pipe in a tense global neighbourhood.

Under every scenario modelled by the International Energy Agency, “natural gas remains an important part of a cleaner energy future”, yet Australian fracking projects are the subject of protests, attacked and campaigned against at the planning stage, if they can get the funding even to make it there. This virtue-signalling isn’t even-handed. You penalise anyone who wants to drill for gas but can happily buy the cheap polyester and plastic made from gas from fast-fashion online retailers for pocket money.

Activist Greta Thunberg. Picture: Jonathan Nackstrand/AFP

You tell farmers how much fertiliser they can use, but anyone can buy chemicals, overwater their lawns and let it run out to sea.

You tell miners they are dirty – and thank the frontline health workers who gave you your vaccination, but the coal miners are the frontline workers giving you the Covid payment.

As the signs at the supermarket show, Greta Thunberg-like, we blame the wrong people.

Yell at the produce kid when fruit and vegetables are smaller and more expensive because farmers can’t get fertiliser made from gas.

Yell at the checkout girl when the cheap clothes, plastics and cleaning products, all made from gas, rise in price. We risk blindly heading in the same direction as our northern neighbours, ready to yell at the power guy when the lights turn off.

Our actions at home have consequences on a global scale. The UK and EU will have to look to others, including Australia, if Russia turns off the tap. Greta Thunberg may be no Putin, but her agenda will have the same outcome. For now, those signs will have to stay up.

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