Des Houghton: Goodbye to the Lucky Country

“I fear I won’t recognise my beloved country by the time Penny Wong, Chris Bowen, and Jim Chalmers are finished with it,” says Des Houghton, as he paints a picture of a nation we soon might not recognise.

I fear I won’t recognise my beloved country by the time Penny Wong, Chris Bowen, and Jim Chalmers are finished with it.

In my crystal ball I see keffiyehs becoming a fashion accessory at the University of Queensland.

I expect Foreign Minister Penny Wong will recognise Palestine any day now, thereby showing our support for a declared terrorist organisation that governs it.

The Palestinian flag will fly high at progressive high schools, as it already does on Crown land on North Stradbroke Island.

Next it will be Treasurer Jim Chalmers’ unpleasant duty to raise taxes after the startling revelation that most Australian households receive more in benefits (cash and in-kind) that they pay in taxes.

Superannuants who greedily hoarded funds will be hardest hit. There will be an exodus of self-funded retirees to New Zealand in a bid to escape the raids on their nest eggs.

I’m expecting Chalmers will also abolish the Reserve Bank, at the behest of the ACTU. The bank’s governors will be arrested for hate speech for criticising the taxation of unrealised capital gains.

Mike O’Connor, the truculent columnist, will also be arrested for alleged transgressions against Labor’s new code of behaviour for journalists.

Federal Treasurer Jim Chalmers will also abolish the Reserve Bank … in Des Houghton’s vision. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

In my crystal ball I see soup kitchens opening in the defunct Queen’s Wharf precinct. Thousands were left jobless when the mining industry was closed.

Some redundant coal miners will be retrained as rickshaw drivers for Chinese and Russian investors who swooped on the apartments at Surfers Paradise after the slump. We will be the white trash of Asia.

Other jobless miners will find work as leaf blowers and pool cleaners at Upper Brookfield.

The bush as we know it will be deserted.

Cattle will be mustered by drones. Dingo numbers will be in plague proportions. Without mobile telephone reception, more and more outback families will head for the cities where they will have to queue behind migrants for public housing.

A resourceful lot, the bushies will pitch tents in parks and wait and wait.

Shanty towns like those already well established on North Stradbroke Island will spring up in the City Botanic Gardens near Parliament House. Toowoomba’s Queens Park will be a tent city.

Other tent cities will appear at Redcliffe and Burleigh Heads and on the fringes of Cairns and Townsville where there is a rental accommodation crisis.

Foreign Minister Penny Wong will recognise Palestine any day now, Des Houghton says. Picture: Dan Peled / NewsWire

Labor will probably be in power for two more terms so we can expect significant changes to the landscape.

Chris Bowen, the Minister for Climate Change, scarily approaches his decarbonisation task with zeal.

More land will be cleared and koala habitats destroyed to make way for solar farms and big white windmills. Then more land will be cleared for the transmission lines to carry the power – provided the sun is shining and the wind blowing.

Mike O’Connor will turn to poetry. From his jail cell he will write: “I don’t think I will ever see a wind turbine as lovely as a tree.”

Live sheep exports will be banned, leaving 3 million lambs in Western Australia to die from old age.

There will be food shortages.

Environmentally unfriendly beef feedlots in Queensland will be outlawed. Likewise, piggeries. Illicit bacon trafficked by outlaw motorcycle gangs will be sold on the black market like chop-chop.

Solar and wind will be everywhere. File picture: Richard BOUHET / AFP)

Food shortages will worsen as valuable cropping land is replaced with fast growing eucalyptus and mallee trees in carbon sequestration projects to deliver green credits in the rush to unattainable net zero targets.

I expect other societal changes.

More than half of boys aged 15 will wear dresses and stockings to school as they embrace compulsory transgender affirming studies.

The Greens will have an epiphany and back nuclear power plants. The backflip will come from Larissa Waters who will cite “the potentially catastrophic effects of climate change and the failure of renewables to charge my Tesla”.

Senator Waters said Australian Greens will take their lead from Finland’s green party, Vihreät, that says nuclear power is the cleanest energy source. Waters also noted the recent ruling Greens Party in Germany has also abandoned its pledge to shut nuclear power plants.

And she noted the bipartisan support for nuclear power in the US with the Democrats and the Republicans both agreeing to fund 40 new power plants there.

Waters extended the hand of friendship to National’s leader David Littleproud. He said the Nationals did not rule out a coalition with the Greens.

Originally published as Des Houghton: Goodbye to the Lucky Country