The Bowen-Bandt so-called safeguard mechanism is a national suicide note

Well, now we finally have it – Australia’s National Suicide Note in official black and white form: the Bowen-Bandt so-called Safeguard Mechanism.

The only thing Australia is any good at doing – on the scale necessary to keep 26m of us in the half-adequate lifestyle we seem to think we are entitled to because, well, because, far less the 50m we are mindlessly racing to grow to – is digging or pumping stuff out of the ground and shipping it off to China and other places.

Last financial year our total exports were just shy of $600bn. More than two-thirds of that – over $420bn – were resource and energy exports. That’s iron ore of course, plus coal and gas as the other big ones.

Take them away and we would have had only $180bn to buy all the ‘stuff’ we want from foreigners – the consumer baubles, the plant and machinery, drugs and sophisticated medical equipment and everything else. And, oh yes, the odd submarine or jet fighter; and let’s not forget all the solar panels and wind turbines. Thank you, China, for sending us some of our coal and iron ore back.

We did in fact import just shy of $450bn in 2021-22. What $270bn of foreign ‘stuff’ would we happily have done without?

Well, the so-called ‘Safeguard Mechanism’ is aimed at ensuring we will never get another new mine or gas-field – never mind with to sell stuff to foreigners, even just to keep our lights on, our heaters and air-cons working.

The so-called ‘Safeguard Mechanism’ is aimed at ensuring we will never get another new mine or gas-field.

So over time, as we trek down to the fabled ‘2050 net zero’, the lights will be going out, quite probably all over Europe but certainly around Australia. Figuratively and indeed literally.

For as the existing mines run out and close and there are no replacements – or at best the odd replacement that somehow sneaks through - that the money and the ‘stuff’ it buys to keep our economy and our society functioning, will evaporate.

It goes without saying that ’these people’ are so utterly clueless about the consequences of what they are imposing; they equally utterly unknowingly spell out precisely the sort of things those consequences will be. In his statement announcing the joint Suicide Note – or as he titled it, “Safeguard Mechanism one step closer to Parliamentary passage” – minister Bowen did exactly that.

He proudly boasted that it would be “equivalent to taking two-thirds of the nation’s cars off the road over the same period (to 2030)”.

Now I wouldn’t be quite that pessimistic; I think it will take somewhat longer to achieve the economic destruction on that scale that would see our standard of living drop by such an indicated two-thirds.

Now of course Bowen was intending to convey a measure of the drop in CO2 emissions in ‘car-equivalent’ terms.

But he far more exactly, if totally uncomprehendingly, spelt out the actual real-world devastation that would be wreaked if – when? - we slash our CO2 emissions in that way.

And remember, we are only really getting started by 2030. The object is net zero by 2050.

And that’s not just net zero in our electricity and gas supply industries, and resource and energy exports, but net zero in everything we do to survive.

Including growing food, as Dutch farmers are now finding out, with Dutch consumers to find out behind them.

To call the business response fatuous, embarrassing and dumb, would be too flattering.

The response from (departing) Business Council CEO Jennifer Westacott was emblematic. “Business now has certainty,” she bleated.

Yes, sure, Jennifer: the certainty of the grave.

As Lenin said: “The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them”.

The 2023 version of the rope are the turbines and solar panels coming back from China.