Tag: Traditional Owners

A week into my Australian tour and I already I love the country and its people so much I could happily stay here forever. (Articles like this and this and this may partly explain why.) There’s just one small problem – well, one bloody big problem actually: the rampaging political correctness. How, in God’s name, did the robust, no-nonsense pioneer spirit of the original settlers who carved an earthly paradise out of burning hell allow itself to be watered down, warped and wimpified by a minority of tofu-knitting greens and tight-sphinctered lefties?

Let me give you one example. (Plenty more will follow, let me assure you, for Oz is the land of Political Correctness and Eco Fascism gone mad. Traditional Owners, anyone???) I’ve just returned from the remote Western Australian fishing port of Exmouth, point of embarkation for one of the most daring missions of the Second World War: Operation Jaywick.

A mixed British and Australian team of Z Special Unit commandos (their skin dyed the kind of Asiatic yellowy-brown which would probably have had the operation cancelled before the start, nowadays, because of its evidently racist undertones) set out in a small, captured Japanese fishing boat – named MV Krait – for what should have been a suicide mission to attack the Japanese in Singapore harbour. They anchored the boat off shore, paddled the last 31 mile leg in kayaks, and used limpet mines to destroy 39,000 tonnes of shipping. The Japanese were so completely unprepared that they didn’t know what had hit them. Amazingly the commandos all made it back safely. (Only to perish on a subsequent mission). (H/T Barry Corke)

And what has become of Exmouth nearly 70 years on? It’s a remote and exotic tourist destination well worth a visit as possibly the best place anywhere in the world to go snorkelling with whale sharks, magnificent leviathans up to 60 feet long. That’s the good news. The bad is that the whole region is in thrall to the agents of DEC (Western Australia’s Department of Environment and Conservation) which enforces environmental correctness throughout the state with a zeal which would not have disgraced Imperial Japan’s secret police the Kempitai.

A few years ago, the fishermen who ran the whale spotting trips for tourists made the mistake of asking the Western Australian government for help regulating the business. (They feared competition). The state government was more than happy to oblige by issuing them with permits, withdrawable at a moment’s notice, and subject to any number of draconian restrictions. One operator nearly lost his licence for failing to display the correct flag signifying “my boat is next to a bloody great whale shark”; another – incredible but true – was given a severe warning for stopping on the way back to let its tourists view a school of whales. His crime? Though he had a whale-shark snorkelling licence he didn’t have a whale-spotting licence and was therefore in breach of regulation.

For anyone in Western Australia trying to make a living outside the cities be it mining, tourism, the wine trade, fishing or farming, DEC is more vexatious a pestilence than a swarm of sand flies. What’s more, local taxpayers must stump up an annual A$ 300,000 for the privilege of having their economy spavined, their businesses hamstrung and their liberties shackled by DEC’s army of sanctimonious brown shirts.

And while I’ve seen and heard for myself how bad Western Australia is, I gather that the further east you go the worse it gets. No wonder the Queenslanders couldn’t wait to get shot of the Greenies terrorising their beautiful state. Let’s hope for Australia’s sake the electoral carnage continues into 2013 when the Aussies have the chance to tell Julia Gillard exactly where she can stick her Carbon Tax.

What I realise, though, now that I’m here is that the Carbon Tax is just a fraction of the problem. There is, for example, the equally stupid Mining Tax which is punishing one of the most productive sectors of the Australian economy, killing jobs and driving business abroad. And then there all the Eco Fascists in local government poisoning the wells with their sustainability programmes and their pursuit of the UN’s sinister Agenda 21.

Today I bid a very fond farewell to Perth. Tomorrow I’ll be in Adelaide, at a lunchtime event hosted by the IPA and launched by my old mate – and one of Australia’s soundest politicians – Cory Bernardi. My book – did I mention this? – is called Killing The Earth To Save It: How Environmentalists are ruining the planet, destroying the economy and stealing your jobs.

Every copy you buy grants you the power to inflict on Christine Milne the nightmare of your choice:

a) baby polar bears tumbling off melting ice floes and drowning

b) happy Australians with real jobs earning a living

c) a dozen new mines opening in the Pilbara

d) every wind farm in Tasmania being taken down and replaced by a solitary nuclear power station

e) slow motion replay of the Queensland election result, with Greg Withers – head of the state’s Office of Climate Change – being told by incoming premier Campbell Newman that from henceforward his job is to undo all the state’s insane environmental legislation.

f) a chorus including Ian Plimer, Bob Carter, David Archibald, Joanne Nova, Andrew Bolt, Tim Blair, Bill Kininmonth and James Delingpole singing “Tomorrow Belongs To Me”

So remember Aussies,  buy early, buy often: the future of your great nation depends on it!