Originally published by Vikki Campion of The Daily Telegraph
03.04.2026
We are back where we began, as a population of takers, not makers.
Our first official currency came from the scraps of other empires. In 1813, we didn’t have the tools or skills to make our own coins so we punched the guts out of Spanish coins to end up with Holey Dollars and Dumps.
Now we have the expertise and the raw materials, but we have regulated ourselves out of our sovereignty into a nation of shoppers, not suppliers, for anything more complex than stamping raw metals into coin at the mint.
In five weeks, without a single enemy on Australian soil, we are facing devastation, as agriculture scales back, both protein and crops, transport is crippled, and the consequences are still not being taken seriously by a population shielded by supply-line-blind “the milk just appears on the shelves” thinking.
The climate nuttery that has self-immolated us into vulnerability shows no sign of stopping.
When you thought the Albanese Labor government had seen sense and recognised the importance of long-haul freight in a nation with an economy that centres on sending things dug up from dirt or grown in paddocks to a port, its senators were dancing around EV trucks showing the opposite.
This week, the country with the highest electricity bills in the world had its elected officials leaning out of windows, posing and videoing themselves playing on an electric truck as the solution, after it delivered toilet paper following a three-hour highway commute.
Bradfield MP Nicolette Boele, in her video, exclaimed she was riding in an EV truck “made in Melbourne”.
“We can build it here,” she said. “It’s going to keep our country going, isn’t it?”
So the tyres came from Australia? No. We stopped manufacturing tyres more than a decade ago. Was one panel made in a steel mill in Australia? No. Did the glass? No.
What they were in was a truck partially assembled in Australia. If you take a cake out of a box, ice it and put it in a different box, you haven’t made a cake, you have done a Meghan Markle, who famously transferred store-bought pretzels from their packaging into a clear plastic bag, tied it with a bow and added a handwritten label.
That was a truck that came in a container and, if the supply lines are cut because we can’t defend ourselves, you don’t have that truck.
It’s amazing how a country that can’t make anything to save its own skin believes it is changing the climate.
In the past few years, major companies, such as large fertiliser company Incitec Pivot, major plastics company Qenos, and 169-year-old Oceania Glass, Australia’s last architectural glass manufacturer, all shut down, blaming rising energy costs for their downfall.
But on the lawns of Parliament House this week, those costs were apparently irrelevant.
We are in our fifth week of the conflict in Iran and we have funeral homes struggling to get enough diesel to cremate the dead and poultry farms that cannot get the diesel they need to keep their chooks warm or cool enough when the power goes out.
Yet you have Labor and Climate 200-funded MPs playing on EV trucks, claiming it was cheaper, and asking for taxpayer grants to fund it.
Our hostility to hydrocarbons means we make very little – not oil, not fertiliser, not diesel, not plastic, not tyres, not glass.
We don’t even have an Australian flagship to supply us. On the foreshore of Lake Burley Griffin is a monument to Australia’s merchant navy, which was essential in supplying Australia, and which we also don’t have anymore.
We couldn’t put a ship in the Strait of Hormuz because we weren’t capable. Our naval fleet is the oldest in its history, and our defence asset procurement relies on foreign interests, each with its own alliances, in a time of unparalleled global instability.
After selecting German shipbuilders for the Arafura-class offshore patrol vessels, the government awarded British giant BAE Systems the $45bn Hunter-class frigate program, which has now slipped so badly that the first vessel won’t arrive until mid-2032.
This week, the Australian National Audit Office delivered a scathing assessment of the $7bn Project Land 400, warning it will be a “significant, if not impossible challenge” for South Korea’s Hanwha to deliver our army 129 Redback Infantry Fighting Vehicles by the end of 2028.
Every defence asset is made under contract with a company from another nation and requires parts from a myriad of countries to create. If our supply lines are cut, we cannot even get tyres.
And where do tyres come from? Oil that we believe is more morally important kept underground.
Pure liberal economics doesn’t work in a world where your supplier thinks it’s more important to supply their own nation and people. Believing in pure liberalism is like meditating for global peace. It’s a nice thought for the critically naive.
If we cannot import the parts you need, we are back to taking scraps from other nations.
If there is a silver lining to this conflict, it could be that Australians are finally realising that sovereignty isn’t something you order online with next-day delivery.
Well, everywhere except the lawns of Parliament House.
PLENTY OF DIESEL FOR RENEWABLES WHILE REST OF US FORCED TO CUT BACK
Everyone is pulling back on their diesel consumption except, it seems, those who believe in renewable energy most.
While farmers cannot get fuel, the regional people who can are the consortium that Energy Co tasked with building renewable hubs, who revealed under questioning this week that they had not asked contractors to minimise their diesel usage, even as the nearest service station at Dunedoo ran dry and farmers could not get their tanks full.
EnergyCo’s Hannah McCaughey told Nationals MLC Wes Fang, under questioning, that they were in a “watch phase” as construction continued to suck up diesel, and the Prime Minister warned the rest of the country that stockpiling the stuff was “unAustralian”.
“We are trying to understand what the diesel use is for, if it was needed to be prioritised,” she told the NSW inquiry into Renewable Energy Zones this week.
Diesel is used in internal combustion engines for generators and trucks. Those evil ones that actually work in the bush to keep the lights and airconditioning on, and construction going. Apparently, they are necessary in the construction of your renewable industry.
There’s no electric-powered vehicles for these boys and girls on our public money building Sandy Lane, formerly known as Merotherie Rd – just the fumes of diesel burning with taxpayer-funded abandon.
The reality of the diesel request reveals the myth of the so-called renewable industry.
You cannot even build wind or solar, transmission lines, or renewable hubs without fossil fuels.
The official word from the inquiry was that the NSW government had not asked EnergyCo to ask its contractors to minimise diesel use at this time, just everyone else.
They also won’t confirm if it’s more than 70,000L each day. Why be shy?
They should be at the top of the list for getting their diesel cut because their whole worldview is that the product they are not restricting at all in their use is the same product they want the rest of us to stop using.
Why aren’t they using electric bulldozers? Or solar panels to power their accommodation? If you so strongly believe in electrifying the “transition” and are so militant about it, then why not use it yourself?
The last time ACEREZ’s work on Merotherie Rd hit the headlines was after hundreds of baby birds were slaughtered after their trees were bulldozed.
This comes after an EnergyCo employee spoke disparagingly about landholders at a cafe in Scone, in front of other landholders, forcing a two-day investigation.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese pragmatically working with One Nation to bring quick shipments of fuel from Singapore.
