Power rests with Canberra elite

WESTERN Australians may well ask if they are destined to again become colonials, that is, be administratively controlled by distant ruling elites over whom we’ll have little or no oversight.

State Scene must admit that, if asked this question two decades ago the answer would have been ‘definitely not, it won’t happen’.

The reason is that we have four important historical precedents, of which all should be proud, that suggest the negative answer is correct.

The first is the fact that colonial Western Australians lobbied hard and early to gain self-governance from London – several years before the gold rush of the 1890s.

The second was local wariness of the federation movement that brought Australia into being 11 years later.

When the final popular referendum was held in July 1900 the outcome was just below 50,000 for federation to nearly 20,000 against in the west.

Most rural electorates disagreed, with only Albany (WA’s then major port) and the Goldfields, then dominated by an influx of people from other states, strongly backing the ‘yes’ side. A strong Goldfields separatist movement, called Auralia, existed and threatened to break the area from WA.

The third sign of WA doggedness came 30 years later when the people voted overwhelmingly to secede from the federation.

A secession league emerged in 1926, followed, in 1930, by the dominion league, which sought a separate dominion of WA.

The April 1933 vote showed 68 per cent of the 237,198 voters backed secession.

The fourth, which is generally overlooked, was the way WA was fortified to combat its greatest threat, the possibility of invasion by imperial Japan in the early 1940s.

Fremantle, called ‘fortress Fremantle’, became a formidable allied submarine base while the Swan River was a Catalina base and WA, particularly its southern segment, was heavily garrisoned.

Irrespective of the Brisbane line, dogged efforts were made to help ensure independence of the Japanese planned ‘greater East Asian co-prosperity sphere’, which held its foundation conference in Tokyo in early November 1943.

The common thread running through these four movements and widely backed efforts was a dogged determination by most Western Australians to ensure they remained masters of their fate.

However, since then two disturbing developments have emerged – one relatively longstanding, the other more recent.

Firstly, there is the ongoing drive to centralise Australia. Once this was a Labor Party plank. Today, the Liberals have joined in and it’s hard to find a federal politician – Labor or Liberal – who backs the idea of Canberra backing-off WA’s many areas of administration.

Estimates of the annual cost of administrative duplication Australia wide vary from $10 billion to double that figure – yet neither major party seeks to reverse this and return the bloated cost of administration as lower taxes.

No premier has ever drawn-up an action plan to begin displacing Canberra involvement from a range of WA affairs – from environmental dabbling to education and health, areas that should have remained solely state government responsibilities.

Most seem to no longer have the will to fight for self-determination. A colonial cringe has taken over, with power over our lives and affairs being transferred to distant bureaucracies.

Ask yourself, what’s the difference on a range of questions between the Howard and the Rudd governments?

Both want Canberra to dominate traditional state areas of responsibility.

But there’s worse to come, because a new and more sinister form of colonialism has been emerging.

And it’s being done through an ongoing and well-funded international campaign driven by rampant eco-apocalyptic environmental cultism that now dominates overseas and United Nations bureaucracies with powerful allies at Australia’s governmental and political levels.

This worldwide coalition has access to billions of dollars and the drive to devise enforceable treaties that only a handful of Canberra-based Australians need agree to.

Such individuals regularly attend taxpayer-funded conferences at venues where the finest hotels are found.

Anyone querying their alleged findings and resolutions is dubbed a denier or skeptic, as if being independent minded and inquisitive is sinful.

Not promptly accepting all and everything such highly paid globetrotting bureaucrats and politicians pronounce as the ‘truth’ is seen as insubordination.

There was a time when critics of ever-expanding social welfare spending dubbed that tendency the nanny state.

What is happening now is that fanatical environmentalism is giving birth to the ‘strangler state’ – one where all business endeavour will be so regulated, monitored and taxed that people will be inclined to simply shut-up shop.

Little wonder Caltex’s chief Julian Segal warned last week that the proposed carbon reduction scheme that has UN bureaucratic inspiration and concurrence may result in the company ceasing its refining operations here.

No individual has warned of this emerging strangler state, via backing from international agencies like the unelected and unaudited UN-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, better than Perth scientist, Joanne Nova.

Her ground-breaking article titled, ‘Climate Money’, just published in the Science and Public Policy Institute’s ‘original papers series’, warns of the dangers and magnitude of the coming trade in carbon dioxide, dubbed by UN and other propagandists a ‘pollutant’ but really a plant nutrient.

Expect the same in coal, oil and gas, many other mines, cement manufacture, and meat and grain output.

“Carbon trading worldwide reached $126 billion in 2008,” she wrote.

“Banks are calling for more carbon-trading. And experts are predicting the carbon market will reach $2-to-$10 trillion, making carbon the largest single commodity traded.

“New Carbon Finance, a London-based investment adviser that tracks the market, predicts the carbon market will reach $3 trillion by 2020.

“Richard Sandor, chairman and chief executive officer of Climate Exchange Plc, which owns the world’s biggest carbon dioxide exchange in London, sees an even larger market: ‘We’re going to see a worldwide market, and carbon will unambiguously be the largest non-financial commodity in the world.’

“He predicted trades eventually will total $10 trillion a year.

“In other words, carbon trading will be bigger than oil, and even the promise of a market that massive and lucrative represents a major vested interest.”

When it’s remembered it was the banks’ whiz-kid operators who devised things called derivatives that sparked last year’s global financial crisis, it’s difficult not to suspect that the next financial crisis will be a South Sea bubble-type whopper.

Remember, this trade will be in something (carbon dioxide, that’s a nutrient) you can’t see or feel.

What type of strange rorting and smoke-and-mirrors tricks will emerge from such parasitic fantasies is still difficult to imagine.

All this will be backed by forcing industry – mining, transport, agriculture and recreation – to pay ever-higher carbon taxes to increasingly ration energy usage in the name of the carbon hoax, with consumers always slugged.

And the Labor and Liberal energy taxing plans, deceptively dubbed an Emissions Trading Scheme, envisage steadily rising rates.

Australian taxation policy will be designed to ensure obedience to what Canberra politicians decree, such as ensuring the levels reflect what’s been agreed upon at international environmental and climate forums.

It’s certainly worth keeping in mind that old one-liner: “You ain’t seen nothing yet”.

The days of Western Australians determining their own fate are ending, thanks to the Greens, Kevin Rudd-led Labor, and the Malcolm Turnbull-led Liberals.

Sovereign Western Australia: RIP (1890-2010).