by Viv Forbes
My grandparents were part of the Great Generation. Toughened by wars and depression they were patriotic nation builders.
Their monuments are long-term productive assets like the Mount Isa and Broken Hill mines, smelters and refineries, the Wollongong Steelworks, the Sydney Harbour Bridge, the transcontinental railway, the overland telegraph line, the Yallourn coal mines and Power stations, the Renison and Mt Lyell mines and railways, the Kalgoorlie Goldfields, the Weipa and Gladstone bauxite industries, Pilbara Iron, the Perth-Kalgoorlie pipeline, the Kidman Cattle Empire, the world’s biggest merino flock, QANTAS, the Holden car, Southern Cross windmills, the Sunshine Harvester and a network of roads, railways, towns, power lines, ports and airports.
The pioneers survived floods, droughts, bushfires and plagues of mice, rabbits, locusts and prickly pear to develop an agricultural industry that provides food and fibre for millions of consumers. They were frugal and inventive. They built everything themselves with corrugated iron, shingles, guttering, poles, posts, nails, rivets, solder and wire – houses, humpies, haysheds, milking barns, sheep yards, shearing sheds, water tanks, grain stores, dairies, meat houses, dog kennels, chook sheds and the dunny up the back. They created parks and planted orchards and forests for timber and paper.
They welcomed boat-loads of hard working migrants from many countries to farms and factories and celebrated the arrival of “clean coal energy by wire” to every home.
The Great Generation made sure their kids behaved at school and did their home-work. Mostly kids were “seen but not heard”. The kids walked, rode bikes or horses to school, and parents reinforced school discipline. That generation loved and trusted the ABC which provided unbiased news and weather forecasts and wholesome entertainment.
Our lives are now controlled by the Green Generation, who follow a Globalist agenda. This generation has devalued science, engineering and trade skills and pollute education curricula with the mantras of the green religion. They encourage the climate alarm, anti-enterprise, anti-family bias evident on the staff-controlled, taxpayer-funded ABC.
And now they mobilise noisy truant kids for political rallies.
Too many of the Green Generation specialise in obstruction, destruction and delay, while themselves consuming the assets of the past. They cheer the demolition of coal-fired power plants and use green law-fare to stop or delay almost everything else. Among their battle trophies are South Australian and Victorian coal mines and power stations, most new industry proposals in Tasmania, much offshore oil exploration, new dam proposals in every state, and every new proposal for coal development, gas exploration or fracking. They hope to hang the scalps of Adani Coal, Rocky Point Coal, Wandoan Coal and all Galilee Basin developments on their trophy wall. Australia has a huge uranium resources but nuclear power is banned.
Nowhere is the contrast between the generations more stark than in the Snowy Mountains.
The Great Generation planned, financed and built the Snowy Hydro-electric Scheme (without UN direction or advice). This nation-building project captures Snowy water, uses it to generate reliable electricity, and diverts the water to irrigate towns, orchards and crops on the dry western plains.
The Green Generation supports Snowy Hydro 2, a hollow-shelled project that steals electricity from the grid and water from Snowy 1 to pump water uphill and then recovers part of that electricity by letting the water run back down again (when their intermittent green energy fails). It will be a big, power-consuming, expensive battery.
The sad history of Whyalla is instructive. The Great Generation built an iron mine, a steel works and a great shipbuilding enterprise there. Most of it is idle now. This generation of techno-phobes looks like trying to build foreign nuclear-powered submarines there but with diesel-electric engines (presumably running on bio-fuel.) The British navy that ruled the world ran on coal for the war-ships and bread, salt beef, lard, limes and rum for the sailors. Today’s green dreamers hope to feed the multi-sexual crew on nuts and raisins and use the alcohol to power the motors.
A truly modern navy runs on nuclear fuel.
But is this Australia’s next all-green warship under construction?
The Great Generation created our present world and left many useful assets as their monuments.
The Green Generation is destroying our future. The way things are heading, the lasting monuments to the Green Generation will be the skeletons of abandoned solar “farms” overgrown by lantana scrub, the concrete foundations of bankrupt wind “farms”, and spider-webs of useless sagging transmission lines and towers.
These memorials will serve to remind the next generation of the long, costly and futile war on hydro-carbon energy and the many failed climate forecasts.
More Reading:
Young Americans prefer free things rather than freedom:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6795373/Half-young-Americans-live-socialist-country-survey-finds.html
Fuelling the Navy on Bundaberg rum?
https://www.news-mail.com.au/news/bundaberg-mayor-wants-us-navy-here/3079056/
PDF version: https://saltbushclub.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/great-generation.pdf [PDF, 877 KB]
Could one of our members who is a whiz with math’s, please calculate the size of the base and the height of the MOUNTAIN that will be created in twenty years time. When all the roof top solar panels and the panels from solar panels no longer produce electricity and were they to be piled together, waiting to be dismantled.
Is it correct they could not go into landfill or make artificial reefs on the Great Barrier Reef?
If they have to be dismantled it would be good if a rough idea of the dismantling cost could be calculated and the amount of toxic chemicals that would need to be disposed off?
The State and Federal Governments and the community need to be made aware of the above answers. And candidates in the coming Federal Elections asked what they would do to solve them?
The aluminium from the solar panel frames and salt/caustic soda could be used to make cheap battery cells. The hydrogen from these cells could be used to power engines, fill balloons. The aluminium hydroxide could be used for indigestion tablets (that the shearers used to consume) or heated to produce aluminium powder for thermite or for recycling.
I don’t want to go there with that one. Do these imbeciles know how much polution is created by making solar panels?
By god, you are right. Fantastic article, telling it like it is.
I hope we can stop this green rubbish before it is too late.
Thanks Viv for giving us the truth, and nothing but the truth
I totally agree with everything you have said. How on earth have we been hoodwinked for so long by the lunatic fringe and their destructive influences. A frightening future indeed! Hopefully common sense will prevail before it’s too late!
Great piece of powerful writing Viv and calls the shots correctly. In the UK, we are now setting as a priority the complete decarbonisation of freight transport by 2050. How absurd! Climate change has become the mantra for all hysterical blame game cultural nonsense, led by a generation of politicians who are pitiful cardboard cutouts of our past leaders. Meanwhile, the Chinese one party state manipulates the West, watches us burn our economies and waits patiently, gradually acquiring the worlds mineral assets for a time when its too late for us to stop their march towards world domination. Keep up the good work and let’s try to recruit the many who instinctively support your views.
Great article Viv. I agree and feel sad that our generation is being hoodwinked by this unscientific destruction of our lifestyle. I particularly feel sad for our Children and Grandchildren, who will ultimately be affected the most from the present day Green agenda. Thanks for your great work in endeavoring to put the message out there. I will continue to distribute as widely as possible.
Great article Viv, but a tragic tale of events.
When it comes to the global agenda, ‘following’, or perhaps ‘blindly following’, is the key.
Devoid of the values upon which this great country has been built, the manipulators of children replace values and scientific facts with emotionalism, propaganda, and the warm inner glow of phony green environmentalism.
They are the servants of those tyrants who dream about global power and who tell us if we submit to them they will control climate, cyclones, bush fires………and our money and freedom.
So True. Well said!
Agreed!
Thank you Viv for reminding us of The Great Generation. I have forwarded your article onto everyone I can.
I am often told I am not progressive and times were different for our generation . …..
If this ‘first dog to run from the crescent moon’ comic is any indication, the children of the future will be building lots of psychiatrist couches …
Climate change is not only destroying the planet, but our psyches as well
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/mar/13/climate-change-is-not-only-destroying-the-planet-but-our-psyches-as-well
I live in Ontario, Canada. We had the most inexpensive electricity in N. America a couple of generations ago. Now, we have the most expensive thanks to ‘renewables’. Wind turbines were supposed to last 18yrs, they are lasting an average of 8 before the gears wear our or fail. The concrete foundations are so vast that at one location I surveyed, locals could tell when a unit was failing because they could feel the vibration in their houses. The wind veins are laminated and are becoming delaminated. If one delaminates, all three must be replaced at a cost of about $1mil. There is now only one insurance company in Canada extending coverage to wind turbines. In contrast, I surveyed water generating stations built around 1920. All basically original and still working. Industry has left Ontario in droves thanks to the cost of electricity and the carbon tax. The ‘warmists’ use plant condensing towers as their poster child. These discharge harmless water vapour.
I was a submariner in the R.N. and there is a place for diesel electric subs.
On a conventional boat we could track nuclear subs for weeks and they were unaware of our presence. Nuclear subs don’t function well in coastal waters. I was involved with inspecting some aspects of nuclear plants. The nuclear industry has shot themselves in the foot with very poor p.r. Their attitude has been that ‘Joe Public’ would never be able to grasp nuclear principles, so they kept things under wraps. The result has been mistrust.
I’d love to converse with anyone who has ideas on how to combat the ‘warmest religion’ which is ruining the world for my children and grandchildren.
Hi Viv.
Loved your comparisons, but you forgot perhaps several of those who do most damage. Universities – lecturers, vice-chancellors and boards who force Socialism onto students); much of the Legal Profession who shan’t be buried in a coffin but will have to be “screwed into the ground like a corkscrew”; Teachers who poison the minds of young children; and the whole industry” of being a victim, which has been allowed to grow around what is in fact another “lie”, with that lie being that Humans either began any climate problem (if one actually exists) or that Humans have any capacity with which to reverse it. We have been living in a “honeymoon” period for the past 2,500 years and if anyone wishes to peruse the empirical evidence and absorb the facts therein, only an idiot could think otherwise.
Regards.
Eric Hely.
In passing, what happened to the bubble of “Global Cooling” c. 1980s?
What an absolutely brilliant piece of writing.
It is so sad to read and realise that what Viv has written is so true.
The Lucky Country we use to know, is being destroyed by a minority party.
They must be stopped ASAP, it started in the NSW elections, we must continue the trend in the Federal Elections, for Australia’s and our children and grandchildren sake.