Could Melbourne become an Australian Detroit? By Robert Gottliebsen in The Australian.
The new Premier, Ben Carroll, is talented and in theory he could save the state, but his party has structured its strategies and policies to foster corruption and crime. Simply announcing a Royal Commission is a PR stunt. …
ALP politicians did not receive cash, but they saw $15bn stolen from the Victorian population by union officials and organised crime and they did nothing about it. Worse, they set up structures to perpetuate crime and corruption. …
According to the opinion polls, a huge number of Victorians, led by staunch ALP supporters, now fully understand the government’s key role in Victoria’s corruption plus the out-of-control crime. They now plan to vote against the ALP, which is why Carroll became premier. …
Goodbye Victoria:
If Victorian voters re-elect a corrupt, crime-fostering government, then a large number of employing enterprises will leave the state. The credit rating agencies will then almost certainly force some form of administration on the state, and a returned ALP government will be forced into huge government staff and service cuts. …
Many of Victoria’s large and smaller enterprises can’t operate a head office in a corrupt state, so are making plans to leave. The job and skill losses will be monumental….
Almost certainly the new premier must stop the employment-reducing, compulsory working-from-home nonsense which makes the state impossible to operate in. ….
Crime!!
Victoria is lucky. It has an honest police commissioner, Mike Bush, who knows exactly what is required to slash Victorian crime. He needs a non-corrupt government prepared to tackle the billions of dollars being injected into crime via building sites and illegal cigarettes. The state can turn off the building site money tap. The cigarette money tap requires Commonwealth action.
The “Mike Bush remedy” for crime will almost certainly require a massive change in Victoria’s court system and its “woke” judges and magistrates, many of whom are in desperate need of “retirement”. Cities like Chicago and New York have been infested by crime in the same way as Melbourne and have implemented harsh penalty policies (after one chance) to remove it. It will be nasty, but is essential. Victorians are sick of crime and the failure of the government to tackle the totally broken legal system.
Energy:
The Victorian boom years were based on gas and brown coal. The brown coal reserves are still there, and there looks to be more gas offshore plus the huge gas reserves under the coal. Technology now makes it possible to efficiently extract crude oil out of Victoria’s brown coal and therefore economically underpin Australia’s need for local diesel and aviation fuel. [I think David Archibald has mentioned coal-to-liquids about a million times on this website.]
Deep underneath our brown coal are massive reserves of gas dissolved in water and we need to quickly and inexpensively test whether that water will flow to the surface with its gas. Victoria can use the Latrobe Valley gas, with gas already discovered in the rest of Victoria and likely to be found in Bass Strait, to become a massive gas province, including an increase in gas-powered electricity generation to help in data centres. Eventually nuclear will be required.
Renewables mess:
The current renewables project around Australia is in complete chaos and we are looking at a trillion-dollar outlay which will skyrocket power prices. The federal government is concealing the horrendous costs and the “rort” deals it has done. …
Remember the Commonwealth government is keeping secret the real costs because of the disaster they reveal.
Bureaucracy and DEI:
The toughest task is Victoria’s debt and fixing a non-functional public service. …
Efficiency in the public service is made impossible by the creation of an Aboriginal parliament-style body in the treaty. The treaty needs to be rewritten.
Imagine if Melbourne became Australia’s Detroit. Detroit used to be an exemplar city that hummed with industry and wealth, until the 1960s.