In the later half of 1970, our family was dispatching our belongings to Australia and selling our old 25-ton Bristol Channel Pilot Cutter Cariad, as she would have had a hard time making it to Oz by sea, let alone surviving in tropical waters, being an unsheathed wooden boat.
Her name meant Sweetheart in Welsh, and she had a history, going back to 1904, which was recorded in A Yachtsman’s Log, by Frank GG Carr.
He was the curator of the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich, and we bought the boat from him in 1957, a year before we married, inspired by over-ambitious and, as it turned out, unfulfilled plans to sail her round the world.
Our three children and I arrived in Darwin on 01/01/71, to join their father, who had already started work there some months earlier.
Soon after our arrival, we bought a somewhat smaller boat called Fairgo.
Little were we to know that between then and now, the Australian concept of a Fair Go would become a myth!
The video of Scott Morrison making a woman shake his hand for a photo op, when she and her community had just lost everything in the bush fires, epitomised the “it’s all about me” attitude that underpins his attitude to being Prime Minister.
Well, Mr Morrison – on behalf of a growing number of people, I am here to tell you that it is NOT all about you.
You are incapable of understanding what running a country requires – just as you proved incapable of performing up to scratch, pretty consistently, in your earlier careers.
You are currently running down our economy and failing to provide the urgently needed programs to deal with a list of crises which are all piling up, one after the other.
You claimed it as a miracle when your Party won a slim majority at the last general election.
It was not a miracle.
It was a disaster, and we are all suffering in consequence.
You are not only making a really bad fist of managing the economy, you and your party are politicising institutions like the AAT, wasting money on consultant reports while working to destroy the Public Service, encouraging corruption, damaging the Parliamentary process and wrenching the title of worst Prime Minister ever from Tony Abbott!
I love Darwin, which I regard as probably the most peacefully cosmopolitan city in Australia, if not in the world. But we seem to have a boom or bust economy which is not currently booming!
Now you are bribing, or coercing, the NT Government into starting fracking, when our sunshine records mean that we should be building geothermal energy generators, supplying charging points for electric cars, spaced suitably through the long empty spaces of the Northern Territory, while existing car manufacturing facilities should be coming out of mothballs down south and gearing up to manufacture electric cars – with all the energy being renewable.
Changing weather patterns are meaning that rainfall in the NT is reducing, meaning that we have a falling level in the water table. In consequence, using large amounts of water for fracking is something that will prove immensely damaging by leaving communities with empty bores.
Meanwhile, the gas recovered through fracking will be another source of greenhouse gas emissions somewhere in the world, feeding into an atmosphere shared by the whole world
Your fixation on coal and fossil fuels is a disastrous abomination and your planning ability is – if that is possible – even worse than your marketing skills.
And do you know what your biggest problems are?
You talk so fast that no one else can get a word in, and, if they actually succeed in doing so, you do not listen. You are, without any foundation for your self-belief, over-confident in your ability levels and incapable of recognising and acknowledging the fact when you are wrong.
Throw out your political advisers. Get advice from experts. Your god knows that your skills and interests are far from adequate for the job you have fought for and we are suffering in consequence.
If I have my way, increasingly people will be out on the streets, disrupting traffic and business generally, demanding that you shape up or call it quits.
You make me feel ashamed to be Australian!
Extinction Rebellion is only just warming up!
Calling for recruits now!
I end as always – this is my 2020 New Year Resolution:
“I will do everything in my power to enable Australia to be restored to responsible government.”
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