The Australian
Economic illiterates clueless of the damage they espouse
GREG SHERIDANFOREIGN EDITOR
Shut down our coal exports and dirty stuff from Indonesia takes its place
This week Australian politics entered a new stage. Extremists taking direct action, in the name of a highly coercive version of veganism, stopped the traffic in Melbourne.
Nothing unusual about that.
Although, of course, the Victorian government of Daniel Andrews will not pursue the vegan protest organisers for the cost of the policing involved while it is happy to lumber the admittedly extremely unattractive right-wing Milo Yiannopoulos with a bill of tens of thousands of dollars for the policing of his events, even though he didn’t break any law.
That’s the new normal. Leftwing law-breaking is OK. Unfashionable right-wing law abiding will leave you with a bill for tens of thousands of dollars.
Nothing really new in that. That’s pretty much just the moment we’ve come to.
What was new this week was the determined, widespread invasion of family farms and farm businesses by vegan activists. This led Scott Morrison’s government to promise new legislation to penalise websites that publish the addresses of farmers to promote trespass. Importantly, Bill Shorten condemned the farm invasions. But what is the trend? These farm invasions attract ludicrously lenient fines under state laws.
But they are terrorising to the farm families involved. They explicitly use law-breaking violence and physical intimidation to advance a political cause. That is low-grade terrorism.
Farmers and their families do no constitute a socially progressive victim class so they get very little media sympathy and no support at all from the vast and growing activist class.
Last month, more than 100 vegan extremists, all dressed in black, invaded an innocent, lawabiding family goat farm in Queensland, yet there were no significant penalties. National Farmers Federation chief executive Tony Mahar saw this week’s events as an attack on farming and farmers: “The main concern here is that people are taking the law into their own hands. We’ve seen people dressed in black, their faces covered, breaking into a piggery, a family farm, in the middle of the night. I’ve got kids and if I was the farmer in that situation I’d be terrified and extremely annoyed.”
The extremist vegans — who presumably don’t represent the views of the majority of people who follow vegan diets — don’t merely want kinder treatment of animals. On all the evidence, Australian farmers love their animals and treat them as well as any farm animals in the world. Nor are the vegan extremists that much concerned with agriculture’s greenhouse gas emissions. Instead, they reject the “dominion” of mankind over animals. They do not want animals to serve human beings, especially as food.
The media was both confused and misleading in its treatment of the week’s events. It focused on greenhouse emissions from agriculture because the greenhouse issue allows any activity at all to be attacked. Network Ten’s The Project was particularly telling in censoring out NFF comments about everything Australian agriculture has done to cut its greenhouse emissions. At the same time, its treatment of the vegan extremism was essentially sympathetic.
This is because — and here is the crux — most of the media in most Western nations and, much more importantly, not just the media but the entirety of symbolwielding, values-defining, woke folks, have embraced the metanarrative that social protest in any progressive or left of centre cause, especially involving law-breaking, is morally heroic.
This is a trend across western Europe and Britain, North America, Australia and New Zealand.
The extremism of the extremist vegan wing is important because it’s illustrative. There is nothing any farmer can reasonably do to satisfy these folks. They are attacking the legitimacy of farming itself.
Resources and Northern Australia Minister Matt Canavan tells Inquirer that about 66 per cent of our commodity and merchandise exports are subject to hostile social activism campaigns. If you include services, then the share of our exports subject to negative social activism campaigns is just over 50 per cent.
But even in services, the activists are generally not happy with Australia actually making any money and earning its living.
Our two big services exports are education and tourism. Try to call to mind a single significant tourism development that has been supported by the green-Left social activist continuum.
The much bigger case is coal. Australian agriculture produces about $60 billion worth of product every year and the NFF believes this could easily be $100bn by 2030. Last year, coal was Australia’s biggest export and iron ore our second biggest. Our national prosperity still rests fundamentally on coal, iron ore, agriculture, gas and other minerals exports.
We can tell ourselves all the comforting bedtime stories we like about future jobs coming in health, aged care, teaching, preschool education, counselling, renewable energy. All these jobs depend on government money. Government money comes only from taxes. The only thing you can tax is profits. The resources industry alone pays nearly $20bn in direct taxes. Last year, the nation earned just a little under $70bn from coal exports.
Canavan includes iron ore among the exports subject to social activist opposition because to turn iron ore into steel requires a great deal of coal power. Renewable energy is unreliable and has become more competitive in Australia mainly because we have imposed such uncompetitively high energy prices on ourselves.
The dependence of Australian prosperity on coal takes many forms. It is not only the direct export income and tax base, but all the income tax the workforce pays and all the indirect businesses that service the coal industry. But there is another dividend. Coal and iron ore and gas and the other mineral and agricultural exports keep our dollar strong, which allows us to import all the things we don’t make in Australia — more of it or all of it — which constitutes our affluent life.
Thus the attack on coal and agriculture and other industries is an attack on the legitimacy of modern Australian life. What is astonishing and new is how few explicit defenders there are, prepared to make a case in principle in the public debate.
Anti-coal campaigners resemble the most militant vegans in a critical way. There is absolutely nothing the coal industry can do to satisfy their demands. Yet hurting our coal industry doesn’t help the planet.
If our coal is limited, dirtier coal from Indonesia takes its place and overall global emissions rise. Similarly with agriculture; if activists impose costs that run some of our producers out of business, we import food produced in countries with lower environmental and animal safety standards.
Increasingly, our export industries resemble the US president in Independence Day who asks the invading alien: “What is it you want us to do?” The alien’s answer is simple: “Die!”
Like everything on the Australian Left, the anti-business, antiagriculture social activism is derivative and imported from the US and Britain. It has no equivalent in Asia. The grassroots groups, like the kids who chained themselves to hire vans in Flinders Street, are a tiny part of the vast social activism campaign that has snared many millions of dollars in government money and also has received millions from Left-liberal US foundations. They also benefit from enormous taxpayer-funded university-based activism.
Across the West, the ideological Left in its postmodern, activist guise has captured the commanding heights of education, especially concerning political values. Its meta-narrative is that Western societies are bad: racist, sexist, hetero-normative, imperialist and so on and their economic systems are intrinsically evil, built on industries that are morally offensive and illegitimate.
Perhaps the baby boomers, or at the latest Generation X, was the last in which Western tradition put up some kind of significant minority rearguard action against the enveloping world view of the progressive activist class.
Young people, deprived of any knowledge of Western tradition, much less footling nonsense like economic literacy, are now more sympathetic to the activist outlook. Obviously there are magnificent minorities that stand against the new orthodoxies. But we live in a time of overwhelming moral cowardice and the desire to be part of the shouting mob, to get the approval of the symbol-wielding powers, is strong.
Certainly, the younger the cohort the lower the level of respect for institutions, laws and traditions. In this, young folks are constantly reinforced in their worst instincts by their cowardly elders. There is a trend across the West now for high school students to play truant to protest against climate change. There is nothing wrong with protesting against climate change if that’s what you believe. But the essential frisson in this silliness is that you don’t do it in your own time, but that you get the fraudulent moral charge of notionally breaking a rule by ducking school. No less a figure in contemporary Western civilisation than German Chancellor Angela Merkel has supported this rule breaking. A brave national leader would say to school students: your political participation is wonderful, but you should play by the rules. Instead, we are positively instructing school students that the only moral course is to break the rules even when the rules themselves are entirely good.
In Britain, Opposition Leader Jeremy Corbyn is a lifelong protester and rule-breaker of the most extreme and irresponsible kind, with a long record of supporting terrorists and associating with anti-Semites. In 2017, 64 per cent of 25 to 29-year-olds voted for him. In the US, the youngest congresswoman, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, is a media star for promoting the Green New Deal as a serious program for government. This is an insanely utopian, coercive program that claims to guarantee high-paid jobs for every American, provide free university for everyone, cut carbon emissions in the energy sector to zero
— yes, zero. This is the stuff of pure activist fantasy. It bears no relation to reality. It may be idealistic but it is also destructive because it sets up politics for bitter conflict, inevitable disillusion and ferocious hostility to anyone who opposes the insane program.
Of course, there are also horrible demons on the Right of politics, many of them called into being by the madness of the contemporary Left.
The anti-business template in Australia is simple and much repeated: gain publicity and sympathy by protest and if possible by arrest; use this to drive fundraising; disrupt and delay key infrastructure; secure funding from big anti-development political organisations in Australia and overseas; increase investment risk; seek as much legal harassment of the targeted industry as possible; build a powerful movement; gain sympathetic media coverage; attack particular firms and sites and finally destroy the so-called social licence of the industry involved.
Following these tactics, the social activist class can achieve great destruction. It’s not clear they can build anything at all.
Their metanarrative is that Western societies are bad: racist, sexist, heteronormative, imperialist
