Richard Davis An open letter to the Prime Minister, John Howard.

Dear Sir,

I am writing this letter on behalf of my children and grandchildren, it is they who will have to try and exist on what ever is left of this planet as our generation continues to treat our natural capital as though we are the last generation to inhabit the place. In my lifetime and yours, world population has nearly trebled and is due to increase by another 3 billion in the next 30 years or so. A world population of 9 billion people is simply unsustainable.
A population of the present size and standard of living in the developed world has only been possible because it has been underwritten by cheap energy due to an easily exploited finite hydro-carbon resource and cheap food from a very efficient and highly productive agricultural industry.

Treasurer Costello recently said we must have a child to replace the mother, one to replace the father and one for the country and then goes on to say “there’s plenty of room left”. What planet does this bloke come from. Human induced climate change is showing every sign of becoming catastrophic and he wants more people and more develpoment. What are our children going to do when there’s standing room only, when are we going to be fully developed and what the hell are they going to do after our generation has exploited and pauperised the place to a standstill?.

The world economy has been driven by the manic fundamentalist dogma of the “free” market, the economy, never ending growth and so called progress underwritten by a negligently regulated financial system, orchestrated debt and a mentality which sees the landscape through nothing more than the eyes of profit and speculation. It is the proponents of such a system whose only connection with the natural world is to dominate it and manipulate it for profit, who are incapable of recognising the system is fundamentally flawed, is already failing and will most likely collapse.

The systemic growth of economic output has created an economic dinosaur whose very existence is underpinned by the depletion of our natural capital and the exploitation of societies and their environment. Natural capital is not income. We must start to live within our own ecological footprint, stop destroying the web of life and reconnect with that which sustains us.

In 1980 it was said the average meal in the USA traveled 1500 miles, to globally trade products and produce we manufacture and grow, while at the same time depleting all those things which underpin long term security for the sake of short term gain and a marketing advantage is insanity, it is an unconscionable waste of a finite cheap energy source. While there is probably a lot more oil still to be discovered than has already been used, the profligate and exponential consumption by developed and developing countries is simply not justifiable.

Everything we do is underwritten by oil, renewables the lot and the cost involved in exploiting ever more difficult fields will ensure the price of our cheapest and most efficient source of energy will become prohibitive within a very few years and in doing so change the whole nature and structure of the world economy.

Where the bloody hell are you John, where’s some leadership so our children will still have a planet left to live on??

Agriculture and food production will, and already have become increasingly difficult and threatened on a number of counts with basic foods around the world undergoing substantial pricing increases in recent times.

1) Not only has a highly productive agricultural industry been underwritten by cheap oil, fertilisers and chemicals based on oil, but also cheap and finite phosphate. As finite phosphates like oil continue to be exploited in ever greater quantities, then the price will increase exponentially. The extensive use of superphosphate to enable high “productivity” has been responsible for the increased acidity in farmland, algal blooms, loss of organic content, soil structure, and micro-nutrients essential for good health. Farmland has become dependent on the chemical hit to maintain the present high level of unsustainable artificial production.

2) The destruction of soil and the exhaustion of the land is taking place faster than it can be replaced, the corresponding loss of nutrients and micro biological activity as a consequence of a chemically dependent agricultural system has been compounded by the extensive salinisation of large areas of the continent creating huge production problems for the future. Western Australia (where I was a new-land farmer and contractor in the 60’s) is a classic example of a State whose soil is poor and where massive overclearing and salinisation has occurred, agricultural productivity in that State would be virtually non existent if it were not for phosphates, nitrates and trace elements.

“Global food production per Ha is already declining” said Zafar Adeel, director of UNU Canadian-based International Network on Water, Environment and Health.

3) Extensive and unsustainable over clearing and over allocation of water for irrigation throughout Australia has resulted in the destruction of water catchments, rivers, habitats, wetlands, the associated biota and species essential for maintaining the health and relative stability of those rivers and landscapes. Western Australia and the Murray Darling catchments should never have been “developed” to anything like the extent and manner which has taken place. There must be profound changes made to the way water is used throughout all catchments and land clearing must be stopped immediately.

4) The entire economic model of Globalisation is responsible for a massive increase in emissions and global climate change. In trying to produce food farmers now have to contend with ever increasing variability and chaotic climate conditions together with substantial changes to local rainfall patterns which have occurred as a consequence of the broad scale destruction and change to the structure and nature of associated native forests. Ref:- www.water-sos.org. (Climate)

5) Your Government’s unconscionable and criminally complicit act of the social engineering of rural communities, has deliberately facilitated the destruction of agricultural productivity through the tax deductibility for investors in Managed Investment Schemes. These schemes have enabled company’s using investor capital to out bid traditional farmers. Under this manipulative and socially destructive rort, the company ends up owning the land for nothing while the returns for the mug investor (given the unknown price of oil, harvesting costs, and future international fibre prices from plantations) are highly speculative.

Given your slavish pursuit of economic rationalism, free trade agreements and the virtual destruction of the Foreign Investment Review Board, how long will it be before offshore corporate interests take the MIS companies over and in doing so own this country and dictate the terms of our very existence.

6) You are complicit in destroying the fabric of small competition and community, you have been instrumental in enabling the abuse of market power, the two supermarket chains domination of 80% of food distribution and sales is not competition, it is an approved duopoly. Their purchasing power only favours doing business with other corporate interests, MIS agribusiness or imports from the cheapest source and in doing so destroys small farmer and business competition together with the associated communities and infrastructure. Ref:- www.water-sos.org (MIS Assault)

7) Not only is the wide spread establishment of plantations on “Prime Agricultural Land” destroying the ability to produce food but they are also substantially changing the hydrology of water catchments which in turn impacts dramatically on any remaining downstream farms and community water resources. Ref:- www.water-sos.org (Catchment Stability)

8) Your Ministers pending approval of the lifting of a ban on “genetically engineered” food defies every sense of sanity, notwithstanding extensive research which indicates there are substantial concerns for the safety to human health, (references available) (to say nothing of the potential environmental affects) the fact is we will destroy our marketing advantage in a world which is becoming increasingly concerned with GM food. Most importantly, to allow one or two corporations to control the seed source of the worlds basic foods is gross negligence and everyone in the approval process should be held accountable and liable for their actions.

The consequences of the effects of “Agent Orange” on the Vietnamese and returned Australian Vets, while not as a result of the insertion of genes from different species, are most certainly the unintended consequence of the chemical change to and of the destruction of human genes, altered genes which have had devastating affects to those contaminated as well as the quality of life of subsequent generations.

GM food must be kept out of the landscape until it is proved beyond any doubt it will not have unintended consequences.

9) The politically encouraged ever-increasing world wide conversion of land from growing staple food crops to the growing of crops for the production of “ethanol” has destabilised food production. Not only has it caused the price of a number of staple foods to double in recent times but it consumes finite oil, fertilisers and contributes to exhausting the land just to produce what is a very small quantity of overall net energy.

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I was 5 years old when I first met my father, he had just returned from WW2 and 3 ½ years as a POW. You and your Government have betrayed, violated, defiled and debauched every ideal those blokes fought, died and suffered for.

Freedom, honesty, integrity, our identity and culture, the ability to compete and a fair go have been progressively undermined and destroyed under your incumbency as you aid and abet the social disaster of globalisation and the export of production to the lowest common denominator. Globalisation does not spread wealth it channels it to the wealthy, making billionaires out of millionaires as they exploit the weak and disadvantaged. Free trade agreements are enabling corporate predators from around the world to own our resources and industries, plunder our country, expatriate the profits and mine the very foundations of our future.

Don’t we have people in this country with the intellect to run Telstra? Or is this just part of the grand plan for the goddamn yanks to set it up so when completely privatised they will have easy access to owning our communication systems. Then to add insult to injury the 3 Amigo’s are affording themselves obscene remuneration packages while at the same time Telstra’s services have become a dog’s breakfast.

Regardless of what David Hicks did or didn’t do, he is an Australian citizen and you morally abdicated your responsibility to afford him the most basic and fundamental right of access to the due process of law. For the sake of political expediency and your trumped up fight against terrorism you abandoned him.

You have instilled the politics of fear. You have created a new status quo, legislated it, legalised it and propogandanised it by force feeding and seducing that overwhelming majority of aspirational, sedated, botox modified, narcissistic, apathetic, mislead and indifferent Australians in our society. A citizenry intoxicated by the aphrodisiac of profligate consumption and where more has become never enough, a citizenry that aspires to the McMansion and the urban assault vehicle, McMansions whose garages are the size of what a modest house was 30 years ago, a citizenry with a different set of principles to the one I was born into, a public you have progressively manipulate as you massage the truth to manufacture the mirage of sustainable growth so as to maintain power and business as usual for an economic system which is fundamentally flawed, is in the process of failing and only favors the big end of town, the elite and corporate interests.

The focus on wealth creation and competition negates the focus on community, quantity of life is rapidly consuming quality of life.

The nature of capital is to make a profit, not to provide a service. Your agenda to privatise public utilities, public assets and essential services has destroyed many of those aspects fundamental to providing adequate community services, needs and social justice.

You can privatise and corporatise every public utility and natural resource, but you can’t privatise the law of nature, you conspire to manipulate and destroy our natural capital instead of learning to live with reality, if you continue to leave the fate of the earth to the market, then we’re stuffed.

“We have been progressively engineered into a culture who only value competitive consumption and consumers, instead of community, co-operation and citizenship. Unfetted capitalism with its obsessive and necessary appetite for consumption, ever expanding markets, resource depletion and ever increasing profits, has consumed democracy”. Robert Shetterly.

You have been complicit in destroying democracy by removing the power to govern from the people and communities through their elected representatives to a centrally planned corporate controlled economy, much of it heavily subsidised and operating in a climate of institutionalised lack of accountability all largely aided and abetted by a compliant and emasculated media. Many rural communities in particular have become disenfranchised and impotent to influence what happens to their resources, employment opportunities, lifestyles and landscapes where they live.

Your initiative to establish the Ministerial Committee on Government Communications for the purpose of controlling information has already cost Australian taxpayers over $2 billion. You have squandered those funds in what has largely been political advertising, advertising to cover up a litany of incompetent and self serving actions and decisions, never never never, children overboard, Siev X, Vivian Salon, Cornelia Rau, on and off-shore gulags, Dr Mohamed Haneef , the $56 million debacle of your IR laws and a third world hospital system which is an absolute disgrace, just to name a few. In the jargon of spin, the lie has become the truth, core and non core promises prostitute any sense of honesty and integrity, self interest and mediocrity prevail in place of inspiring, honest and uniting leadership.

You have been negligent in failing to be assertive in representing Australia’s independent interests, to uphold our own identity, our own person and our own opinions in regards to the rest of the world and their administrations. You have alienated Australia in our geopolitical region. How can we be proud as a nation and honor those who fought for our freedom and independence when on one hand you’re in bed with Bush and on the other you are hanging on to the petticoats of Betty Windsor.

You have dragged Australia into the sewer with your obsequious and ingratiating complicity with an extremist, theocratic and apocalyptic American administration. An administration whose main tenets in the pursuit of global hegemony is patriarchy, hierarchy, materialism and militarism as they promote insecurity and war and violate every principle of humanity so as to maintain a economy underwritten by the military machine.

Invasion, murder, rendition, sanctioned torture, rape, illegal incarceration, home grown mercenaries, political and financial manipulation, resource acquisition, displacement of communities, the destruction of social cohesion and their economic existence represent business as usual for an administration whose members should be in front of the world court for violating and breaching the United Nations Charter and Geneva Convention in perpetrating and condoning cereal crimes against humanity.

Your mate Bush when Governor for Texas signed off on the execution of 152 of his own countrymen and I’ll bet most of them were black, great Christian mate you’ve got, or didn’t he understand what he signed!!

Imran Khan has stated there have been over 900,000 Iraqis killed as a consequence of the invasion and destruction of that sovereign country by the Coalition of the Willing. How do you reconcile that? An invasion built on a pack of lies and we’ve been dragged into being part of the insanity of it all, is it any wonder they hate the west and why radicalism has proliferated. For the sake of political expediency and aligning this country with an evil US regime, you have massaged and manipulated the Australian public with the spin of conducting war on terrorism while you progressively turn our own country into a Police State. Cameras every where, access to government building heavily monitored, the creation of a huge security industry which invades nearly every aspect of our lives, over reaction by police as they try to stifle freedom of speech and the freedom to protest and all of this during your incumbency. We used to enjoy a free, open, laid back and relatively uncomplicated existence, we are now alert and alarmed by the State Terrorism you have created.

Your Government is morally dysfunctional and I say that for all members, any sense of integrity which may exist amongst a few is lost when those members pick up their pay and perks as they acquiesce to the corrupting influence of party solidarity and a Prime Minister who should be embarrassed to call himself an Australian. Individual honesty, integrity and proper representation should dictate those politicians resign and stand as independents, if we had a parliament of independents comprising people of the stature of Peter Andren and Tasmania’s Terry Martin, we would have true democracy and a parliamentary process to be proud of instead of holding most politicians in abject contempt.

Finally your banning of the “Peaceful Pill Handbook” with draconian legislation to force the will of those pious, self-righteous, bigoted and dictatorial god botherers who dominate the Liberal Party, on those of us who demand the right to be in control of our own lives and die with dignity in the company of loved ones or friends if we so choose and then for you to legally pursue those selfsame love ones and friends for allegedly aiding suicide, is an unconscionable disgrace. It epitomises the mentality of your morally bankrupt administration, particularly as you are more than happy not to ban the copious quantities of mind numbing and dysfunctional crap, spewing largely out of the USA, to invade our screens and publications.

History will record you have presided over the most pernicious, divisive, treacherous and toxic Government this country has experienced and particularly in a time of enormous global challenges, challenges which threaten our very survival.

Where the bloody hell has integrity and responsible leadership gone John???

And where is that insipid me too party in all this mess??

Yours in apoplectic frustration.

Richard Davis,
C/- PO Westerway 7140

“The decisions we make now should stand the judgment of seven generations of our forbears and the judgment and effects upon seven generations of our children still to come” The wisdom of North American Indian oratory.