Wake Up, Australia!
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Today is Remembrance Day, an appropriate time to reflect on our ability to defend ourselves.

History holds lessons.

Back in Dec 1941, Japan suddenly attacked the US Naval base at Pearl Harbour. Three days later, two British warships, “Repulse” and “Prince of Wales” were sunk by Japanese planes off Malaya. Soon Japanese armies were rampaging through Asia towards Australia. By Feb 1942, the British fortress of Singapore surrendered and Japanese bombs were falling on Darwin. By Sept 1942 the Japanese army had slashed their way down the Kokoda Track and could see the lights of Port Moresby. They were looking across Torres Strait to Australia. At that time, most of our trained soldiers were fighting Rommel in North Africa or were in Japanese prison camps.

Suddenly Australia was on its own and needed to defend itself with what we had here. Armies need soldiers, weapons, bullets, vehicles, fuel, food (and cigarettes).

Rationing was introduced for petrol, food and cigarettes. An immediate critical shortage was copper for cartridge cases; we had mines producing lead, zinc, silver, gold and iron, but there was a critical shortage of copper.

Fortuitously, just before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour, an exploration drill hole at Mount Isa had struck rich copper ore.

Mount Isa was called on to avert a calamitous shortage of copper in Australia. With government encouragement, Mount Isa Mines made the brave decision to suspend the profitable silver/lead/zinc operations and convert all mining and treatment facilities to extracting copper.

The lead concentrator could be converted to treat copper ore, but the biggest problem was how to smelt the copper concentrates. Luckily the company had skilled engineers and metallurgists in the lead smelter. In a miracle of improvisation, scrap steel and spare parts were purchased and scavenged from old mines and smelters from Cloncurry, Mt Elliott, Mt Cuthbert and Kuridala and cobbled into a workable copper smelter. In 1943 the first Mount Isa blister copper was produced. Production continued after the war when Mount Isa returned to extracting the then more profitable silver/lead/zinc. Later new plant was built enabling both lead and copper to be produced from this fabulous mine. This story of the importance of self-reliance has lessons for today.

The war on carbon-based energy, the carbon tax, the renewable energy targets, escalating electricity costs and the voices in Parliament calling for Emissions Trading Schemes have all unnerved our big users of carbon fuels and electricity. Smelting and refining have become threatened industries in Australia, and closure of the Mount Isa copper smelter and the Townsville copper refinery has been predicted. Already six major metal smelting/refining operations have closed in Australia this century and more are likely. The closures have affected copper, lead, zinc, steel and aluminium – the sinews of modern industry. And the car industry, with all its skills and tools, is closing.

Local production and refining of oil is also declining, while political extremists are trying to prevent domestic exploration and production of gas. More and more land and offshore waters are closed to exploration and mining, and the needs of heavy industry are ignored. It was estimated recently that by next year, half of Australia’s oil refining capacity will have closed. In the event of a disruption to tanker routes, Australia has just 12 days of diesel supplies before city fuel and food supplies start to dry up.

We are losing the resources, skills and machinery needed for our own security, while we fritter away precious resources on green energy, direct action, carbon capture and storage and other pointless anti-carbon projects.

Our green energy policies and the war on carbon-based fuels are killing manufacturing industry, leaving us unskilled and defenceless.

Wake up, Australia!

Viv Forbes

habitat21

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