MWM has a scoop; a letter from 2075, written by a former right-wing politician to his eight great grandchildren. Rex Patrick Junior reports on the deathbed confessions of a man who got it wrong.
Spoiler Alert: The name of the politician will be revealed at the end of the letter, but there is a risk you might work it out before you get there.
Dear Great Grandkids,
I’m at the end of my life; you’re at the start of yours.
You live in a world where you wake to lights powered by solar, wind and tidal flows and breathe air uncontaminated by the burning of coal and gas, or vehicle exhaust emissions. Your gen-six robot brings you your morning coffee, made from clean and perfectly fresh water pumped from the sea via a local desalination plant, which you can sip on as you ponder what life might have been like had we not hit net zero 25 years ago.
Perhaps you might instead be turning your minds to how you’re going to capitalise on your standard four months annual leave, made possible because of productivity efficiencies of AI and a transformed economy that distributed wealth generated from technology. A visit to the revitalised rivers and forest using your long range electric vehicles might be in order.
My descendants; I served in the Australian Parliament for two and a half decades, stepping away from politics in 2039. I was popular with my regional constituents but, with the benefit of hindsight, I now know I didn’t serve them, or you, well. The wonderful lives that you and they have today are not the result of my work, rather it’s because I caused people to ignore me.
I spent my life in politics looking backwards. I write this letter urging you to look forwards.
***
Before taking on the role chief-of-staff to an interesting, but similarly ‘visioned’ politician named Barnaby, I worked for the Productivity Commission. I could have learned a lot from my experience, but I never really got the reality of what makes an economy grow.
Sure, a growing population can feed economic growth, as can more land and more resources, but that only takes a country so far. Countries need to innovate so that they can do more with what they have and new ideas need to be encoded into new technologies.
But I just kept pressing for more of the same, like export of coal, gas and raw materials. I was happy for Australia to just be the world’s best quarry. I was so hooked on this that I used to dress up in workers’ clothes, in hard hats and high-viz vests, to show my run-away enthusiasm for digging things up and fluffing them off as fast as possible.
Some other countries were at least smart enough to establish sovereign wealth funds and fill them with cash from the sale of resources. Not Australia – I watched, from my position as the Minister for Resources, as our resources disappeared over the horizon on foreign owned and operated ships, with not a dollar paid to us for them. Australia was the land of free resources. That’s one of the reasons why Australians are now less well off than the people of many other smaller countries, including Norway.
Australia needs a sovereign wealth fund like Norway for the next boom – electrification
I’m ashamed to say that your great grandfather worked hard against renewables. I know you’ll find that hard to believe noting the abundance of cheap renewable energy we’ve enjoyed for decades … and just the idea that you would burn fuel to make electricity is unthinkable now.
***
I used to portray the high cost of electricity as a reason to stick with coal and gas. Even though our premier scientific organisation, CSIRO, made it very clear that wind and solar was way cheaper than fossil fuel generated electricity, I refused to accept the science. The facts back then, and as history now shows, was that it was the high price of gas that was driving our electricity prices – when no baseload power was available the gas turbines were fired up and the providers and would charge consumers a motza.
I was directly responsible for the high prices. Again, I was the Minister for Resources at a critical juncture when the then gas cartel was making billions exporting Aussie gas overseas and ensuring local prices were inflated. I could have implemented a gas reservation policy, but didn’t.
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Not only did I betray electricity consumers, but the ongoing high electricity prices also saw the shutdown of Australia’s energy intense industries, which were also responsible for maintaining the critical mass for the less energy intense industries. I helped cripple, indeed extinguish our manufacturing industries, so much so that we’re still trying to catchup with the world today.
I found this old graph showing how we compared, in terms of economic complexity, to other countries in our region. Content on embracing the past, it’s now clear I was part of the problem.
Economic Complexity to 2025 (Source: Harvard economic complexity index)
***
I kept opposing wind and solar farms on account of the fact these sorts of generators had an adverse effect on our prime livestock and food production land.
Of course, you might not understand what I’m talking about now that our beef and other meat products are ‘grown’ in clean cell factories, with output that far exceeds historical meat taste and has better health qualities. No animal’s killed and there’s no methane issues.
And of course, our fruit and vegetables are now grown in climate controlled skyscraper farms. There’s no shortage of land for wind and solar, or for recreational needs. If only I’d had some foresight.
***
Of course, in a world that now enjoys accident free interconnected transport in self-driving electric vehicles, you wouldn’t understand why I was opposed to EVs. My old boss, the Prime Minister in the 45th and 46th Parliaments once suggested promoting EVs was “declaring war on the weekend”. Now that’s quoted in university courses as a text book example of political cynicism and economic self-harm.
In 2022, I was full steam ahead supporting development of the now shut down Adani Carmichael coal mine and backing my old boss’s blinded philosophy.
In that year I issued a press release arguing against EVs, with my core argument being that the one-time manufacturing energy cost for an EV was more than that of the one-time manufacturing for a car with an internal combustion engine. I misled through omission – not comparing the ongoing energy costs of the two vehicle types.
Oh – and I threw in the good old “can’t go long distances” and “can’t tow a boat, caravan or trailer” lines. The long haul electric trucks and trains, certainly make me look rather foolish now
If only I had looked through the front window rather than being fixated on the rear vision mirror.
***
Ha! I laugh at myself in a self-disappointed manner.
I know how much you all enjoy your camping trips along the Darling and mighty Murray Rivers. There was a time when the Murray River was sick and the Darling was nothing more than a dried riverbed … and my only contribution was to advocate for things that would make it worse.
We used to use much of our water to grow cotton on both rivers. We exported all of it. It was akin to exporting water from the dryest continent on the planet.
In 2019, as a ministers, I argued before a Senate Estimates Committee that we shouldn’t look at the use of our food basin from a national interest perspective. Rather, “The farmers have the best ability to make these decisions and we’re not going to have a situation where governments seek to micromanage decisions on someone’s farm,” I said.
Thankfully, over time others stepped in and we now have an abundance of Australian grown food choices cultivated by the much healthier Murray-Darling Basin, with water from those great rivers.
I was never able to see the big picture.
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***
There’s good news in all of this though.
As my colleagues and I successfully used our luddite philosophies to empower the right wing of the political coalition I was part of, the centre-right voter base turned to the teals.
Our own success in climate change denial, including the removal of our first ever female leader from her position, ultimately ensured our own political demise. My colleagues and I never again formed majority government. In fact with that turn to the teals we drove, we effectively planted the seed that grew into a party of Government, one that ultimately changed the countries trajectory.
So, in hindsight, I failed your grandparents, your parents and you. The purpose of my letter is to say sorry and to encourage you to look forward and embrace the future, not bury it under coal piles.
Yours sincerely – Great-Grandad Canavan
Rex Patrick is a former Senator for South Australia and, earlier, a submariner in the armed forces. Best known as an anti-corruption and transparency crusader, Rex is also known as the "Transparency Warrior."