Australia has locked in its purchase of more than 120 tanks and other armoured vehicles from the United States, at a cost of $3.5 billion, as part of a major upgrade of the army’s fleet.
The commitment to buy 75 M1A2 main battle tanks indicates the government is committed to an advanced fleet of armoured vehicles despite the focus in recent years being on other major acquisitions such as submarines, jet fighters and long-range missiles amid the rise of China.
- Sydney Morning Herald, 10th Jan 2022
What a top idea.
This not only further represents the Australian Government's commitment to Australian workers but also represents the Morrison Government's kowtowing to American business.
Remember, Scott Morrison said that he won't 'undercut' businesses by funding free rapid antigen COVID-19 tests. At a wholesale cost of $2.75 and five Rapid Antigen Tests per person, that's just $343m to supply every single man, woman, and child in the country. $343m is unaffordable but an amount of money which is just 10 times more than that, at $3,500m is affordable.
"The government can not keep spending on COVID-19 as it has done over the last two years. We've invested hundreds of billions of dollars getting Australia through this crisis. We're now at a stage of the pandemic where you can't just make everything free, because when someone tells you they want to make something free, someone's always going to pay for it and it will be you."
- Scott Morrison, 3rd January, 2022
The Australian Government has run the numbers and decided that the health of the nation is collectively worth less than a tenth of a percent of what it costs to kill people overseas.
Furthermore, after having successfully destroyed the Australian passenger motor industry which means that the automakers which no longer exist can not build this kind of automotive hardware, rather than award the contract to someone like Volgren who manufactures buses in Dandenong, or Kenworth Trucks Australia who manufactures trucks in Kilsyth, or even Thales Australia who manufactures the Bushmaster Protected Mobility Vehicle, the Morrison Govrnment decided to give Australian workers a giant two-finger salute and collectively told them to go to hell, along with the rest of us.
With regards not buying tanks from Thales Australia, Thales Australia is what used to be known as Australian Defence Industries and used to be an Australian Government owned company. It was progressively sold off by the Howard Government from 2006 onwards. The parent company Thales Group is a CAC 40 Component and given that the Australian Government decided to give a giant two-finger salute to the French Government and buy American submarines which we don't need instead of French submarines which we don't need, then buying tanks which we don't need seems like a natural fit.
I love the fact that the Morrison Government is so openly knavish. Since Australia consistently decides that it will allow sports people to lie about their circumstances to pass through immigration but leave refugees and asylum seekers languishing in detention centres for almost a decade (some as a result of the wars that we choose to fight on behalf of the United States - we have no foreign policy whatsoever), then at least we're not deluding ourselves that we're a nation of cruel cruel bastards who pay to kill people rather than try to do good in the world.
A chap much wiser than me once said that "Whereever your treasure is, there your heart will be also." and Australia proves that it would rather spend public coin propping up private business, and foreign private business at that, than it would in spending that same public coin on public services. Our treasure lies less with paying our own citizens to do work (which also by the way might have included building weapons of war) but throwing our treasure at the feet of private oligarchs who conduct business within our democratic state. Those people aren't answerable to us an act as if they have no responsibility to the nation.
We are not the clever country. We do not offer free tertiary education and so we can never aspire to be that. We aren't a kind nation. We aren't even a good nation. We didn't take any preventative measures or even measures of mitigation before we embarked upon a "Let It Rip" strategy. Instead, the Morrison Government (and the newly installed Perrottet Government (which looks suspiciously identical to the Berejiklian Government)), just decided that the best strategy was not to have a strategy and to let any future crises fall as they may. All of the current problems such as staff shortages because people are infected and sick, leading to distribution issues and empty shelves in supermarkets were of course entirely predictable by anyone who had more than an ounce of common sense. The question was never if a variant like Omicron would arrive but when.
Opening up the market for Rapid Antigen Tests was always going to lead to price gouging because that's what business does. Business looks at ways of finding profits. Opening up isolation rules and abandoning tracking regulations, was pure economic theatre put on for the benefit of private business.
Still, having seen what looks like another problem unfolding, the Morrison Government rather than reacting to the problem with an appropriate response, had decided that the way you save money is by spending ten times more and the way that you prevent a public health crisis is with battle tanks.
We can do without butter, but, despite all our love of peace, not without arms. One cannot shoot with butter, but with guns.
...
We have no butter but I ask you: would you rather have butter or guns? Shall we import lard or steel? Let me tell you: preparedness makes us powerful: butter merely makes us fat.
- Hermann Göring
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