Like many, I shuddered when Tony Abbott said these words in his election night victory speech:
“From today I declare that Australia is under new management and open for business.”
The following interview is a Must Watch. Fund manager Roger Montgomery explains extremely well why “open for business” really means “the path to serfdom”. A continuation of decades of selling off Australia’s national assets — our in-ground natural resources, and farmland — to pay for our profligate, housing-bubble-centric lifestyles, and our increasing failure to manufacture anything that other nations want to buy.
Otherwise known in our Orwellian world as “sound economic management”:
World famous investor Warren Buffet explained the problem in an even easier-to-understand cartoon format, aptly titled “Thriftville vs Squanderville”:
All the more reason why I find Barnaby Joyce’s recent reticence to keep the heat in his very public fight against excessive foreign “investment” to be disappointing … and suspicious:
Barnaby Joyce holds his tongue on foreign investment
NEW Agriculture Minister Barnaby Joyce has muted his outspoken opposition to foreign companies buying up Australian farms, admitting that foreign investment is shaping up as a difficult issue for the Coalition partners to handle…
Mr Joyce conceded yesterday that he had deliberately decided to give the government “some breathing space” by not publicly dissenting on the issue.
In his first address as Agriculture Minister — a speech the famously hot-headed Mr Joyce admitted was his first in which he referred to notes and watched his words — he told cattlemen and farmers gathered in Townsville that they would have to gauge his views based on past comments, and not expect new controversy.
“Judge me by my track record; refer to my recent statements (on foreign investment),” Mr Joyce told the AgForce annual conference in north Queensland.
“My conversation in private is vastly more fervent than what I can say publicly; but I want to give (the issue) room to breathe.”
Mr Joyce denied he had been gagged by Tony Abbott or changed his mind, but said he did not want to make any promises to farmers that he might not be able to keep, now he was a minister.
He also said experience had shown him that good political outcomes were rarely delivered by confrontation.
“In my heart, I still have fervent views and will fight for them behind closed doors; I am not changing my views on anything or dodging the issue (of foreign investment) and people know where I stand,” Mr Joyce said.
“But I am trying to deal with it in such a way that can bring about change; and the reality is that you won’t achieve delivery by backing someone into a corner.”
Has Barnaby been “got at”?
Too early to say, perhaps.
But all things considered, alas, it is beginning to look like it.
And when we see that China has just bought 5% of Ukraine’s best farmland for the next 50 years, there is plenty to be concerned about.
If you did not vote for a “radical”, “protectionist”, “populist”, “nationalist” political party at the recent election, then you are partly to blame for our continuing to tread the path to national serfdom.
Because the economic policies of both the LNP, and ALP, represent just that.
The path to serfdom.
Barnaby Is Right 
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