Fuel excise rises should remove cars and build great public transport systems

Rises to fuel excise charges are a good idea, but!

Increases to the fuel excise should be
 such that they remove motor vehicles
from our roads and then pay for a
modern and sophisticated public
transport system.

Just as smokers have been discouraged from inhaling nicotine through increased prices, we should be driving motorists off our roads through increased costs, and fuel excise rises will help with that.

And this is where the “but” comes into play for if we make it more expensive for motorists to drive their privately owned cars on publicly funded roads we need to provide an alternative.

The alternative is a public transport system that is efficient, clean, modern, comprehensive and sufficiently structured to make sure everyone can get quickly and easily everywhere they want to go, at a reasonable cost.

Sound impossible? Unquestionably, but to go back two centuries and suggest we aim for what we have now, there would have brought howls of utopian madness.

The collision of world circumstances, led by our misunderstanding of what impact our carbon-intensive lifestyles would have on human habitation, along with that of many other species, clearly indicates that public “everything” demands precedence over privatization.

We already have, and understand, what it is we need to do to produce electricity in a genuinely sustainable way and so that could be used to power an intricate, efficient and timely public transit system.

Presently, the public spends lavishly to build and provide an infrastructure from which private enterprises profit handsomely and although the public get some momentary benefit, the resultant riches go primarily to a privileged few.

The equation looks pretty straight forward – make motoring the preserve of the enthusiast and wealthy; invest heavily in the public transport/transit system and in doing so create many thousands of jobs in the construction, running and maintenance of this wonderfully people orientated way of sharing our resources.

Along with building, operating and maintaining our new public transport/transit system we could set about dismantling the centralized and dirty fossil fuel power sources and employ vastly more people creating, building and maintaining our democratic renewable energy sources, including solar, wind, hydro, bioenergy and in limited way the one fossil fuel, gas.

The idea of dismantling the privatized road transport system and replacing it with a sophisticated and cutting-edge public system is loaded with complexities and difficulties, but so was, and is, what we have now and if we had known before what was ahead, including the untended consequences, we would never have set out on the journey.

Ideological liberals who preach a smaller and less intrusive government have had two centuries, at least, of market-driven  and privatized opportunity to legitimize their claims, but the fallacy of their argument, now illustrated by the increasing world-wide economic chaos and brutal inequality, demands they step aside and allow “public everything” to predominate.

State level naivety prevails at Shepparton meeting

State level naivety prevailed at a recent Shepparton public meeting.

Victoria's Minister for
 Agriculture, Peter Walsh.

Victoria’s Minister of Agriculture said the state’s farms would double their production by 2030.

Mr Peter Walsh, who agreed earth’s climate was changing, argued human ingenuity and technology, along with the will to achieve an outcome, would see climate change lowered in importance.

In keeping with the stance of most climate change deniers, Mr Walsh supported his arguments saying it had been dry and wet before, and would be that way again, with a poignant example from his family’s history.

That story, with huge emotive power for the 200 at the meeting, overlooked it being an isolated event from the 20s and 30s that does not compare to 2013, which was riddled with significant weather catastrophes around the world, driven by a seriously disrupted climate system.

Obvious during Mr Walsh’s vision for the future was an ignorance, wilful or otherwise, of the collision of world circumstances making the realization of the Minister’s dream strikingly difficult, if not impossible.

It will be problematical to bring this cornucopia of food imagined by Mr Walsh to market for various reasons, among them the fact that a disrupted climate will change every growing circumstance; the implications climate change will have on water supplies; a serious depletion of energy, both in terms of oil and electricity; and a shortage of the fertilizers used in abundance to enrich Australia’s ancient and less than fertile soils.

The reality is that the earth is warming, humans are responsible and we can no longer expect the same result from the same effort, using techniques and ideas that filled our larders, even as recent at two decades ago.

Farming as we know it has a limited future and because of the atmospheric damage caused by the burning of fossil fuels, along with the inequality arising from the ruthless focus on profit and growth, we stand on the cusp of a future in which localism will prevail and the imagined riches of the South-East Asian markets will be out of reach.

Minister Walsh visualizes record harvests of grain, meat, fruit, dairy products and anything else that can be extracted from Victoria’s less than giving soils, with that produce being funnelled to the hungry and welcoming Asian people.

The reality that farming is not again going to be what it was, ever, was not something that could be discussed rationally and reasonably at the Shepparton meeting as farmers were not there to hear how success tomorrow depended upon them rejigging their operations

They were there to hear a debate between the Government and its Opposition, but within the confines of what they knew and understood, not how they needed to invent a whole new way of farming.