As our inexperienced (but trying hard) Prime Minister and his vainglorious Treasurer attempt to right the budget ship and stop it foundering in a sea of debt, neither seem to have any idea where the good ship Australia is going or what is propelling it. Both have control of the tiller from time to time, but there are no charts or orders to guide them. The economic ship is on a course for disaster that will adversely affect every Australian. Both of our captains would benefit from some serious thought and recognise that bringing the budget into surplus will require serious increases in productivity in every community across Australia. This increase in productivity can only come from visionary leadership, planning, and determined effort.

That is the leadership of the Prime Minister and the Treasurer supported by their colleagues. It must emanate from their government. From their initiative. From their passionate belief that Australians can do this, but only if they have the freedom to be their best.

This vision must be built on the rock of intelligent planning and focused effort. If the Albanese government wishes to see all Australians in self-sustaining employment, it must start with a passionate vision. It must plan before acting and think before speaking.

As a nudge to getting productivity started I am suggesting that the following policies could be part of a comprehensive plan that would make Australia productive, prosperous, and proudly independent. It is a call to action by ‘Dinkum Australians’ to re-establish Australia as a ‘Can Do’ Nation; ultimately making us a leader in engineering, construction, technology development, manufacturing industry, and agriculture.

It is a blunt call to both state and federal governments to stop hindering our productive enterprise and provide the sparks to fire up our potential because our nation today is a shadow of the ‘Can Do’ enthusiasm that started with our settlers and was boldly echoed by visionaries like Ben Chifley and his Minister for Public Works Nelson Lemon when they announced the commencement of the Snowy Scheme. Chifley said on that day: ‘This is a plan for the Nation and it needs the whole nation to back it’

The building of the Snowy Scheme became the catalyst to half a century of national growth and achievement. We successfully assimilated people from all over the world and developed technological and production advantages that made us prosperous and proud. By doing so we repaid the debts of the war effort. We must again do similar or our growing debt will destroy us.

During the growth period after the second world war, optimism for our technological and resource development transformed us from an agrarian British outpost to an independently productive nation. Over the last three decades, our adaptive Aussie enthusiasm has been suffocated by the imposition of regressive regulation often based on green-driven ‘environmentalism’. The sale of our ‘Tools of Trade’ to monopolies not acting in the interests of the Australian people has resulted in the predictable outcome of increasing costs leading to closing factories, degrading infrastructure, and manufacturing job losses.

We are now job-dependent on service industries and a growing bureaucracy. Our economy can no longer provide the permanent employment that underpins the standard of living to which we have become accustomed; a standard presently kept afloat only on borrowed money. While our employment numbers are positive, full employment will not survive an increasingly likely recession.

As a result, our citizens are not future-orientated and little inspired by plans beyond tomorrow. They unrealistically expect everything from government today and weak politicians are happy to promise them what they want but which they can never deliver.

We need to plan and build a new road to national prosperity, calculated to give the Australian people new hope in the future. A future where every Australian will have a productive taxpaying job.

We must restore the budget to surplus by creating more taxpaying jobs and we must give the people the freedom to be their best by repealing suffocating regulation. We can only do this by re-establishing water, power, gas, fuel, and food security as our priorities.

We need to passionately demonstrate that man is not only a vital part of the environment, but that our tenure on this planet can be and is beneficial to the environment and highlight this fact by building a nationwide system of flood and drought control. We must foster the union of our industrious people with our extensive resources to sell to the world finished product rather than raw materials. We must ensure that the vital infrastructure to do this is designed and built in Australia by Australian companies, manned by Australian workers.

Short-sighted over-regulation of that which is our natural advantage has turned us into a debtor nation with poor prospects, because of ever-rising costs caused in large part by the foolish pursuit of ‘renewable energy’ and climate change abatement, on which such policies can have no impact. This national malaise must be swept away along with all other barriers to the people’s freedom to produce.

If we are serious about overcoming our present malaise, we should set up ‘The Australian Infrastructure Fund’ financed by bonds from our Superannuation Funds and charge this fund with the earliest development of the following job-producing infrastructure.

1. As a starting point to a more productive future, we must scrap the Murray-Darling Basin Plan and replace it with a plan that works for all, guaranteeing our future water needs by building numerous dams and weirs.
2. Build the Welcome Reef Dam on the Shoalhaven River to guarantee Sydney’s future water supply.
3. A large Dam on the Mitchell River to guarantee the water supply for Melbourne.
4. Build the Chowilla Dam on the Murray to manage the huge water resource of the Murray River. This dam would service three states and make South Australia a garden state with vast areas of irrigated crops.
5. Build several weirs and Dams on the Darling River and its tributaries.
6. Build the Iron Boomerang east-west rail line with modern steel works at each end.
7. Build the Lake Coolah, Stony Point off river storage in the Murrumbidgee valley.
8. Build the modified Bradfield Scheme in Queensland.
9. Build the upper Clarence water conservation and hydropower scheme which will largely stop recurring flooding in the Clarence Valley and vastly increase agricultural production in the Clarence Valley.
10. Stop runaway population increases in our capital cities by building developments in regional centres.

This list is just a few examples of what we could and can do if we are to make our nation great again and stop the useless practice of pandering to environmentalists, living in ‘Cloud Cuckoo Land’.

Importantly, the list above would all pay dividends to the government for the foreseeable future in stark contrast to the billions being wasted on capital city transport in recent years, which will never repay the government.

But it will only happen when we have a government that has the intelligence to understand that productivity is never an accident. Such a government would have the vision to make Australia great and will take the Australian people on a wonderful journey to a more productive and harmonious future. A future where all our children will have a rewarding job and we will all respect one another as equals.

It is the land we share that unites us as one people. By working together our future is boundless.

When we do that there will be no more arguments about Australia Day and we will all have pride in what we have achieved and enthusiasm for what we are doing.