“I only looked backwards”: A letter to my great grandchildren

MWM has news; A letter dated 2075 written by a former right-wing politician to his eight grandchildren. Rex Patrick Junior recounts the deathbed confessions of a man who misunderstood.

Spoiler Alert: The politician’s name will be revealed at the end of the letter, but there’s a risk you might figure that out before you get there.

Dear Great Grandchildren,

I am at the end of my life; You are just at the beginning of the journey.

You live in a world where you wake up to lights powered by sun, wind and tidal flows, and breathe air unpolluted by the burning of coal and gas or vehicle exhaust emissions. Your sixth-generation robot brings you your morning coffee, made from clean, perfectly fresh water pumped from the sea via a local desalination plant; You can sip it while thinking about what life might have been like if we hadn’t reached net zero 25 years ago.

Perhaps you may instead be turning your mind to how you can take advantage of your standard four months of annual leave, made possible by the productivity efficiencies of artificial intelligence and a transformed economy that distributes the wealth generated from technology. It may be convenient to visit the regenerated rivers and forest using your long-range electric vehicles.

My grandchildren; I served in the Australian Parliament for twenty-five years and stepped away from politics in 2039. I was popular with my constituents in the district, but looking back, I know I no longer served them or you. The wonderful lives you and they have today are not the result of my work, but rather because I caused people to ignore me.

I’ve spent my life in politics looking back. I am writing this letter urging you to look forward.

***

I worked on the Productivity Commission before taking on the role of private secretary to Barnaby, an interesting but similarly ‘visionary’ politician. I could learn a lot from my experiences, but I never really understood the truth of what makes an economy grow.

Of course, a growing population can also fuel economic growth, such as more land and more resources, but this only takes a country so far. In order for countries to do more with what they have, they need to innovate and new ideas must be coded into new technologies.

But I continued to press for more of the same, such as exports of coal, gas and raw materials. I was happy that Australia is the best quarry in the world. I was so into it that I wore worker uniforms, hard hats, and high-vis vests, showing off my overflowing excitement at digging things up and fluffing them up as fast as possible.

Some other countries were at least smart enough to set up sovereign wealth funds and fill them with cash from the sale of resources. Not Australia; As Minister of Resources, I watched our resources disappear over the horizon on foreign owned and operated ships and we were never paid a dollar for them. Australia was the land of free resources. This is one of the reasons why Australians are currently worse off than the people of many other smaller countries, including Norway.

Australia needs a sovereign wealth fund like Norway for the next boom in electrification

I’m ashamed to say that your great-grandfather worked hard against renewable energy. I know this will be hard to believe when you consider the abundance of cheap renewable energy we have enjoyed for decades… and the idea of ​​burning fuel to generate electricity is no longer even unthinkable.

***

I was citing the high cost of electricity as the reason for turning to coal and natural gas. Even though our leading scientific body, the CSIRO, made it clear that wind and solar were much cheaper than fossil fuel-generated electricity, I refused to accept the science. The facts then and history now show was that it was the high price of gas that determined our electricity prices; When baseload power was not available, gas turbines were firing and providers were demanding a motza from consumers.

I am directly responsible for the high prices. Again, I was Resources Minister at a critical time when the then gas cartel was making billions of dollars by exporting Aussie gas overseas, ensuring local prices were inflated. I could have implemented a gas reservation policy but I didn’t.

‘Valley of death’ or mountain of return? Gas booking should be retroactive to reduce electricity bills

Not only have I betrayed electricity consumers, continued high electricity prices have also caused the closure of Australia’s energy-intensive industries; these were also responsible for maintaining critical mass for less energy-intensive industries. I helped cripple, in fact wither, our manufacturing industries so that today we are still trying to catch up with the world.

I found this old chart showing how we compare to other countries in our region in terms of economic complexity. It is clear that when I am content to embrace the past, I am now part of the problem.

***

I have continued to oppose wind and solar farms because such generators have a negative impact on our primary livestock and food production areas.

Of course, you may not know what I’m talking about now that our beef and other meat products are ‘raised’ in clean-cell factories, have an output that far exceeds historical meat flavor, and have better health qualities. No animals were killed and there are no methane problems.

And of course, our fruits and vegetables are now grown in climate-controlled skyscraper farms. There is no shortage of land for wind and solar energy or recreational needs. I wish I had some foresight.

***

Of course, in a world where driverless electric vehicles now enjoy accident-free connected transportation, you cannot understand why I am against electric vehicles. My old boss, the Prime Minister in ’45he and 46he Parliamentarians once argued that promoting electric vehicles was “declaring war on the weekend”. This is now cited in college classes as a textbook example of political cynicism and economic self-destruction.

In 2022, I went full steam ahead to support the development of the now-closed Adani Carmichael coal mine and support my former boss’s blunt philosophy.

That year, I issued a press release opposing EVs; My main argument was that the one-time production energy cost of an EV is greater than the one-time production of an internal combustion engine car. I made a mistake by neglecting to compare the ongoing energy costs of the two vehicle types.

Oh – and I added the good old “can’t go long distances” and “can’t tow a boat, caravan or trailer”. Long-distance electric trucks and trains make me look absolutely stupid now

I wish I had looked through the windshield instead of being stuck in the rearview mirror.

***

Ha! I laugh disappointedly to myself.

I know how much you all enjoy your camping trips along the Darling and magnificent Murray Rivers. There was a time when the Murray River was sick and the Darling was nothing but a dried up riverbed… and my only contribution was to advocate for things that would make it worse.

We used most of our water in both rivers to grow cotton. We exported all of it. This was like exporting water from the driest continent on the planet.

As a minister in 2019, I argued before the Senate Estimates Committee that we should not look at the use of our foodshed from a national interest perspective. Instead, I said, “Farmers have the best ability to make these decisions, and we won’t have a situation where governments are trying to micromanage decisions on someone’s farm.”

Fortunately, over time others have stepped in and we now have a wealth of Australian-grown food options, grown by the much healthier Murray-Darling Basin, with water from these great rivers.

I never saw the big picture.

‘Death of the river system’: Citizens make it legal to illegally take water from the Upper Darling

***

But there is good news in all of this.

While my colleagues and I have successfully used our Luddite philosophies to strengthen the right wing of the political coalition of which I am a part, the centre-right voter base has gravitated towards the turquoises.

Our success in denying climate change, including the removal of our first female leader, ultimately ensured our own political demise. My colleagues and I never formed a majority government again. In fact, with this turn towards the turquoises we effectively planted the seed that eventually grew into a Government party that changed the course of the country.

So looking back, I disappointed your grandparents, your parents, and you. The purpose of my letter is to apologize and encourage you to look forward and embrace the future rather than burying it under piles of coal.

Best regards – Great Grandfather Canavan

Rex Patrick is a former South Australian Senator and formerly a submariner in the armed forces. Known as an anti-corruption and transparency warrior, Rex is also known as “Transparency Warrior“