The death-knell of neoliberalism in Australia is sounding louder, with a landmark policy recommendation inserted in the end of a Parliamentary report handed down mid-March.
Australia needs to think big if we are to build our way out of the current economic depression. There is no bigger idea than Project Iron Boomerang, a plan to connect northern Queensland’s coalfields to northern Western Australia’s iron ore reserves with a railway that transports the minerals both ways, supplying steel mills at both ends.
The recent fracturing of the neoliberal consensus that drove both major parties to mass-privatise national assets and hand control of the economy over to private banks is accelerating into a full-blown breakdown. Now a Liberal Party politician no less, Queensland Senator Gerard Rennick, has taken aim at the neoliberals’ most sacred cow and called for a national bank to invest in public infrastructure.
Australia continually loses innovations overseas because they can’t get investment backing here, from neither the banks nor the government. If we are not to be condemned to unemployment, in the Treasurer’s recent analogy, going “up in the elevator but down by the stairs”, we must turbo-charge the productive sector with a national investment bank that can unleash the nation’s enormous economic potential.
The Burdekin River is Australia’s largest river by peak discharge volume. It is upon this North Queensland river the nation awaits the construction of Hells Gates Dam, the centrepiece of a new Bradfield Scheme. Floodwaters diverted west of the Great Dividing Range will allow inland Australia to flourish, providing a genuine economic stimulus to address the now-deepening economic depression.
