Climatism and green tape are strangling productive enterprise in Australia. We are starting to resemble an overhead in search of an income.

The climax of warmist silliness is the proposed Citizens' Climate Assembly which will hold several gabfests and draft a long wish list of contradictory conclusions. This report will be filed in the big cabinet with the IPCC, CSIRO, Stern and Garnaut scare stories and the travelogue reports on the many climate excursions to Copenhagen, Bali, Rio, Kyoto and other hardship locations.

Innovators in Australia are now preoccupied with making innovative submissions to ensure they get on the receiving end and not the extraction end of the Big Carbon Redistribution Schemes. Everyone wants a share of the green subsidies without paying a share of the green taxes.

All the time, expanding Marine Parks are strangling the fishing industry, forests are turning into National Parks, handcuffed graziers are watching protected scrub and carbon forests smother their grasslands, cultivated cropping land is diverted to producing bio-fuels for cars, irrigators are denied water, landowners may not build on their land, mineral explorers flee overseas to escape Australian taxes and red tape, while politicians debate how quickly they can close our coal mines and power stations.

Only a rich pampered society like Australia could countenance such widespread destruction and silliness. For most of the world, life is a daily battle for food to eat and energy for warmth, lighting and cooking.

Since the days of the wool boom and the gold rush, Australia has always survived by making the raw materials essential to civilized life. Our future does not depend on our ability to manufacture red tape, invent climate models, trade carbon credits or to run a Citizens' Assembly - we will rely, as we always have, on our creators of primary wealth - miners, farmers, foresters and fishermen and those who process their products and service their needs.

Every new tax on these people, every no-go zone and every bit of green tape reduces our ability to pay our way, provide for our dependents, support our bureaucracy and afford the luxury of environmental care and concern.

Making things still matters.

Viv Forbes is a geologist and pasture manager and Chairman of the Carbon Sense Coalition. He has long experience in all aspects of the mining, grazing and infrastructure industries of northern Australia.