Tomorrow is Remembrance Day, an appropriate time to reflect on our ability to defend ourselves.

History holds lessons.

Back in December 1941, Japan suddenly attacked the huge U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor.  Three days later, two “invincible” British warships, Repulse and Prince of Wales, were sunk by Japanese planes off Malaya.  Soon Japanese armies were rampaging through Asia toward Australia.  By February 1942, the British fortress of Singapore surrendered, and Japanese bombs were falling on Darwin.  By September 1942, the Japanese army had slashed their way down the Kokoda Track and could see the lights of Port Moresby.  They were looking across Torres Strait to Australia.  At that time, most of our trained soldiers were fighting Rommel in North Africa, or they were in Japanese prison camps.

Suddenly Australia was on its own and needed to defend itself with what we had here.  Armies need soldiers, weapons, bullets, vehicles, fuel, and food (and cigarettes).

Rationing was introduced for gas, food, and cigarettes.  An immediate critical shortage was copper for cartridge cases – we had mines producing lead, zinc, silver, gold, and iron, but there was a critical shortage of copper.

Fortuitously, just before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour, an exploration drill hole at Mount Isa had struck rich copper ore.

Mount Isa was called on to avert a calamitous shortage of copper in Australia.  With government encouragement, Mount Isa Mines made the brave decision to suspend the profitable silver/lead/zinc operations and convert all mining and treatment facilities to extracting copper.

The lead concentrator could be converted to treat copper ore, but the biggest problem was how to smelt the copper concentrates.  Luckily, the company had skilled engineers and metallurgists in the lead smelter.  In a miracle of improvisation, scrap steel and spare parts were purchased and scavenged from old mines and smelters from Cloncurry, Mt. Elliot, Mt. Cuthbert, and Kuridala and cobbled into a workable copper smelter.  In 1943, the first Mount Isa blister copper was produced.  Production continued after the war, when Mount Isa returned to extracting the then more profitable silver/lead/zinc.  Later, a new plant was built, enabling both lead and copper to be produced from this fabulous mine.

This story of the importance of self-reliance has lessons for today.

The war on carbon energy, the carbon tax, the renewable energy targets, escalating electricity costs, and the voices in Parliament calling for Emissions Trading Schemes have all unnerved our big users of carbon fuels and electricity.  Smelting and refining have become threatened industries in Australia, and closure of the Mount Isa copper smelter and the Townsville copper refinery has been foreshadowed.  Already six major metal smelting/refining operations have closed in Australia this century, and more are likely.  The closures have affected copper, lead, zinc, steel, and aluminum – the sinews of modern industry.  And the car industry, with all its skills and tools, is closing.

Local production and refining of oil is also declining, while “lock-the-gate” vandals are trying to prevent domestic exploration and production of gas.  More and more land and offshore waters are closed to exploration and mining, and heavy industry is scorned.  It was estimated recently that by next year, half of Australia’s oil refining capacity will have closed.  In the event of a disruption to tanker routes, Australia has just 12 days of diesel supplies before city fuel and food supplies start to dry up.

We are losing the resources, skills, and machinery needed for our own security, while we fritter precious resources on green energy, direct action, carbon capture and storage, and other pointless anti-carbon chimeras.

Our foolish green energy policies and the suicidal war on carbon fuels are killing real industry, leaving us unskilled and defenseless – like a fat, toothless walrus basking on a sunny beach.

Wake up, Australia.