It moved from being the “target” year to, when we actually got to it, looking back on it from 2021, our great wasted “time-out” year. Starting way back when we (and New Zealand) led the world into the new century at midnight on December 31, 1999, on the way to the Sydney Olympics, 2020 became the “go-to-year”, so to speak, for all sorts of targets, from the pollies to the activists. It had a nice round ring to it; it was sufficiently far into the future that you didn’t necessarily have to actually do anything anytime soon, and especially not anything painful or costly, to deliver on whatever target was promised; and best of all, it was way beyond any political cycles. Politicians making 2020 promises, or setting goals to be delivered by 2020, didn’t have to be too fussed at the prospect they would still be around to have to give a real-time accounting actually in 2020. This started to become a little more “challenging” when we moved into the 2010s. Although that “problem” was quickly and neatly solved by making 2030 the new “go to” target year, or better still 2050.Hmm; who knows, maybe one day we’ll get a quirky pollie, who’ll nominate 2029 or 2049 as his or her “go to” year.Anyway, when 2020 actually came around, it turned out to be a “time-out” year — thanks to that other thing that “came around”: the virus. We more or less put everything on hold; we spent the year focused on protecting from the virus and waiting for the “Godot” vaccine. It was a year all about lockdowns and border closures, both international and local. We took a — very big — “time-out” from our immigration Ponzi, one of the two great drivers of growth every year since that New Year’s Day. The other was digging up, progressively more each year and now up to over one billion tonnes of, WA and shipping it off to the northern hemisphere and mostly to China. We certainly kept doing that through 2020, as I detailed last week, and kept doing it in, well, spades, so to speak. But we pretty much stopped immigration dead in its tracks in overall terms; and specifically turned off the “student spigot” that had poured people and other people’s money into our universities and other educational institutions. I’m not seeking to debate any of that in this comment; my main beef is that we didn’t put the time-out to any productive use: to think about; to debate; maybe even — true, in some bizarro fantasy unreality — reach some sort of agreement about what sort of future Australia made sense, that we should want, and how to get there. Do we really want to just go back to the Australia of 2019?The Australia where growth was all “built on” ever-rising resource exports to China — with much of it then coming back in ever-rising imports of “stuff” — and an immigration-based population Ponzi driving more and more property building and then demanding more and more infrastructure to service it all, especially in Melbourne and Sydney? It would seem not, as people are literally voting with their feet on the idea of a (ever) “Bigger Australia” by moving out of the two big cities … With all sorts of other things happening — sliding by the wayside — along the way; like most prominently, more and more of our manufacturing disappearing into history? To take one example: maybe we don’t want any local oil refineries; maybe we don’t want any petrol at all in that “tomorrow Australia”; but shouldn’t we at least discuss it and even, well, decide it? Before we actually got into it; 2020 might have looked like a good year to aim for; when we arrived we wasted it.



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