Sales are crap right now.
“It’s the Amazon boycott!” people will say. “People don’t realise they’re not hurting Bezos, they’re hurting us poor indies!”
I’m rather ho-humbug about this. Sales are crap *everywhere*. This is not unexpected. If you as much as point at people’s financial security, their jobs, their house, their debts, their investments, you’re going to get a fearful reaction. People cut back on things they don’t *need* right now. Eating out, an expensive holiday, a new car, and yes, books.
Since a certain person has been running a wrecking ball through the economy, that’s to be expected.
We learned this morning that Australia is not going to escape tariffs this time. Cue meltdowns in various places (news sites, the stockmarket).
People advocate that if only the government had begged and substrated themselves harder.
I’m with Malcolm Turnbull (fancy that, I’d never imagined agreeing with him, but there we go) that letting a bully win only begets more bullying. If not aluminium (note the second i) or steel, he’ll start bellyaching about beef, or gold, or wine, or wheat. Or he’ll just randomly change his mind because he slept badly, or because Putin told him to.
All this masks what I think is a fundamental issue:
Can Australia, for the first time in its history, please find some balls and stand its own ground?
We’re not huge but we’re not small either. We have a unique geographical position. We can stand our own ground and form mature alliances with other countries that are not dependent on, as Malcolm Turnbull gloriously phrased it, a conga line of sycophants.
The chorus for Australia to get out of AUKUS gets ever louder. Or Australia can just be with the UK. Mark my words: we’re never going to get those US submarines. By the time they would, theoretically, arrive, submarine warfare will be old hat anyway. For the same price, they can buy hundreds of thousands of drones to be operated by a bunch of 18 year olds from a bunker on South Head (no lives in danger), to be launched by regular ships or the back of a frikken ute.
Australia needs to grow a pair and finally become truly independent. A republic would be nice, but that’s not what I mean. We need to stop gaining our confidence from being allies to bigger nations. We are, as Paul Keating famously said, at the arse’s end of the world. No one is going to come and rescue us. We need to learn to deal with threats on our own.
No one needs to be aggressive about this, but let’s just stop the sucking up and grovelling.
