Isherwood: Australia needs a space program

Isherwood: Australia needs a space program

The 40th anniversary of the moon landing is a reminder of how far backwards the world has gone under the monetarist policies of globalisation, and a lesson that genuine economic prosperity requires exploration, scientific discovery, and new technologies, declared Citizens Electoral Council leader Craig Isherwood today.

“For that reason, Australia, which under globalisation has collapsed from an industrial powerhouse to little more than a colonial quarry, needs its own space program,” he said.

The Australian economy in the 1950s and 1960s was able to play a key role in early space exploration, including being just the fourth nation to launch its own satellite from its own soil, at Woomera in South Australia in November 1967.

However, it was immediately following that high-point, that Australia’s protectionist industrial policies championed by the great Country Party leader John McEwen, under which Australia had developed world-beating industrial and scientific capacity, were systematically dismantled by British imperial free trade policies, and most of the cutting-edge areas of Australian industrial development, including the space program, nuclear power program, and machine tool production, began to be slashed.

“And look where it got us,” Mr Isherwood said, “$1.2 trillion in foreign debt, collapsed manufacturing, collapsed agriculture, and a quarry economy that depends on China for its survival.

“If Australians want a real economic recovery, don’t look for it in a rise in the stock market, or in housing prices to even more unaffordable levels—look for it in a resurgence in world-class scientific and industrial capacity, which developing our own space program will catalyse.

“We have all of the ingredients for a successful space program: We have brilliant sites for space bases on Christmas Island and Cape York Peninsula, because of their proximity to the equator.

“And we have hardy souls in our scientific community, including our own home-grown astronauts Andy Thomas and Paul Scully-Power, and cutting edge rocket scientists in our universities, who have toiled away with minimal support to develop new space technologies, but who could achieve spectacular results if they were charged to lead a national effort.”

Mr Isherwood concluded, “A space program isn’t a cost, but an investment, which will mobilise our engineering, manufacturing, construction and scientific capabilities, and generate spin-offs for the economy that create jobs and raise our living standard.”

ends

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