Because Australia is a colony with a colonial attitude.
The elites are not interested in nation building, Australia is just a place to extract wealth.
We need to be a completely independent republic.
You could be right about that colonial attitude. But our profits aren’t going to the king or the mother country - so I’m not sure that becoming a republic would solve the problem. Rather, it’s multi-national companies and their rich owners that are getting the value from extracting our wealth. So standing firm against those is probably what we need.
(Becoming a republic makes a lot of sense too - but I don’t think our constitutional monarchy system has much to do with our national wealth being pillaged for external profits of others.)
I suspect the point was more about cultural cringe and presuming that we should fold to our “superiors” rather than determine our own fate and values.
This is a big part of it.
I don’t ever recall a single discussion on what kind of country we should be and how we should serve all who live here.
Wealth from colonies is sent overseas to the owners. Originally English families that had successfully petitioned the crown to get rights to land and wealth, now they are overseas companies.
How would becoming a republic change the way we handle mineral rights?
It’s frustrating as fuck that we act like we can’t mine our own shit, or process it. We bring foreign companies in to profit off our natural resources only for the government to get pennies on the dollar through taxation.
Our long term goal should be to turn mining into a government utility and own the process end to end. Then the whole country will benefit from our mineral wealth and not just a few billionaires.
That won’t stop corrupt operators in politics.
The system we have, if run by honest people, works very well.
Problem at the moment is that Australias biggest idiots would see any change to oil taxation as a personal attack on them
Just look at how they’re responding to being forced to pay tax on their tax dodgies
It’s a trillion dollar fortune for somebody
Norway moved over a lot of people to insure that energy:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_(film)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byford_Dolphin#Accidents_and_incidents
Most would scream bloody murder if they knew but most wouldn’t scream bloody murder over their past…
Because Australia is a lucky country…
