Planetary Health In A Town On Life Support

Globalists unleashed on Katoomba Golf Course

”The Blue Mountains is home to nearly 80,000 people residing in 27 towns and villages, spread across 100 kilometres of mountainous terrain….It covers an area of 140,377 hectares [11,000 square kilometers or 4,247 square miles], 74% of which comprises National Park”.
Blue Mountains City Council website.

Our Council sits just inside the bottom half of NSW Councils based on population but is near the top for ambition. It aims to become a centre for Planetary Health. This is a United Nations project with strong links to the recent COP 28 Climate Change Conference about which we will say more below.

Meanwhile, recent planning decisions and past neglect has its most famous town, Katoomba, on life support. Councillors and management are determined to save the world but appear less concerned about the prospects for local residents and businesses. Pay Parking meters have not been the fabulous tourist draw Council expected them to be.

A Big Picture Council

This is a big picture Council. Through the Blue Mountains Planetary Health Initiative (PHI) it is committed to a grand if vague vision. We see glimpses of this through regular emails reporting the activities of inspired local residents. In addition this body, recently, hosted talks by important people whose vision aligned closely enough with theirs.

On a Thursday night, three weeks ago, they hosted Mark Diesendorf, the author of “The Path to a Sustainable Civilisation”. Mark was active in the Blue Mountains in the early 1990s. At the time, he joined a local campaign, of which I was a part, to prevent the addition of fluoride to our water. As long time locals know, we lost this battle.

Still, it was great to see this war weary campaigner back in the mountains to join our latest fight. The enemy is climate change and CO2 production. At least, that seems to be the foe he and our Council are determined to vanquish. Considering our Council’s world leading advocacy of the Rights of Nature, someone might have a word with the trees before we cut their rations.

The talk covered such disparate problems as public health, social inequality, biodiversity loss, biochemical flows, oceanic acidification, plastics pollution, waste, state capture, neoliberalism, overpopulation, media control, AUKUS, neocolonialism, sovereign debt, continuous wars, Modern Monetary Theory, Job Guarantee, Universal Basic Income, political donations, Franklin Roosevelt, group and community action.

The Job Guarantee

Good luck raising many of these issues with our Council representatives. For example, the Job Guarantee was a key focus on the night and also drew considerable audience interest. This is a competitor to the sellout concept of Universal Basic Income much adored by Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and other socially engaged multi-billionaires.

The Job Guarantee could end unemployment but requires extensive Council and community consultation. Together, we would determine what local work needs to be done and set willing unemployed people to do it. Such work may require a training component but the result is a win for the newly skilled worker, the community, council and country.

This project would be federally funded but locally administered with our Council taking a key role. It would be a hell of a lot cheaper than these private and feckless job agencies. Those agencies are a perfect example of neoliberalism in action.

When it came to the question and answer session of the Diesendorf event, I had a few points to share on the Job Guarantee having been a fan of it for many years.

Is the Mayor here and what happened to the questions?

Unfortunately, following a sparkling welcome to country our Mayor (known locally as Captain Fear) had been unable to stay. So many of the problems the guest speaker highlighted will remain a mystery to him unless he watches the video recording. What he will certainly miss is the question and answer session.

Inexplicably, staff painstakingly and I am certain reluctantly, edited questioners and questions out of the recording - almost an hour of them. These included mine. Labels put to the screen gave us the subject areas under discussion but lent a jumpy and discordant element to what appeared to be a diviner’s responses. What was the speaker responding to? We may never know.

Anyway, I decided to put my statements and questions back on file. They are recreated in the 2 minute clip below as faithful to the spirit of the subjects I broached if not a verbatim record of my words on the night. Unless Council decides to post its version, mine will stand as the official record. Unfortunately, I don’t recall Mark Diesendorf offering much of a response.

My questions to the speaker, along with those of others, were excised by Council staff. I have put mine back

I have a recollection of writing to Council on the question of the Job Guarantee. There is some local history attached to this. Eight years ago, one of the more progressive members of the local Blue Mountains Unions Council, Nick Franklin, agreed to join me on a trip to Sydney where there was a 75th anniversary celebration of the 1945 Employment White Paper ¹.

We travelled to Trades Hall in Goulburn Street to invite the architect of the Job Guarantee, Professor Bill Mitchell, to come to Katoomba to explain this concept and correct a few locally held economic fallacies, which he did. He also pointed to the key role successive governments have had in perpetuating unemployment. His criticism of Labor made Bill few friends in this largely Labor audience² ³

As Bill explained, Labor appears no friend to the unemployed. Ged Kearney was when she called, spiritedly, for a Job Guarantee at a Hazelbrook restaurant fundraiser about 5 years back. Such notions have probably been knocked out of her by now. The last thing her party is about is devolving authority downwards. It is committed to our dependency.

It would have been terrific to quiz the Mayor on his attitude to this idea. Would he have stood up to his party and steadfastly pledged his oath to promote the promise of local jobs, skills development and town improvements? What do you think?

There is not much point in inviting people like Mark Diesendorf to the mountains if we don’t at least discuss their ideas. To do so would relegate these events to the status of entertainment and diversion. Council already offers us enough of that.

COP 28 Revisited

We might even discuss where some of Diesendorf’s ideas are a bit flaky. If we are living under neoliberalism and small government, why is government reaching ever more deeply into our daily lives. Organisations such as World Economic Forum, United Nations, COP 28, ISSB reporting standards et al demand action from our government with the space between the order and servile response shortening by the day.

Returning to Planetary Health and COP 28, one of the concepts at the centre of this event was “fiscal space”. This is the idea of governments setting aside part of their budget to address climate change. How big will it be? Imagine a number and triple it. As we are dealing with something quite chimerical, no-one knows.

The world’s biggest investment houses will be ever ready to meet the climate abatement needs of third world countries whose ongoing debt slavery can expect to be continue as part of the COP con. Yet, a substantial part of this CO2 heavy lifting is to be done by the developed world as we deindustrialise and settle for a lower standard of living. This is called EQUITY.

An extensive financial framework is being built around this. One of the hosts of COP 28 is ICLEI (Local Governments for Sustainability, originally International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives). Our own Council carries 30 entries to this organisation in its database. I wonder what it does and what it expects of us? Dare we ask?

This is our new world according to Mark Diesendorf & part of the design is small government. What is small is the ever-shrinking role of the public. In trruth, neoliberalism demands government is big enough to support the market’s needs.

More than anything, what concerned me about Diesendorf’s perspective was it appeared to be a little out of date. It included none of the pressures on governments to conform to this grand globalist agenda. He presented a simple pre-Covid world where Rupert Murdoch is the baddy and our only real enemy is climate change. Today’s world is much more complex.

He told us “coal is on the way out”. It is. It is going to China where it will be used in the new power stations they build every few days.

The United Nation’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals have enormous implications for life as we know it but these were only ever mentioned obliquely in his wide-ranging talk. Our Council and its Planetary Health Initiative are committed to building these goals into Council’s policy framework. Is this a good idea?

The Great Surplus Lie

Through the night, it became apparent that Diesendorf is a recent convert to a unorthodox narrative that describes how our economic system works known as Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). This narrative lays out the role of money in our economy. I, too, was a supporter of this for many years. MMT offers a perfectly accurate and revelatory description of how the system works.

As Bill Mitchell explains in his Katoomba Hotel clip, under a fiat currency system, the government does not need to borrow its own currency, sell bonds or tax you. Where MMT runs into trouble is that governments have a vested interest in telling you the opposite is true. These helpful representatives collude with media, acadaemia and orthodox economists to make sure you don’t work it out.

This is about power not reason or economics. This is also why the Job Guarantee doesn’t get a run. I once had great hope that these truths might be conveyed to the thickest of politicians and the world would be wonderful.

What I didn’t understand is that their orders come from elsewhere. The odds of getting through to them on the economy was even money with having them acknowledge the dangers of the mRNA injections, uselessness of masks, lockdowns and PCR tests.

Has anyone heard of ESG?

When I asked the ESG question many in the audience turned to the back of the hall to see who the author was of this impertinence. Those I took in displayed an alarming blankness of expression including Mr Diesendorf. This is a concern because ESG has big plans and they include us.

If you are building a top 40 of environmental concerns, residents should put this near number one because it is designed to have far reaching significance for all aspects of our lives. This will drive Smart Cities, 5G towers and CBDC introduction as part of a growing range of surveillance and control measures.

As of next year, large companies in Australia will be required to report on the E which stands for Environment. This is part of the new ISSB standards (see above). It is only the start and there are plans to extend these measures. These will initially focus on greenhouse gas reduction and will eventually be installed at the centre of our lives as our measured “carbon footprint”.

Unnatural treatment of the natural environment

I told Mark and his audience about ESG plans contained in the Natural Capital Handbook, October 2023, which outlines the commodification of nature. This describes how our natural resources such as national parks and waterways may be managed to deliver corporate returns that can be traded as carbon offsets. Note the participation of ESG in the black far right column of the diagram below. Clearly, this is government facilitating the market.

P3 The Natural Capital Handbook – a practical guide to corporate natural capital accounting, impact, dependency and risk/opportunity assessment; and reporting - CSIRO, October 2023.

Mark on Media

In his take on media, Mark sees Murdoch, the Institute of Public Affairs and the Australian Strategic Policy Institute as major sources of our disinformation. My research tells me he’s a fan of their great enemy the Australia Institute. Yet, this “left leaning” outfit’s biggest funder for most of its life has been Anne Kantor, Murdoch’s sister.

Mark seemed to know nothing of The Trusted News Initiative and the ABC’s entanglement with it. Like the ABC, the Australia Institute is positioned left on the climate change debate. All this confusion has us running one way and then another. I like James Lindsay’s wry observations on such matters.

Diesendorf only fleetingly mentioned the role of social media in recent debates which may be because of his lack of engagement with it. It has had a big role for much of the last three years as a truth censor in favour of official orthodoxy.

Where the Woke Live - YES voting in the Blue Mountains

This table was put together from Gazette figures a few days after the Voice vote so they may have changed a little but not enough to make a difference

As this table shows, the upper mountains is the epicentre of progressive politics. Queers for Palestine will find a hearty welcome here. It is also a centre for climate alarmism which makes it an ideal place for a Planetary Health Initiative and the simplistic views of its celebrity guests.

The big message of the night was “We don’t [much] have time”, which is the name of the company that markets Greta Thunberg. This is the same message we have been given for 50 years.

Size and volume records of official lies have been broken continually over the past three.

How about our town? How about our lives?

Meanwhile, we have towns and communities still reeling from the aftershock of catastrophic Covid-19 “planning”. What did they REALLY plan? The three heads of the tricephalic local Labor dragon competed throughout the plandemic to prove themselves the most zealously Big Pharma compliant. They have treated us like fools as plans and policies have been put in place with as little consultation as they could get away with.

We now get soothing assurances that the Digital ID bill, Banking Act changes, Misinformation bill and WHO International Heath Regulation modifications are just what we need. Lies. All lies.

Where will this lead? Where has it led to date? Have a look at the state of our economy. Look at our town!!!!!!

And now we face a new constellation of climate change lies. The biggest is that CO2 is a pollutant and we, exclusively, are responsible for it. For all his innocent scaremongering, nothing Mark Diesendorf told us during his talk convinced me this is anything but a lie.

It is a trap. The Planetary Health Initiative is a small, silly local part of it with its loony tales of zoonotic threat. Shutting down comments or selectively editing YouTube videos to remove questioners and questions from local residents is strange behaviour.

You people have everything going for you. The academic status, the prestige of office and the sanctimonious sense of being right but you still won’t stand behind your own work. Will you Katy Gallagher? Will you Planetary Health apparatchiks?

You are just a microcosm of a big system that is determined to propagandise us to the edge of sanity and beyond. Wittingly or unwittingly, does it matter?

Climate change is merely the latest con where, typically, you play your part desperate to avoid debate, scrutiny and accountability. At what cost? Shame on you all.

NB: Don’t miss Phillip Altman’s Covid-19: a Post-Mortem presentation this Saturday. Details below:

Footnotes

1. The 1945 White Paper on Full Employment

2. In his talk, Bill Mitchell makes reference to his, Dr Victor Quirk, who spoke at the same event. Victor did his Phd on “The Right to Work”.

3. Britain and the Right to Work - Dr Victor Quirk, International Journal of Environment

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