Commenting on Tony Abbott’s recent Perth speech in Quadrant, Keith Windschuttle identified three crises ‘which, taken together, represent a national crisis beyond anything yet experienced by current generations of Australians’. These he summed up as energy policy, debt accumulation and multicultural immigration. The Turnbull Government has not only failed to counteract these crises, it appears not to recognise that they exist. Some of its actions have been as counter-productive as they’ve been useless. The government’s action, or inaction, is so serious that it is hard to find the right word to describe it.

Regarding energy policy, it has quite madly followed the Obama Government declaring war on the coal industry, and aiming at the abolition of Australian coal-mining in the near future. Coal is central to our economy and industrial base and is our biggest export earner. Banning it will not only cause all energy and other prices to skyrocket (when energy is available at all), but also wreak havoc on individual standards of living and on the whole industrial base, as is already happening in South Australia. The result, inevitably, will be skyrocketing consumer prices across the board.

To say that burning coal contributes to global warming is nonsense. There has been no global warning for 20 years and what temperature fluctuations have taken place may have nothing to do with human activity, but be due to causes such as the state of the sun.

As for the coal industry omitting allegedly polluting ‘carbon’ or ‘carbon dioxide’ (the two words are used interchangeably for different substances), carbon is not a polllutant but is essential for all life. Carbon dioxide is as essential for plant life as oxygen is for animal life.

It is bizarre to think that coal can be replaced by so-called renewable energy sources. These can meet only a small part of Australia’s energy requirements and are unreliable. Turnbull’s idea of expanding the Snowy Moutains Scheme has been costed by experts as uneconomical.

Both political parties are too cowardly to press ahead with nuclear energy, although nuclear power plants could be located in Australia’s vast deserts with safety. It is opposed by people who when asked (and I have mischievously made a practice of doing this on election days) are unable to tell the difference between an alpha and a beta particle.

The worldwide campaign against nuclear energy was kicked off by the Soviet Union and leftist ‘fronts’ during the Cold War and now has a zombie-like life of its own, surviving its creator and possibly with aid from the US coal industry, which does not want to see competitors and funds the anti-nuclear movement in other countries, as handy armies of useful idiots. If Australia’s major parties were acquainted with the concept of patriotism, they might press for bipartisan agreement on coal and nuclear energy policies. A royal commission might be held into the origins and financing of both the anti-coal and anti-nuclear, as well as the anti-fracking, movements,

The second crisis – debt accumulation – needs relatively little comment. The budget has shown the government’s lack of interest in tackling it. Government spending cuts are difficult, but a start could be made with the $1.1 billion a year spent on Turnbull’s darling, the ABC.         The Arts Council could also be slashed, as could the money showered on universities to turn out useless BAs rather than skilled tradespeople. (It is said that the great question to be asked by those future arts graduates who will be in employment is not ‘What is the Meaning of Life’ or ‘What is the Nature of Art?’ but rather, ‘Will you have Fries with That?’). Other areas of saving may be identified without difficulty (the words ‘French submarines’ and ‘wind power’ come to mind). Taken one by one the savings are small, but taken together they soon add up.

These economies would be a start (the death-penalty for terrorism, carried out promptly, and without interminable appeals, would also save money). What is really needed is a new, fearless, razor gang to systematically tackle waste in the public sector and at all three levels of government. The Expenditure and Public Accounts Committees have been too quiet lately.

The Turnbull Government is maintaining indiscriminate immigration without, apparently, being able to acknowledge that some cultures, and some migrants, are more assimilable, and more of an asset to the nation, than others. It is not even permissible to ask the religion of would-be immigrants, as if religion were not a crucial factor in the present culture war. Indeed, Turnbull has not said a word to suggest he understands that the culture war matters, or which side he is on in it, or that it exists at all. He has allowed, and perhaps even encouraged, the Australia Council to cut off the money to pay Quadrant’s creative writers – which was about the only non-left forum for them in the country. Only a committed leftist or a man culturally blind could have supported the ABC as he has done, or hijacked the country’s main conservative party.

The government’s announced plan to combat terrorism and the threat to Australia’s cultural identity by putting to prospective immigrants an expanded questionnaire on Australian ‘values’ is so stupid as to take the breath away. To call it a Band-Aid on a cancer is an understatement of its inadequacy (and will Prime Minister Turnbull put forward stabbing your leader in the back as an Australian ‘value’?). Meanwhile, the Navy is calling for ‘committed Muslims’ to join it.

Is anyone fanatical enough to be a terrorist or supporter of terrorism expected to be too scrupulous to lie to immigration authorities? The idea shows no comprehension of the Muslim concepts of Taqiyya and Al-Hijra discussed here last week. (Taqiyya means lying to advantage the faith, Al-Hijra means migrating for the objective of advancing the faith. These are not only permitted for Muslims but are enjoined upon them as a duty. Have the geniuses who conceived the ‘values’ test no conception of these ancient facts? Abu Usamah, an imam at the Green Lane Mosque in Birmingham, says, ‘We call them stinking kafir [non-Muslims], dirty. But, of course, akhi [brother], if that’s going to turn them away from al-Islam, we don’t say that to them in front of their face.’

What these crises have in common is an inability by the government to show courage and challenge political correctness, or even to understand let alone fight the overarching issues of the culture war. This is not only doing it no good electorally, but also threatens our civilisation.