Am I the only one who gets it??

I have been sitting by the fire watching the world's woes presented as unrelated events, each with a different reporter, in a different part of Australia or the world.

First, was the carbon tax.... please tell me if I am wrong but I thought that was to try to help or force (depending on your point of view) industries to look at innovative ways to do their business while making less carbon pollution.... and I thought that was because there seems to be some agreement amongst some levels of government that we should do something about climate change. However, it seems that a carbon tax is just another excuse for immature behaviour amongst politicians, without any discussion on the root cause of why we need one.

Second, was quite a lengthy piece on how the high Australian dollar is making it hard for fruit growers and processors in Victoria to export their goods. In fact, it showed 2,000 perfectly good, 80 year old pear trees being ripped out of the soil. Then the screen was filled with the picture of a supermarket shelf loaded with cheap, foreign, tinned pears(mostly grown in China, they said), packaged with Coles home brand labelling.

Now, to me, naive as it may be, these two items are bound together as if with super-glue and any decent current affairs programme would have been asking serious questions about the dedication of a government, putting itself forward as being tough on climate change, whilst allowing our own fruit growing and processing industries to be sabotaged by cheap, poor quality, foreign fruit being shipped thousands of kilometres across the seas to supermarket shelves, where they sit in tins lined in plastic, instead of in decent, Australian steel (of course steel has its down sides but let's not get side-tracked!!). There needs to be an incentive to buy Australian and someone needs to stand up and explain the connection between all this carbon dioxide in the air, and all these foreign tins of fruit in the shops.

Third, there was an economist explaining that the terrible floods in Queensland back in January were the cause of the bad state of the Australia current account deficit; you see, many coal mines had been either flooded or had access to them cut off by the floods and thus have produced a fraction of their usual coal exports ever since. He was then explaining that all will be up and up (on the graph to nowhere), once that production is back to normal again.

Again I actually naively imagined that coal was one of those industries that maybe should be rethinking its future, now we are all agreed that we are getting tough on climate change... and that getting back to full production and filling those world markets for massive amounts of coal was the whole reason we are having such an affect on our climates.

So, I thought maybe if we stopped importing so much rubbish from China and started eating our own, Australian-grown fruit and veg, then we could break even with this current account deficit thing. And if we started putting solar panels on every roof (in the sunniest country on earth) then we could make electricity even in the floods and we wouldn't need the coal to be mined.

Am I the only person who sees the link between these news items? Perhaps I should send Julia an email and explain the simplicity of the whole thing.... tough action should mean encouraging everyone to grow food, buy Australian and catch the bus.