The war front is closer than you might like

If we are going to win the arm wrestle with the past we need to muscle up. That means spending more on arms and munitions than we do at the moment, and possibly expanding our numbers of men and women under arms.

It also means making our economy more resilient.

The sinews of war are economic. We need to ensure we have a strong economy, with multiple redundancies. If a low carbon economy is the goal, then we have to recognise that wind and solar will not achieve that, and we need to embrace nuclear power.

Fourth generation small modular reactors provide us with an opportunity that is cost-competitive, can be plugged into the existing network, and can be decentralised so they are harder to disable than a conventional coal-fired system.

There are many impediments to nuclear power, not least legislation passed by John Howard banning it. We need to start now to address these issues.

Nuclear should also allow us to be cost-competitive in manufacturing as Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) appear to produce as cheaply as coal-fired power. But this is an idea with a 10-year horizon at least before it could be instituted to any degree.

The current scramble in the USA, UK, and Germany to replace supplies of Russian gas with domestic, or other sources, reminds us how important energy self-sufficiency is. It also demonstrates the role that Australia could play by making the world less reliant on potential bad actors for their energy.

That is something we can do something about almost straight away.

We need to take away impediments to oil and gas production. One of those is the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 which has been weaponised to allow green activists to delay, or prevent, necessary development.

I'm not against the environment, but there has to be a cost-benefit trade-off between human life, and say, the black-throated finch.

The government also needs to look at the role of corporate regulators, corporations, and the ASX in punishing companies who produce fossil fuels by strangling their access to finance. Governments should determine emissions policy, not outsource it to would-be corporate oligarchs.

Of course the market has a role to play, but this should be on the basis of economics, and there are many uses for which there is no alternative to oil and gas, such as plastics, fertiliser, transportation, steel production, and firming and backing-up unreliable renewables.