DELAY RIGHT CALL

THE move to delay next year’s Bleach* Festival until August may at first glance seem surprising but it must be commended.

It’s an interesting dilemma to have but an already-packed events program in the first part of the calendar year provides the city with a feast in the early months, and a famine later.

Bleached Arts CEO and artistic director Rosie Dennis, in just a few short months in from taking over the role, has seen the wisdom to work with – and not against – the city’s annual events calendar.

The decision comes only weeks on from the unveiling of the new board to oversee the Coast’s $13 million a year mega-events body, Major Events Gold Coast.

Its goal is to book out every weekend with a national or internationally broadcast event. A high target, but we wouldn’t be the Gold Coast if we didn’t aim high.

Like Ms Dennis, board chair Darryl Kelly acknowledges the first thing we need to get right is to smooth out the calendar to ensure we get the most bang for our buck.

No doubt Bleach* will be back even bigger and better come August next year.

WHERE has capitalism got us?

Australians are the envy of the world and as a result tourism provides Australia with $43.1 billion per year. Our climate is not only great for tourism, but also helps grow fruits and vegetables in abundance. Australian fruit and vegetable exports exceed $1.1 billion.

The livestock export industry was valued at over $1780 million in 2015-16. Yet, by sending our animals abroad we lose $80 million in extra revenue, whilst torturing our animals in the process.

Australia produces 19 useful minerals in significant amounts.

Because of all this Australia should be very wealthy. Instead we built two of the biggest gas plants in the world and not one litre went to Australian market. They are built in Curtis Island and Chevron Island, with no facility to supply Australia. As a result of building two of the biggest gas plants in the world Australia’s gas prices went up.

Australian manufacturing has declined significantly over the past 30 years. Manufacturing is now less than 9 percent of GDP. It once was 27 per cent. We send Iron ore abroad, along with the fuels needed to process it and buy it back at tenfold the price we got for it. This helps other economies but does very little for Australia. Free trade cannot help our economy when we are trying to compete with countries paying 10 per cent of Australia’s labour costs.

Australia recorded a government debt equivalent to 40 percent of the country’s GDP in 2018. Government debt to GDP in Australia averaged 23.71 percent from 1989 until 201, so when the Morrison Government tells us that we are in surplus, he is being misleading.

Overall, 93.1 per cent of the labour force is employed. How are we in debt? And what about other countries without our revenue?

Almost 31 per cent of Australians are renting accommodation, and 34.5 per cent are paying off a mortgage, 31 per cent owned their homes outright and there is over 141,000 homeless.

You would think a person working full-time should be able to afford to their own home, but the system has failed them. Firstly, the constant need to drive up house prices, to show there is a strong economy, means house prices are too dear for first-home buyers. Secondly, when a person or couple rent a house, they will find it very difficult to get the deposit for their own home. This is one way the rich get richer.

Two parties have controlled Australia since its invasion, Liberal Nationals and Labor. So who is to blame for this economic nightmare? The Greens seemingly. Yes, the party which has never been in power. So when Mr Campion calls Extinction Rebellion activists Communists, I ask who has benefited most from capitalism.

SHAUN CUNNEEN, GOLD COAST

AS usual, Jim Taylor (GCB, 9/8) is down the rabbit-hole of logical fallacies – his favourite being the “appeal to authority fallacy” whereby only his preferred experts are “real” experts.

If Jim had even the slightest scientific training he’d know that the acid test of proper science is accurate predictions, which the climate cultists have never achieved.

Imagine going to a fortune teller regularly for 40 years and she never makes even one remotely accurate prediction. Do you believe her next prediction will be guaranteed correct?

Moreover, would you believe her sufficiently to make dramatic and damaging changes to your national economy and energy systems, solely on her word? Jim does exactly that.

In the 1980s the cultists swore seas would rise 2m by 2010. I sold a low-lying house on that “certainty”. I checked on it during a king tide in 2010 and there it was, high and dry – and it still is.

Failed predictions mean your hypothesis is incorrect. Failed predictions mean you rip it up and start again. But not with climate science – because it has nothing to do with proper science.

Climate science piggybacks on the reputation of proper science so that distinctly unpleasant people can gain totalitarian control of us all while their enablers steal the prosperity our parents created.

Our brave forebears who fought and died for the freedom from totalitarian communism that we enjoy must be spinning in their graves watching the spread of the evil climate cult.

PETER CAMPION, TOLGA

I CERTAINLY wouldn’t be taking “Go F*** Yourself”, aka Logan Paige Gould (GC Bulletin, 9/8), home to meet mother with a name like that.

As the late Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan once stated: “When you are listening to someone using the F word, you are listening to a nobody”.

DAVID HALL, COOMBABAH