Economic resiliance

Australia would not survive more than a few weeks of warfare.

We need to:

• Rapidly increase the uptake of electric vehicles as we only have a few weeks of fuel in the country. See also Fuel security.
• Increase reserves of fuel in the country – especially diesel. Obviously fuel stores are very vulnerable to missile strikes so tanks should be widely distributed and hidden in warehouses where possible.
• Examine establishment of coal-to-oil facilities again – noting that this has been found to uneconomic and polluting in the past. It also would create an easy target for foreign militaries so probably still a Bad Idea.
• Ensure most munitions and other military supplies are either manufactured here and/or are held in large quantities.
• Ensure key pharmaceuticals and medical supplies are manufactured locally or at least held here in reserve.
• Examine adding mobile phone towers to the NBN. NBNCo could purchase selected mobile phone infrastructure to create a more robust network that everyone could connect to.
• Continue to encourage distributed power generation and storage (solar, wind, batteries). See also Cheaper Energy.
• Possible Government Insurance scheme to cover complete loss of buildings.

Securing Superannuation

We recommend preventing superannuation funds investing in:

• Companies with excessive price-to-earnings ratios. (E.g. Tesla)
• Government bonds of countries with net debt over 100% of GDP.

All American credit cards?

Currently Australia relies on US-based companies for most credit card transactions (Visa, Mastercard, AMEX, Dinners). The Visa and Mastercard duopoly account for 90% of payments outside of China.

Many alternative payment systems such as PayPal, Google Pay, ApplePay, etc. are also US-controlled.

Unfortunately the US government may require these companies to cut off payment services to nations, companies or individuals without notice so alternatives need to be available.

There is the Chinese UnionPay, but this could also become unavailable at short notice.

Japan’s JCB is only accepted via AMEX, which is not widely used in Australia.

Indian RuPay cards are not widely accepted here as yet.

It may be prudent to investigate if a new government-backed card can be developed that integrates with the European Wero system.

Of course we did have Bankcard, but that was shutdown in 2006.

Cybersecurity

Much tighter rules are required to stop Australian firms from taking short cuts for short-term profits. Too many companies are running on obsolete, insecure and poorly configured software platforms.