It appears that the much-talked up budget crisis has disappeared because Tony Abbott’s government is spending big on war.
The Coalition government has quickly allocated half a billion dollars a year to join the new war on Iraq by another US-led “coalition of the willing”, or — if we call it what it is — a “coalition for the killing”.
The ABC's 7.30 program said on September 15 that the Australian government has "invested a billion dollars buying into a state-of-the-art military satellite system".
Reporter Dylan Welch explained: "It's called the Wideband Global SATCOM system, or WGS. To be part of the system, Australia paid close to $1 billion for the sixth satellite, one of a constellation of 10 which have successively been launched since 2007.
"The satellites communicate with ground stations via radio frequencies, allowing the US to control military units anywhere in the world.
"To communicate with the satellites. Australia is quietly building two ground stations, one at a spy base in the WA desert at Kojarena and another outside the NSW town of Wagga Wagga. Kojarena will also host a highly-classified US communications centre for the WGS system."
An expert on US military facilities in Australia, Richard Tanter of Melbourne University, explained on the program that one of the main reasons the US needs satellites with more data is for their growing fleet of drones, which are used for intelligence gathering and to kill enemies of the US.
So let's get the story straight.
Australia is supposed to be having such a huge budget deficit problem that the Abbott government says it has no choice but to slash welfare, destroy Medicare, sack thousands of public servants, increase university fees and cut funding to a huge range of other social services, right?
But it is not such a big budget problem that Australia can't blow billions on imperial wars and spend billions on more high-tech offensive weapons, warplanes and submarines?
Of course it all comes down to priorities. Surely, the head-chopping terror tactics of the so-called "Islamic State" terrorists in Iraq and Syria change everything?
But any sober person would have to ask how exactly spending billions more on imperial wars that have created the very terrorism we are all horrified by will do any good.
Doesn't experience say that it will achieve just the opposite result?
Truth, and reason, are some of the first casualties of war. And the powers that be seek to intimidate all who question their war propaganda and try to tell the truth.
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