The Tobacco Wars                                                                                                                                                

 

As I write this piece, crime syndicates are currently flooding the Australian marketplace with illegal cigarettes. Avoiding excise duty, they deprive the government of revenue and, pitched at a price well below legal smokes, they threaten to reverse the downward trend in smoking rates. Adding to the concern, firebombings of retail outlets are threatening lives and property as criminal gangs fight for dominance. 

Some argue government excise should be drastically cut to make legal smokes competitive, but this would only play into the hands of the criminals who would most likely lower their prices and still make a profit.

I suggest the following to clean up the mess.

Scrap the excise and replace it with a GST type of tax at the retail point of sale. This tax would be set at a level that maintains government revenue and would be imposed on all cigarettes sold, whether legal or illegal, thereby giving illegals zero price advantage. 

As a consequence, crime syndicates would be deprived of a viable enterprise, firebombing would cease and high prices would continue to discourage smokers.

This strategy of course would be extended to all forms of nicotine such as vapes and other tobacco products.

This suggestion was submitted to the federal departments of Prime Minister, Treasury and Health on September 9, 2026.

 The Middle East Conflict                                                                                                                           

As I write this, Israeli armed forces are fighting Hamas forces in the Gaza Strip, Israeli hostages are being held in Gaza, Hamas rockets are falling on Israel and there is death, destruction and misery on both sides of the border.

At the same time there have been repeated marches and protest meetings around Australia with supporters of Hamas blaming Israel for this devastating war, whilst Israel's sympathisers blame Hamas.

What is there to gain in these mass demonstrations? Support for Hamas simply encourages them to keep fighting whilst support for Israel does likewise for the Israelis.

If Hamas and Israeli leaders around Australia got together to organise mass protests that didn't blame one side or the other, but in fact condemned the fighting and urged both sides in the war to sue for peace, they would be putting pressure on the combatants on both sides to seek a peaceful resolution to the conflict.

If the organisers of these rallies in Australia's relative calm can't get together to push for peace, how on Earth can they expect Hamas and Israel, locked in the throes of battle, to do this?

 EVs and Road Taxes                                                                                                                             

The Federal Government currently funds road construction and maintenance by imposing an excise tax on vehicle fuels. Whilst this regime is problematic in some regards, up till now it has worked reasonably well on the basis that the amount of fuel used roughly proportional to the number of road miles travelled.

However, with the future pointing to petroleum powered vehicles being supplanted by Electric Drive Vehicles (EVs), this method of raising road funding comes into question - with EV owners paying no excise - and the government is scrambling to develop new methods of taxing EVs to compensate.

This is going to prove an extremely difficult exercise because:

• The tax couldn't be applied to the vehicles themselves because some EVs might be travelling extensively on the roads every day, whilst others are only used for short trips or are garaged for lengthy periods - ie the tax would not be proportional to road usage.
• The tax couldn't be applied to the amount of electricity used because it would be impossible to determine whether electricity consumed had been for domestic or commercial use, or for charging vehicles. To address this the government might legislate special vehicle charging plugs that monitored power usage, but that would create a whole new industry in illegal charging facilities and home-grown special charging stations which in turn would require government inspectors to root out those cheating the system.

The obvious answer would be to introduce a Roads Maintenance levy in the Federal Taxation system (similar to the Medicare levy). Whilst some might argue they use public transport and don't drive a car, they  nevertheless consume products that transport companies have to deliver by road and are therefore beneficiaries of the transport network. 

People also all have to pay via taxation for some things they might never use, but are required by the rest of society - the electricity grid despite some people having solar and being off-grid, Universities for people who will never require tertiary education, NDIS for people who don't need daily assistance - there are many things we pay for that we as individuals don't need but are essential for the successful functioning of a democratic society.

 Who discovered Australia?                                                                                                                        

Aborigines have been living in Australia for thousands of years, so how could anyone claim it was discovered by Captain Cook when there was a whole race of people who already knew it was there?

What are we to make of these claims?

The problem lies in the fact that people are viewing the situation from the perspective of prior knowledge. They are in effect saying "we saw it first, therefore we discovered it". An example of this would be as follows:

'I'm late for work. After I rush out of the house, my wife notices that I left my lunch behind. Later that day I discover I've left my lunch at home.' - Surely no-one would object to my using the word discover in this sentence - even though my wife made the discovery first.

Statements of this nature shouldn't be viewed from the prior knowledge viewpoint, but should be considered against the background of context.

The aboriginal community are quite right to claim that Cook didn't discover Australia because that is in line with their thinking. But by the same token, when viewed from the standpoint of British (or colonial) history, it is also quite right for historians to claim that Cook did discover Australia, because no-one in Britain at the time knew of its existence, and his claim to finding it would have been, by any definition of the word, a discovery as far as the British were concerned.

The argument really boils down to a semantic dilemma which is readily solved by considering the context in which the statement is made.

 

The Lunar Space Elevator                                                                                                                      

1. 

The idea of a Space Elevator was first mooted by Russian Yuri Artsutanov in 1960 and his successors in scientific circles have come up with various proposals as to how this concept might be turned into a reality.

Basically, the concept involves launching a satellite into a geostationary (or geosynchronous) orbit above the earth after which in this location it would rotate around the earth at the same angular velocity as the earth's daily rotation, therefore appearing to be stationary above a fixed point on the planet. Once established in orbit, a cable could then be lowered from the satellite and fixed to an anchor point on the earth's surface, enabling a specially designed vehicle to climb up and down the cable, transporting supplies and materials to and from the satellite. This would eliminate the need for rockets to service the satellite and transport astronauts between earth and satellite. 

A system such as this, however, would face insurmountable problems including the following:

·  The geostationary orbit is located approximately 35,800 km above the earth’s surface, and a cable of this length would be required to tether the satellite to the planet. The cable connected to the satellite would have to support the total weight of cable below which would result in a strain on the cable that no known materials could withstand.

·  The cable climbing vehicle would need to be powered on its ascent to the satellite. Storage of the required fuel aboard the vehicle would add mass, increasing the strain well past breaking point of the cable. Using solar power might be an option but the weight of solar panels required would again add to the mass pulling on the cable.

·  The cable would be exposed to adverse weather events, high velocity stratospheric jet streams, lightning strikes, cyclones and meteorite impact.

The Lunar Space Station; A new use for an old concept

For any 2 bodies in an orbital system there exist 5 locations (known as Lagrange points) at which the pull of gravity of each body and their orbital motion results in zero gravity at that point. For the earth/moon system the Lagrange point no. 1 shown on the diagram below is located just 58,000 Km above the lunar surface.

Although the distance of 58,000 Km for an L1 Lagrange satellite above the moon is greater than the 35,800 Km cable required for a satellite/earth elevator, it can be considered feasible as a site for a satellite connected to the lunar surface for the following reasons:

• Lunar gravity is 1/6th of earth's and this would result in a dramatic reduction in the load, and therefore the strain, on the cable
• The strain would be further reduced by the fact that the lunar pull on the cable would be counteracted by earth's gravity for a substantial part of the distance.
• A large solar panel array on the moon could supply electricity via the cable to power the travelling elevator cab.
• The elevator would not be subject to the atmospheric disturbances posed by an earth/satellite elevator.

The main benefit in establishing such an elevator at Lagrange 1 would allow personnel, equipment and construction materials to be delivered to a moon base without delivery rockets required to carry sufficient fuel to escape lunar gravity on their return leg.

 Tearing down statues                                                                                                                                   

In 2001 the world looked on in horror as the Taliban in Afghanistan blew up and destroyed the famous ancient statues of the Buddhas of Bamiyan. And yet in Australia we still have people calling for the destruction or removal of historical statues. Although the values, morality and actions of certain iconic historical figures may be repugnant by today's standards being completely out of step with the current zeitgeist, there is a better way to deal with statues of these figures than to deface or tear them down.

We can't go through the pages of history books redacting the names of people we don't like - history reports on the good, the bad and the ugly, and having a sound knowledge of all the contributors to the historical tapestry - good and bad -  informs us of the rights and wrongs of the past, thus giving us a sound foundation on which to build a better future.

What then should we do about statues that fly in the face of public opinion?

My take on this is simple - Research the history of the subject iconic figure, have a public enquiry, formulate a brief summary of the individual's contribution to society (good and bad) and attach a plaque to the offending statue that tells the truth.

Nuclear Energy                                                                                                                                           

The following letter was sent to Chris Bowen, Federal Minister for Energy on 11 March 2024. I believe it speaks for itself in highlighting a disturbing aspect of nuclear energy that to this date has not been fully recognised and explored.

The Honourable Chris Bowen

 Dear Sir,

 I note the Federal Opposition has adopted a pro-nuclear stance in its agenda and wish to offer your ministry a powerful argument against the adoption of nuclear power generation in this (or any other) country.

 There appears to exist a blind spot in so far that arguments about global temperature rise are seemingly centred around reduction in greenhouse gas emissions to the exclusion of all other sources that also give rise to warming.

 There is in fact a significant contributor to the problem that to this date has apparently been completely overlooked.

 Nuclear power generation.

 Please consider:

Whereas renewables such as solar, wind, & hydro etc, merely convert energy from one form to another, thereby having nett zero effect on global warming, nuclear power, unfortunately, does not possess this benign quality.

 The radioactive elements used in nuclear generation have in themselves no inherent store of thermal content, but in the reaction process they produce vast quantities of heat which, rather than alleviating global warming, actually contribute to the problem.

 The amount of additional heat nuclear generators currently pump into the biosphere can be readily obtained from reliable sources but can be summarised as follows:

• Global nuclear capacity presently stands at around 390 gigawatts (with several countries committed to increasing their capacity in the future).
• Nuclear power station efficiency is on average around 35%.
• The power currently generated by nuclear is therefore in the order of 1,200 gigawatts.

·         This results in nuclear power generating 3.7 x 10¹⁸ joules per annum, or the equivalent of enough energy to provide one billion average sized homes with power, all of which ends up being added to the global warming problem. 

 I trust this argument may be of assistance to your government in combatting a populist idea which, if adopted, would contribute to a problem that threatens us all.

 Yours faithfully

 Brian Farber

Member, Institution of Engineers Australia.