It's almost pathological, what short-term collective memories we have. Look at the stock market. One day a share is a dollar, the next day $1.10, then it drops to 90c. The stocks rise and fall like bouncy balls but when you look closer, you find the listed companies are trading the way they were the week before, business much the same, profits much the same, so what is it that makes the stock so agitated?
To the outsider it seems like we can't remember how things were a week ago and certainly have little foresight on how they will be a week from now.
Now wait a minute, if we stop and think we know that there is a major drought on its way. If not this year or the next, maybe the year after. 15 of the past 18 years have been drier than the Victorian average.
We know that once again we will be checking the levels of our dams in every morning's paper. Last drought everybody got so worried that we spent a fortune on a desalination plant that has never been used. After all, now it's raining. Does that mean that the plant will never be used? No, we know that it's only a matter of time, maybe in the future people will be saying what great foresight this had shown.
Until now Victoria has been Australia's greatest gas consumer. But new Queensland export contracts will triple gas demand, and push prices up to overseas levels. Our off-shore gas wells will find their contents sucked up - and their lives much reduced from the current 30 years.
In the United States they beat the shortage by opening up huge shale gas and oil deposits. Suddenly they are trumpeting about having fuel sufficiency for 100 years.
It turns out that Victoria also has huge shale beds capable of producing gas and oil, and enormous coal reserves for coal seam gas. These two areas obviously need urgent attention. But what happens? The last state government banned coal seam gas because of complaints from farmers and then, because they did not know the difference, they banned shale and even oil exploration.
The new government has come in and at the moment seem too scared by this dilemma to do anything about it. So they have allowed the prohibition to continue with no good scientific justification.
In fact, we are quite capable of extracting fuel in an environmentally careful way. We know how to drill oil without spillage, protect water tables from gas leaks. Gas can be released from shale like riffling a pack of cards.
Meanwhile, Australia imports 91 per cent of its fuel, and by 2030 we will be completely dependent on overseas fuel. The trouble is, what if some conflict closed off our sea access - as the Japanese did in WWII. We're an island, what do we do next?
In his NRMA report, Air Vice-Marshal John Blackburn insisted: "This is a national security, a national survival issue in the longer term."
Tighten the regulations, build in safeguards - and for once, show a little foresight.
