The G20 summit is the most patently moronic thing happening in Australia and I write this as the Essendon Football Club parts ways with dual premiership coach Bomber Thompson in favour of the Four Horsemen Of Finals Failure in James Hird, Mark Harvey, Neil Craig and Mark Neeld.
Estimates on the cost of hosting G20 in Brisbane … BRISBANE! … vary, but most agree it’s a shitload, with the Feds kicking in close to $400m, the Queensland Government stumping up $150m in security costs and the Defence Department also needing to find $10m or so for some reason.
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In layman’s terms, the Queensland Government security costs alone would allow the Swans to recruit another 15 Buddy Franklins for the next decade. I would use a Tom Boyd reference but honestly, nobody gives a shit about Footscray.
It is also roughly the cost of Metricon Stadium. I haven’t been there as of yet, but I like the look of it on the old picture box and the Queensland punters seem to turn out in decent numbers. It is going to be used for the Commonwealth Games as well. It works.
Speaking of the Commonwealth Games, let’s get down to brass tacks about what the G20 is. Don’t be fooled by the spin about this being some vitally important global decision making forum. It ain’t. It ain’t even the Commonwealth Games of global decision making – that’s the G7 or G8+1 or whatever the configuration is depending on what the Russians have been up to in the preceding year.
The G20 is kind of like, no I’m not going to say it, but you know I’m thinking it. Let’s compromise and say its like one of those slightly creepy Catholic Youth International Festivals where keener kids all get together and claim that world peace is imminent while a plainly evil man that heads up an organisation with centuries of blood and suffering on its hands – David Cameron in this case – spouts transparent bullshit.
The real decisions that count in this world are taken one place and one place only – the Oval Office of the White House. Don’t believe the Green Left Weekly types that would have you believe US power is on the decline. It isn’t, as ISIS are currently discovering at the rate of 200 non membership renewals a day. America runs the world and that isn’t changing anytime soon. Things like G20 are just crumbs thrown to the rest of us to maintain the fiction that “middle powers” – again, I return to the Footscray analogy – have some say in how things are run.
The security costs are also ludicrous because the biggest danger Queensland faces is not some Michael Bay movie style terrorist assault in the G20 meeting. That’s because terrorists don’t do that stuff anymore. It’s so 2000s. In case people missed it, Al Qaeda doesn’t exist anymore. You can thank the useless American military for that, most notably the Navy SEALs and a bunch of pimply Air Force kids sitting in a bunker in Nevada popping Maverick missiles and 500kg laser guided bombs on anything that moves in the “kill zones” of north western Pakistan and parts of Yemen.
No more 9/11’s
We’ve beaten Al Qaeda. They lost. The era of big set piece African embassy bombing or 9/11 or Madrid style attacks is over. Not only are there no organizations with the resources or manpower to carry them out, but what’s left of them have figured out that they don’t work anymore. The American security apparatus is so effective that once you even start planning to do it, they’re listening to your phone, reading your WhatsApp and then before you can say “deluded rich Saudis ready to die for the cause” (they remain in plentiful supply) there’s a Reaper drone on its way.
The only real security threat to the G20 is some local, and by local I mean anywhere in Australia, kid who has watched too many gory Syria videos and got a gun from somewhere, or made a bomb for $200 bucks from stuff at Bunnings, who decides to blow or shoot up a Maccas in Logan City while shouting Allahu Akbar. Maybe a whitefella who converted in jail. That’d get international headlines as an attack on the G20.
But will the $150m security “configuration” stop that? No, it won’t, and it never can. That’s why – and we’re going deep into jihadi internal strategic debate here – the theories of Al-Suri, who was recently whacked by ISIS for being a bit too cool for Al-Baghdadi’s liking (Google Image Al-Suri, he was a pretty funky looking guy for a jihadi terrorist, with his ginger beard and green eyes, like some Viking for Allah) was right, and Bin Laden was wrong.
Big set piece attacks like Bin Laden favoured can and are stopped. There hasn’t been a successful one since 2006. But Al-Suri, which translates literally as “The Syrian” believed that small, “DIY jihad” attacks carried out by individuals or very small groups on a regular basis would have a far greater effect in terrifying the West. And he’s right – the guys who beheaded a soldier on a London street, the Boston bombings, the madman who walked into the Brussels synagogue with an AK and killed four tourists – that works. And they’ll keep happening, because they are very hard to detect in the planning stages. The Americans can’t read what is inside in your head – yet – if you don’t put it on the internet or tell anyone.
The Biggest Threat to Brisbane
The greatest threat to Brisbane is not some cartoon evil terrorist organisation launching an underpants bomb on a pissant photo op like the G20. It is the big muddy thing that snakes through the middle of the city. It is under half a decade since the big muddy thing got angry and actually took over the joint like some watery occupying army. The cost to the wider Australian economy of those floods was estimated at $10bn.
Now, that is something that is going to happen again and again and get worse and worse, due to, er, um, climate change. Showing just how important the G20 is in the greater scheme of things Barack Obama and Xi Jinping didn’t bother waiting until they got to Brisbane to announce their climate change deal – and this one is actual news.
So yay for G20, a giant waste of taxpayer’s cash that could be better spent on at the very least mitigating the effects of the inevitable future Brisbane river floods.
Bah, anyway, stuff them all, bring on footy season.
I hear Shaun Atley is training the house down.
