Dear Reader,
Just after 5:30am on Monday, 15 November 2022, a train bound for Melbourne derailed 30km west of Geelong, VIC.
Thankfully, no one was hurt.
This wasn’t a passenger train. It was a freight train. A big one, measuring 1km from nose to tail.
First responders arriving on the scene found a pile of broken wagons and around 20 mangled — but empty — shipping containers.
SOURCE: 9 News
No victims. No damaged load.
So why even talk about it?
Because the truth is, there WERE human casualties in this Victorian train crash. They just weren’t among the wreckage.
They were all over Australia…
Let me explain...
The freight train was headed to the Port of Melbourne to drop off its empty containers and then pick up several full ones for the return journey to Adelaide.
But thanks to the derailment, these containers never made it off the dock.
To make matters worse, the train wreckage blocked and damaged the track at Inverleigh, VIC.
That, it turns out, was a major problem.
There are only TWO train lines that run east to west across Australia. The other line, from Sydney to Adelaide, was already cut off due to flooding at Broken Hill.
These two freight lines — the busiest routes in the country, according to government statistics — were shut for a whole week, cutting vital supply lines from international ports in the east to capital cities in the south and west.
Economist Jason Murphy, reporting for News.com.au said:
‘It couldn’t have happened at a worse time...No trains are able to go east to west in the whole country. We were hanging by a single thread, which has now been severed. Get ready. Empty shelves and high prices could be about to get even worse.’
Scary, isn’t it?
Two blocked train lines is all it took to limit the movement of goods across an entire country and harm our economy.
Look a little closer, and you realise...
We are more vulnerable than you know
Australia is a triumph of human ingenuity and bloody-minded determination over the extremes of nature.
We’re an island the size of the continental USA, sitting at the bottom end of the planet, far from anyone and anywhere.
We’ve built and connected major cities on different kinds of terrain, dotted around the edge of this huge land mass, with almost no one in the centre of it.
There are only 25 million of us. And yet we’ve made it work. In fact, Australia doesn’t just work. Our country is a massive, modern-day success story.
How?
Simply: we’ve learned how to transport goods, at scale, in a timely fashion, into and across the country.
Australia is a first-world, dynamic economy — thanks to the global supply chain.
Without it, we’d be screwed.
I’m not even exaggerating. We make hardly anything here. Few people know just how tiny Australia’s manufacturing base is. It accounts for just 10% of our GDP!
We import the vast majority of what we need to survive. Finished goods, parts, food, fuel, raw materials and more — by the container ship load.
Our country is reliant on large, intricate logistics operations: warehousing, fork-lifts, trains, trucks, and drivers...
...Who in turn depend on hundreds of thousands of kilometres of road and rail track...more than 600 airports...a huge river body system...and vast cable and pipeline networks.
It’s hard to comprehend all this when you’re mooching down the aisles at Kmart.
And that’s only scratching the surface.
I haven’t even begun to describe the intricacies of the process. A store like Kmart will stock many thousands of products, each with its own individual supply chain.
It’s an incredibly complex ‘system of systems’ that’s invisible to most of us.
And, until 2018, it all worked seamlessly. There was bread on the supermarket shelves, clothes in the stores and fuel at the pumps — whenever we wanted it. And it was mostly cheap, too.
But then it broke
Now, before you shout ‘COVID’...the pandemic didn’t break the supply chain. It certainly exacerbated the problem. But the fuse had already been lit.
Most people who DO think this is a knock-on effect of COVID will tell you we just need to give it time and things will get ‘back to normal’...
Well, that’s not likely to happen.
The supply chain that facilitated global trade for 30 years is broken.
And it won’t be put back together — not in the same way.
The ideas that brought the global supply chain into being have been upended...tossed away by a self-styled ‘elite class’ of technocrats — billionaires, ideologues, and politicians hell-bent on engineering a new kind of future.
I’ll show you what I mean by that in a moment. But unless you take some of the action I’ll set out in this letter, I don’t think this is a future you’re going to like very much.
Chances are you’ve already seen some of the initial signs of this future firsthand...
- Random gaps on supermarket shelves (sometimes the weirdest things are missing)…
- People are now stealing from grocery stores in broad daylight…as everyday items become unaffordable.
- Your favourite coffee shop can’t get any staff...and they won’t take cash anymore...
- Banks have permanently closed more than 400 branches and 700 ATMs in 2023...
- Smaller packaging and smaller products at Coles and Woolworths...nine Tim Tams instead of 11...and 30g fewer Pringles in a standard tube...
- A slew of unfinished houses in your neighbourhood...as hundreds of construction companies go bust.
It might seem like these things are unrelated.
But one of the world’s top financial authors and geopolitical analysts says this can all be explained by the global supply chain crisis.
Worse, he says no one in the mainstream media has joined the dots...no one is talking about how this could end the Australian economy as we know it within the next 12 months — and take your way of life down with it.
Get ready...