We're compromising our farmland, dismantling our renewable energy industry, degrading our research capacity and loading our future entrepreneurs with debt. What is Australia's de-industrialised future, asks Peter Doherty.

Growing up in Brisbane in the 1940s and '50s, under the federal governments of John Curtin, Ben Chifley and Bob Menzies, I was (like most boys) barely conscious of politics but acutely aware of machines.

I knew that we had produced a fighter plane, the Wirraway, pre-WWII, and I fired the Australian designed and built Owen gun as a high school cadet.

During our annual family holiday at Caloundra, we had the option of renting wooden boats powered by small, Australian-made inboard motors. We lived in the (at that time) working class suburb of Oxley, where many of the dads rode the commuter train west to the railway workshops at Wacol. Our neighbours included carriage builders, fitters and turners and the like who built both the wooden rolling stock and the steam engines.

Standing on the station to take the train east to school, I recall that the wheel bearings were made by the US firm Timken and, from being taken to see the massive array of weaponry displayed at a VJ celebration in front of the Brisbane Town Hall, I might (if I'd been more than five years old) have connected with the massive industrial might of our North American allies.

Then, as I learned later, we'd repaired damaged US warships at dry docks in Brisbane, and US Navy submarines were based there because of that resource. That's why, I guess, I still have the question at the back of my mind: how does de-industrialisation affect our national security? Where are those light and heavy engineering skills? If climate change goes fast, the predictions are that we will see a rapid, and increasingly dangerous, breakdown in the global social order. Some might argue that's already under way.

Just after the war, some of the few who owned automobiles were running around in WWII Jeeps. Then "Australia's own car", the Holden, appeared on the scene. History tells us that we missed the opportunity to make something like the ultra sturdy Volvo, but hindsight is always superior. And we were seeing locally made Ford and Morris products, then Nissans, Toyotas and even Mitsubishis.

In Darwin in 1942, the light and manoeuvrable Mitsubishi Zeros shot the clunky, underpowered Wirraways out of the skies! But those memories were being rapidly set aside, and rightly so as a new order emerged in the Pacific.

Now, with the categorical imperative of globalisation and the exploitation of cheap (even slave) labour in other countries, the bulk of our industry has disappeared. Along with it, we've lost much of that old sense of shared fate and mutual obligation that characterised Anglo Saxon (and Anglo Irish in our case) attitudes in the aftermath of WWII.

Many of our major companies no longer call Australia home and the economic "dries" that currently control the country are locked into an ideological "magic of the markets", libertarian strategy that can place no value on the natural environment or, indeed, good agricultural land.

We continue to put fertile farmland under bitumen and McMansions, while compromising agricultural production for open cut coal mining and fracking. Living in a fantasia where we're somehow exempt from global efforts to end the world's fossil fuel dependency, we do our utmost to sell coal internationally and to dismantle our nascent, fragile renewable energy industry.

Then we degrade our research capacity, with cuts to the CSIRO and the Australia Research Council. We can't even find the money to properly support advanced initiatives like the Synchrotron. And we choose to be led by people who seem to despise our universities, and do their utmost to limit the entrepreneurial adventurism of graduates by ensuring that they are loaded with debt.

What our arriviste neo-cons don't seem to understand is that US federal governments of both the right and the left consistently transfer massive amounts of public money to support private industry. Principal sources are the US departments of defence, energy and agriculture.

How much of the innovation in Silicon Valley was, and is being, funded by defence contracts? When the Americans spend a billion dollars on weapons, the great majority of that stays within the country.

We need to rethink. Government has a part to play, and it's not just by leaving the field. Look at what's happening to our north!

Peter Doherty is a Laureate Professor at the University of Melbourne and the author of Pandemics: What Everyone Needs to Know (2013).