OK, I seem to have a lot to say; It was intended to be about the, then currently impending, election in Australia but I think I have been nursing much of it since I first became eligible to vote, in the UK, almost 69 years ago. (We had to be over 21 in those days!)

When I migrated to Australia, 35 years ago, I believed that a new migrant should be damned grateful to be accepted and should shut up, comply with Australian customs and behaviour, and NOT be permitted to vote for at least 10 years. I still think so. I also don’t see why we are permitted to become citizens after only two years. Anyone can fake it for that long; for seven years – Irish Republic – or ten – USA – it’s a bit harder to conceal your unsuitability.

But having been here for 35 years I think it reasonable to offer a few comments on the body politic and how it might be improved. I won’t be around to see it but I’d like my grandkids to have a fair go.

Parties:

Labor – much like the Labour party in the UK – except that they at least could spell. Full of fancy promises that will presumably be paid for out of an inexhaustible supply of money from some fairy godmother. Devoted to forcing those of us who are willing to pull our weight to fund those who are only along for a free ride – or just plain crooks, as we have recently learned.

Liberal – heavily funded by the stinking rich so obviously expected to help them to get richer. If there is one truth in the world it is that the rich are always desperate to get richer. Not enough stinking rich votes, so have to appeal to those expecting to get rich by promising to help them too. Might even have a bit left over for the rest of us but don’t bet on it.

Others – devoted to ’causes’ such as ‘Protecting the Raw Prawn’ and apparently oblivious to the need for all to put in some useful effort for the common good.

All – apt to slough off their responsibilities onto automation – see ‘Robo Debt’ – and erect barriers, at ALL levels of government, to any honest communication with the electors.

Of course, it is surely obvious to everyone that we don’t give our governments time to achieve anything of value. Conversely, our governments consistently fail to advance any useful activities initiated by their predecessors, purely for doctrinaire reasons.

This might be a good place to mention one of my favourite examples of childish pettiness. A very hard working and effective Premier, of a State apparently called Noosouf Wayulls according to the ABC, was peremptorily ejected from office because her boyfriend had used public funds to build a recreational facility in his electorate. This seemed curious to me until I learned that the facility was a Skeet Shooting range. It is of course unimaginable that, had it been a Footy Stadium or, even better, a Cricket Ground, anything far short of Canonisation of the Premier would have resulted.

And then there is that incredible animal the ‘Two Party Preferred’ voting system. If you only want two parties why not simply ban the rest? I intensely dislike the idea of ANY part of my vote being directed to anyone not specifically identified by ME! And the extraordinary panic when some inspired person found a way to exploit it and put some real people into the Senate certainly revealed who the system had been invented to benefit. And it wasn’t US!

One more generality:

A future based upon endlessly digging up – or piping out – finite resources is not something that greatly appeals to me. Do the words ‘Artesian Basin’ suggest anything to you? So although I am greatly in favour of the development of wind and solar sources of power I would like to see a vigorous effort directed to the recovery of valuable substances used in the capture of that power and in the development of devices that are NOT dependent on great use of rare materials. And 65 years ago I spent a significant part of my life making my modest contribution to nuclear power generation in the UK. As far as I am aware, nuclear power has never made any significant contribution to the National Grid in the UK. The Power Station that I worked on apparently functioned without incident for it’s planned 20 years and was then blown up, as intended in the initial plan. I actually watched that on my TV right here in Adelaide. I believe that the identical Station at Tokai Mura in Japan, which I also made some small contribution to, was blown up after the specifed 20 years as well. I have no idea whether either of them produced any significant power in their lifetimes. I don’t think the one at Bradwell ever did much, though it was nice to moor our boat in the warm outflow of its cooling water, in the Blackwater river, when we were having breakfast on a chilly morning. I did some work for the one at Sizewell too but whether it was ever connected to the grid I don’t know.

Well that’s quite enough of that. Now for a few words of guidance for all political parties:

When announcing your various intentions I would like to see the following form of words mandated:

‘From the (enter total amount of money) that we intend to take from YOU in taxes of various forms, after deducting (enter amount for entire parliamentary entourage) for OUR own salaries and expenses and (enter amount) for OUR accommodation, services, transport and other costs, we propose to spend (enter amount) on (enter name of project or activity).’

Then, when the amount raised by taxation (plus any surplus, I laughingly add) proves to be insufficient for the Government’s needs –

‘In addition to (enter total amount) that WE intend to raise by taxing YOU, WE propose to borrow in YOUR name, at a cost of (enter percentage of interest) per annum, over a period of (enter number of years) for which YOU will repay a total of (insert total cost).’

Now a couple of final comments:

The UNIVERSITIES are much given to bragging about the vast funds that they receive in tuition fees from overseas students. There seems to be no reason therefore why those same universities should not be obliged to provide adequate, suitable accommodation for the number of students that they accept. They could presumably even make a profit from that! (AREN’T THEY SUPPOSED TO BE RUN BY CLEVER PEOPLE? Saying that they are not in the business of providing accommodation is rubbish. If they are not, who else ought to be providing it for them to profit by?
After all, renting out accommodation would surely give a better return on their excess tuition fees than the Stock exchange, with no risk at all.

HOUSING. Initiatives such as removing stamp duty, although certainly desirable in themselves, will only result in the price increasing by that amount. House prices are entirely a matter of supply and demand and have always, in my lifetime, been just outside what anyone could sensibly afford to pay. I first bought the worst house in Greater London with the aid of a loan from my company pension scheme, spent every penny I could scrape up on repairing and refurbishing it, and went on to do the same on my next two houses until I could afford a new (mortgaged) one. When I migrated I still needed a mortgage for my new home in South Australia, and it cost me 17.5%. interest. (That is not a misprint.) The house I live in now is almost paid for. And if I live for another 6 weeks I will be 90 years old. Almost as old as the house. In all my time nothing has changed in housing affordability.

I would like it to be easier for young people to buy their own homes but their problem is not exactly new.

Since I wrote the preceding words we have had an election. Although I am alarmed at the potential lunacies of which the nation’s chosen leaders are capable, it is pretty obvious that the only practical alternative is even more dysfunctional than it appeared at the time. A very good reason for NOT trying to restrict our choice to one out of but two parties.

(6 weeks later – ‘MADE IT!’)

Dear faithful reader/s the only thing that keeps me blogging is the notion that someone at least is reading this rubbish. I discern this from the monthly stats that Word Press send to me.

Once again I have milled around confusedly simply finding a place to begin. There are endless ‘help’ features but not a single one that answers the question ‘How to I get to my start page?’. This is worrying, as it implies that nobody else has this problem. And I simply can’t imagine why it has been made so obscure. The site used to open with the last post displayed and the options for starting a new one – and publishing it when it was complete – obvious. Now I see the previous post but have to blunder about trying to find my ‘dashboard’ before I can start a new one. Well at least the ‘publish’ button has finally appeared.

By now I have forgotten what I was going to write anyway.

Oh yes.Two things. One was to reformat all that stuff describing the extraordinary level of fiddling and fraud among those responsible for the great Klimit Change pantomime, so that you can read it more easily. I must admit I found it a bit of a struggle when I read through it again. Well of course you can’t now simply run down the page through your previous blogs. You can get them listed by the ‘archive’ command but clicking on an entry in the list does nothing. And I can’t find it stored anywhere else on my PC so it will have to wait.

I can, however, write a bit about my other topic – Gaza.

Now if you are old like me – unlikely – or even half my age, you may recall that ‘The Gaza Strip’ was an empty bit of land supposed to give Israel a bit of a separation from people determined to destroy their State before they could even begin to build it.

Of course they were immediately and repeatedly invaded across it, until they got fed up and started to build on it themselves.

Now I have not kept up with all of the subsequent attempts to destroy Israel but I do recall that when I was in Port Said a week after what was known as the ‘Six day war’ I had a young American crew man on my boat who wished to leave and go to Israel. The Egyptian police were, understandably, a bit concerned about his motives and asked me if I could enlighten them: ‘Why does he want to go there’ they asked me. ‘Oh’, I replied, ‘he’s chasing after some girl there’.

‘Oh a girlfriend’ they responded, laughing. ‘Of course he can go to Israel, tell him to come in and pick up his passport.’ ‘Well I don’t know how he’s going to get there’ I said. ‘Oh easy’ they replied, ‘he can get the bus from the square in the morning’. The bus! A week after the war! It was an education for me.

So, Gaza was an empty space and it mostly still was when I visited Israel a few years later. Now, no longer a ‘strip’, it has apparently become the ancestral home of countless generations of ‘Palestinians’ – who are alternately referred to as ‘Gazans’. Am I living in some sort of Time Warp? However bizarre Trump’s suggestion of turning it into a development site, it pales into insignificance compared with this curious historical phenomenon.

Oh, and just as a tailpiece, I have observed that whenever the Israelis are in deep shit they elect Benjamin Netanyahu to get them out of it. Which he does. Then they promptly discard him until the next crisis. Just what they will do when he’s had enough of that treatment is hard to imagine.

In my next blog I must discourse upon the disgusting behaviour of ‘the media’ in taking every opportunity to broadcast the fancy name of the murderous thugs responsible for this latest attack on Israel. This is clearly a case of giving ‘aid and comfort’ and certainly encouragement, to an enemy of all decent people. I am much against censorship – indeed if such broadcasting identifies the supporters of these louts it is in a way a good thing. As long as the broadcasters then receive the social opprobrium that they richly deserve.

This behaviour by the ‘media’ – and the lack of any appropriate response to it – supports and encourages the sort of trash who are now defacing and damaging Jewish property and planning attacks on Jewish people. Perhaps a nice, fat fine for broadcasting the thug organisation’s name could be spent on making good some of the damage done by its supporters.

Well hoo bloody ray. I have finally stumbled on the ‘New Post’ page, after the customary blind stumble around the site – lasting over an hour – only to see three headings:

‘Updating failed. You are probably offline.’ I’m not; my email uploads instantly.

‘The backup of this post in your browser is different from the version below.’ Well whoopee doo what the blazes does that mean and why have you done it?

‘Restore the Backup’ (This last in a square frame.) Well I rather think not.

So now, after another wasted hour, to my subject.

I have been considering a few contributions that I have read about climate change and was struck by the following reasoning:

It was claimed that methane farted by cows was a major factor in the increase in mean temperatures. Let’s accept that for now.

I draw the following conclusions:

We do know that Dinosaurs were present and thriving on the Australian continent at a time when temperatures were much higher than they are today – or so we are authoritatively told. And then for some reason they ceased to exist. Why?

It seems reasonable to suppose that the high temperatures were a function of all those dinosaurs farting. And presumably they bred and farted until the temperature became too great for their continued existence. So they all died. After which the excess methane dispersed gradually and eventually the climate became as we know it today.

That’s only a guess of course but it has as much substance as most of the claims made by the clamorous true believers in the new climate religion. Fascinating how they hang onto their wonky beliefs despite the complete failure of their domesday predictions to come true.

And the shrieks of ‘Denier’ (‘Unbeliever’/’Heretic’/insert favourite denigration) serve to unite them in their delusion and protect them from cold reality.

My own life expectancy, even at its most optimistic, is such that I will die long before any significant climate change could occur – although there will probably be a few of the usual climatic disasters – hurricanes, tsunamis, sinkholes, wildfires, earth tremors – that I hope to avoid before then. But it would be a pity if these silly little buggers were allowed to force their crackbrained notions on the rest of the world, with who knows what disastrous effects.

You, dear reader, are almost certainly younger than I. I strongly suggest that you do your utmost to disabuse the world of this hysterical race into pseudo (that’s a posh word for fake, dear) science. Otherwise you may find that living with human induced climate interference is not at all what its advocates promise.

Incidentally, ABC TV recently told us that Adelaide will experience severe water shortages this summer. But have no fear! ‘The distillation plant will produce (some mind boggling number of litres of) fresh water’. Who knew that distillation plants actually produced water!

Go on – think about it.

Apologies to any of my recent readers who have tried and failed to find anything new on this site recently – well for quite a while in fact. Unfortunately WordPress seems to be dedicated to relentlessly changing the format of the site, so that I can’t just sit down and write some more. How I have finally arrived back at this screen is a complete mystery. I spent most of a day, when I ought to have been doing more important things, trying to get to a place where I could a. write and b. publish my next blog, with absolutely no success at all. Then today the sensible old screen appears immediately I log in.

This way lies madness.

Now to my topic. Well two of them combined in fact. Artificial Intelligence and Klimit change.

I re-read the whole of the stuff that I copied into the site, relating to the fakery and grandstanding that went into establishing Klimit change as we now know it. It’s still there, badly set out but worth your while to fight your way through it if you still haven’t yet seen through the smoke and mirrors.) As you know if you’ve read my earlier stuff, I started out as a true believer. But I do have some pretension to a. intelligence and b. investigation. So I looked at what people other than those with the loudest mouths and greatest publicity were saying. And the others were saying quite a lot – and being prevented from saying it via the UK’s public broadcaster – the supposedly unbiased BBC. Another famous institution gone down the sewers.

What I re-published here was simply a refutation based on truth and commonsense – I waded through a great deal more carefully validated information before realising that I had originally been conned. NOBODY likes admitting that. But I do.

None of this invalidates the use of sun and wind to provide power. I use solar panels and a battery and am damn glad of them, especially when the rest of the street goes dark. And the idea that we can go on endlessly digging up and destroying the earth’s contents – and those of the Oceans’ as well – is absurd. BUT…

I am increasingly worried to see reports that the klimit change lobby is funding political aspirants to forward their cause. And however greedy, biased, arrogant and ignorant our current selection of political hacks, they do seem to have some collective sense of proportion. If they often seem like a bunch of squabbling pre-schoolers, how much worse will these unequipped, tunnel visioned, amateurs be?

Do you really suppose that they will have the slightest interest in or knowledge of, the mass of everyday business that keeps the country running – even if it does backfire and blow smoke frequently. Peter Dutton scares me, Anthony Albanese bores me, but these people terrify me. PLEASE don’t be conned into voting for them.

(Reminder to self. Re-visit the ‘two-party preferred’ comedy soon.)

And so to Artificial Intelligence.

Now I have known a couple of people who have artificial limbs. And these limbs use the latest technology to detect nerve impulses previously used to operate the genuine article and cause the artificial muscles to respond in the same way – raise arm, close fingers and so on. BUT, I have no desire to possess such limbs. And nor did they, back when they had perfectly good natural ones. So why are our politicians so keen on Artificial Intelligence?

Need I say more?

I’ll write this as a blog, simply because that is an available platform. I’d like to get it into the hands of someone who could make political use of it but I don’t know how. So I’ll write it while I am still seething and thus have it available if I see a way to make it useful.

I wrote this last. Then it seemed to me that even if you read nothing else it says what matters most, so I repeat it here:

Governments don’t build houses. People do. The harder governments make it for people to build houses the less houses will be built.

If there are adequate houses for sale or rent, prices will be affordable. If there aren’t, they wont.

Anything that discourages people from building or restoring houses puts up the price of housing.

_______________________________________________________________________________________

I have just listened to politicians banging on at the National Press Club about the cost of housing and how they will fix it. All of them clearly live in a dream world or, more likely, hope that their hearers do. The bulk of their comments were derogatory and ignorant, aimed simply at discrediting their political opponents regardless of truth or even relevance. I don’t believe that any of them have any experience or knowledge of the reality of providing affordable housing.

That made me so bloody mad that I became impelled to write about my own brief experience of reality.

I have no technical or business knowledge of the construction industry. However, I do have first hand knowledge of government stupidity and impediment in the provision of affordable homes for a few, not very wealthy, people. Here goes:

After a lifetime of working for other people and owning our own (mortgaged) home, my wife and I discovered that all of the job opportunities in Information Technology – which we worked in – had vanished with the capability of people in Bangladesh to provide ‘Back Office’ services cheaply via the Internet. So what to do?

As we had some small savings, we thought that maybe we could help in a small way to provide homes for people and make a modest income for ourselves by doing so. After all, I was only 70 years old and my wife some years younger, so we had plenty of work left in us.

We started by building a small house in our own backyard.There was some rather pointless obstruction by one Councillor, despite the property already being rated for two dwellings, but this was overcome with the help of our own Councillor. The Council building inspector was bloody minded and obstructive too, leading to some bizarre and ludicrous changes in the design of the house and the division of the property, but we persisted and eventually we had a house, rented out for just enough to cover the mortgage payments. Not exactly millionaire territory!

We still had a bit of cash, so we bought a couple of houses on mortgage, using our savings for the deposit and paying a rather higher rate of interest than on our own home loan and on that of the new house that we’d built. We rented these later houses out for just about enough to cover their mortgages. Then with what we had left we bought a horribly rundown block of units on mortgage and restored them to a useful state. First we stripped out and dumped the contents; then we had them entirely flushed out with high-pressure hoses and totally repainted. We tore out and replaced loos, baths and sinks; fitted security doors; and refurbished built-in units. We cleaned out garages – which were piled high with dead washing machines, discarded clothing, and other things preferably not inspected too closely. Then we built dividing walls to give privacy to each tenant or owner. We paid for inspections, roof repairs, and a complete survey to ensure that no essential work had been overlooked.

Friends came and helped and, on the very last day before the agents were due to advertise the units for rental, the very pregnant young lady who lived next door brought out tea for us at midnight, as we struggled to complete the final tasks. Then we drove away to rented overnight accommodation, en-route to our daughter’s house as we currently had no home of our own.

Well it was a lot of fun and now we owed a lot of money on mortgages. We’d sold our original home, rather badly as it turned out – it resold for twice the price a year later!

After a few months at our daughter’s house we bought another, 100 year old, house for ourselves; and spent a bit on making that habitable.We also worked on it ourselves for about 10 hours a day and paid out more to roofers, plumbers etc. We live there still and we still have a mortgage.

Meanwhile the rented houses were barely paying off their mortgages and the excellent manager who had looked after the rental of them for us retired. Eventually we decided that we must sell them, only to discover that the new manager had failed to report needed maintenance on them – which we would have immediately had carried out – so that the prices that we eventually received were not too great.

Then the tenants of the house that we’d built in our backyard had a power cut. When power was restored they had no hot water, so they called out a plumber to press the button on the water heater control – and we received his bill. It was greater than the rental that we received for that month. We couldn’t increase the rent; we couldn’t afford to subsidise the tenant; so we sold that house to pay off the mortgage.

Back at the units we began to enjoy the delights of strata titling as we sold some to the occupants. Nobody could be bothered to take part in the Strata Management Committee but one owner in particular raised objections to every essential expense whilst refusing to offer any alternative suggestions. The relief when we sold the final unit and paid off the last mortgage was enormous.

It would be too boring to continue in this vein. We did make some money. Probably it came out at about $3 an hour for our time, although I never had the energy to calculate it accurately. We bought and sold a couple more houses, again at no great profit but a great deal of work making them habitable.

Throughout all of those activities there was government sniping and obstruction, adding to our costs but providing no contribution to the supply of affordable housing. A fine example of the workings of government occurred during the start of the Covid outbreak. We proposed to stop charging rent from our least well paid tenant until things improved but our letting agents said ‘Oh no! Don’t do that. The government will stop her support payment and she will be worse off’! Says it all, really.

Eventually, to our relief, we sold everything except our own – still mortgaged – home.

We are still not millionaires.

So, when I hear ignorant people banging on about the great lurks and tax benefits enjoyed by rich property owners I am a little skeptical. I don’t doubt that there are some evil bastards out there screwing their tenants and benefiting from government money but that is NOT the root of the problem. The problem is the little creeps at every level of the system who, for personal profit without useful contribution, political posturing, or simple bloody mindedness, obstruct suppliers, large or small, from providing an adequate supply of affordable housing.

If you want people to provide their savings to finance housing, by all means make it worthwhile and don’t bitch about it. If you want to use our life savings to ease the housing shortage, surely asking you to provide some relief from our costs is not unreasonable.

Governments don’t build houses. People do. The harder governments make it for people to build houses the less houses will be built.

If there are adequate houses for sale or rent, prices will be affordable. If there aren’t, they wont.

Anything that discourages people from building or restoring houses puts up the price of housing.

And a final thought:

There is no such thing as ‘Government Money’. There is only OUR money, that we have earned and made possible by OUR work, which governments have taken from us by stealth or brute force. Whatever they propose, WE pay for.

The times they are a’changing, so they say.

Well this site sure keeps changing. Instead of opening up ready for me to start the blog it’s taken me about an hour of flailing about mindlessly just to reach a page to write on.

I was expecting to tell you in this post that I was changing the blog’s address – I only moved to Word Press because Go Daddy increased the cost of email hosting sky high. We took out our own domain name so that our email address would not need to changed every time we changed our ISP – but when we moved to Word Press they put their own name on top of it – which rendered it bloody useless – so we moved it to NetOrigin instead. But all attempts to move this website as well failed, despite heroic efforts by NetOrigin’s support staff and myself.

Recently NetOrigin began spruiking domain name transfers and I thought I’d try again – until I checked their annual charges! So, despite my reluctance to pour more wealth into Mike Cannon-Brookes endless pockets, I’ll stay with this Atlassian minion for now. At least as long as I can stand this mindless buggering about trying to access the blogging area.

I read that Kevin Rudd referred to Donald Trump as a village idiot – a bit rich coming from the most incompetent Prime Minister of Australia in my time. Isn’t it wonderful how these people go on getting paid a fortune in public money as they screw up in one job after another. And would you believe, people VOTE for them! At least Rudd never looked or acted anything but self-centred, bigoted and ill-tempered; so perhaps – God forbid – he is honest!

I confess I was mightily relieved when Trump first won – well anyone, even a dead horse, rather than Hillary Clinton. And I assumed that Americans reacted the same way. I don’t know why they reacted so badly to Ms Harris this time, surely Trump has taken on most of the more unlikeable characteristics of a dead horse now, and Ms Harris didn’t seem particularly vicious. (Well maybe she was a bit, outside of her public appearances.)

And now here at home? Well nobody in parliament scintillates much, do they! It will be the usual task of trying to pick who will do the least harm. Will we become like the UK, where I spent a few years, long ago, mildly engaged in the aim to thrust Noocleur Powr into the forefront of the nations power supply industry. The one plant that I was directly engaged in constructing was blown up – as scheduled – sometime in the last century and I have yet to hear of any significant contribution by the many variants spread about the country. Does anyone recall recent Japanese history?

Talking of that, I don’t know what part of the USA power grid is supplied by Nuclear Energy. What I DO know is that I spent a night a few years ago on a boat moored opposite a vast Con-Ed power station in Illinois and there was a 24-hour constant stream of long barge trains unloading COAL there.

And what of immigration? We are told that the Universities make a fortune out of overseas migrants, so why are they not required to provide or locate adequate, affordable accommodation for ALL students who need it? They will say ‘We aren’t in the accommodation business’. Well they ARE in business to make a fortune so, like any other business, they’d better learn to do what it takes, not just what they enjoy.

And talking of housing…

I have observed that the price of houses always rises to just above what anybody can safely afford. I have owned ten houses and a block of 4 units over the past 60 or so years and all met that criterion. I purchased my first house with the aid of a loan from my company pension fund and I fail to see why anybody should be prevented from drawing a modest part of their superannuation for that purpose today. But the price will always be almost out of reach or normal people. Remove stamp duty? The price will rise. Give a subsidy? The price will rise. Only a supply greater than demand will stabilise or reduce prices. And who will PAY for that to happen?

Meanwhile, whatever the truth about Klimit Change (yes, you do detect a degree of skepticism there) we will be paying large sums to largely ineffective people to talk about it. Oh, it exists alright. And the results may be catastrophic. What we DON’T know – despite some shaky but vigorously supported claims – is exactly why, for how long, and what next. And if bloody people would stop trying to bend the facts to fit their pet theories and actually study reality we might begin to do something useful about it.

Of course, we might some day be in a position whereby a few chosen people (probably politicians) will be able to travel by spaceship to a planet that has already been decaying for far longer than the earth, in order to maintain life there. How fortunate that I wont be there to see it.

Good note to end on, eh!

Inspired by the discovery that I have an actual fan for the blog, I thought I might resume production; though hopefully in a more cheerful manner than of yore.

I decided that today I would mention some of the interesting additions to the language arising from recent political reporting.

The most outstanding example is the verb ‘to Albanese’, which I define as the act of discarding a ‘sincere’ promise when it has passed its usefulness in obtaining votes in an election. As in:

‘I have chosen to Albanese your promised tax cuts.’

There is, I understand, a Chinese (or perhaps Spanish – the web is unhelpful here) proverb – ‘Be Careful what you Wish for’. Perhaps we should have an Australian proverb – ‘Be Careful what you Vote for’.

Other interesting possibilities arise from the television program ‘Nemesis’.

We might have ‘to Dutton’, meaning to scheme at the removal of a popular and effective Prime Minister in the hope of getting his job – although purists might argue that the action should properly be called to ‘Dutch Ditch’ in appreciation of the significant agitator behind the scenes, Mathias Cormann.

Following on from this of course we have to ‘Morrison’, meaning to slither up unnoticed through the ranks of plotters and seize the advantage by default.

Going back in time a bit, we could have ‘to Howard’, which is to combine a popular wish “Let us become a Republic’ – which might well have gained a majority vote – with the condition ‘with a President appointed by ME! ‘ which predictably sank the proposal without trace.

I won’t even begin to consider what we might cull from the Tony Abbott fiasco. No doubt readers – if they can stomach thinking back to those days – will find a fruitful crop of possibilities. There seems to be no proof that he was, as popularly supposed, a cardboard cutout operated from behind by Peta Credlin. Still, there might be a possibility of mining some useful verbs from the juxtaposition of the two of them.

An enduring source of sadness for me was the untimely resignation of Peter Costello. Perhaps Peter was savvy enough to realise that, had he stayed, we would have had ‘The Abbott and Costello Government’ – and anyone old enough to have read the old ‘Film Fun’ comic paper, with its strip cartoon of the slapstick characters Bud Abbot and Lou Costello would be hard put to find a better description of almost any Australian government that I have experienced. Tony certainly did his best to live up to it but without Peter its charm was missing.

I won’t try to exploit poor old Barnaby’s troubles and I ask you not to do so either. He can dig himself deep into the doo-doo without any help from us. I recall Malcom Turnbull with his arm around ‘My dear old pal Barnaby’ when Barnaby was re-elected – hence maintaining Turnbull’s majority – and then disowning him when he acted like – well, like Barnaby. Devise a new verb for Turnbull’s behaviour then – if you can.

I will stop there and await your contributions.

I really don’t know why I bother with this. I’m not interested in selling anything and I doubt if anyone is being entertained by it. I suppose I am just hoping that there are at least some people out there who share my feelings and might be glad to know that they are not alone.

Dredging through the contents of my PC I chanced upon some stuff that I wrote ages ago and just left lying there. The fact that one item was written just after the Australian Democrats committed ritual suicide shows you how long ago. But with another predictably pointless election looming I thought I would post it all here, just as it is, with no polishing.

My thoughts can be said to boil down to complete dissatisfaction with both our legal and political systems, indissolubly interlocked – and with those members of the ‘media’ self-appointed to comment on them. Given the striking absence of both commonsense and honesty, clearly displayed by their words and behaviour I am baffled that so few people seem to feel as I do about them.

There are hordes of people ready to prance about the streets, squalling slogans and waving banners in support of or objection to the most trivial or mindless causes. Yet none of these seem to take any concerted action to bring about obviously necessary changes for the benefit of the vast majority of citizens.

My happiest days, in terms of politics, were in the first two years after my arrival in Australia. Australian politics and Australian politicians were absolutely meaningless to me. And as I firmly believe that anyone migrating to another country should have no say in the running of that country until they have contributed substantially to its fabric, I was content for it to stay that way.

In time, of course, the political complexion of the country came into focus – and it was not a pretty sight. And it is not improving; in fact, apart from a few interesting features provided by the welcome exit of Paul Keating, the rise and implosion of Pauline Hanson (now apparently rising again) and the ritual suicide of the Democrats, it is deteriorating at a rapidly increasing rate.

The body politic is so diseased that it is difficult to decide where treatment might best be attempted first. Burdened by a constitution that mandates eight governments to control the affairs of an electorate smaller than the population of any of the world’s major cities, and an electoral system of such Byzantine complexity that nobody but a mathematical genius could trace the effect of any individual’s vote, there is no way for the majority of Australian citizens to sensibly influence the conduct of affairs.

Since the vast array of redundant State and Federal politicians are unlikely to vote themselves out of a job, perhaps we should look first at improving the electoral system. At the moment, when considering the competing claims of the main contenders one can only say, as did Macbeth:

It would be nice if we could further echo Macbeth and say of any Prime Minister:

‘A poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more.’

Unfortunately we seem doomed to continually hear more, even from those who have buggered off to New York – thus making clear their love of, and commitment to, Australia.

Anyway, here is what I wrote. I have been voting for 65 years and in that time nothing significant has changed, so I doubt that anything will in my remaining years.

(The Democrats are no more. Perhaps had they heeded this they might still be around. Much of what I said then applies to all alternative parties though. Just substitute the appropriate name.)

Just a Thought.

Hey Democrats, can I have something to vote for – please?

It’s a shame about the Democrats. It’s a shame about the Greens too, but in an election, particularly a Federal election, I want to vote for somebody who has a programme which addresses a whole range of major issues, not just a single one, however important I believe it to be.

For the Greens, to address only one issue is inherent in their makeup. The Democrats don’t have that excuse. And I always thought that ‘keeping the bastards honest’ was, apart from being a hopeless task, no substitute for a properly crafted set of striking alternatives in important matters. The Democrats have (or at least had) a real party. Why don’t they bloody well do something with it?

Let me spell this out, Democrats.

You are standing in front of an undefended goal and arguing, when you have only to kick the ball.

I see Mr Beazely as an oily front man for a bunch of doctrinaire dilettantes who will happily plunge me, and everyone else who has worked hard all their life for a modest return, into poverty and squalor, just so that they can piddle about making lunatic ‘social experiments’. They, of course, being sufficiently well heeled to avoid the consequences – as was, and is, the late, unlamented Mr Keating. Labour in power offers me the life expectations of a laboratory rat, watching pigs get fat.

I think John Howard is the nearest thing to an honest man in politics since Winston Churchill – but he’s the front man for a bunch of strutting egomaniacs who would have been more at home in Nazi Germany. Their only virtue is that their extreme greed does prevent them from bankrupting the country – although no doubt they and their nameless friends pocket most of the proceeds. Liberals in power offer me tantalising glimpses of what I’m not going to get, but they may accidentally drop a few crumbs my way. They’re a better option than Labour, but that’s hardly a compliment.

So IF you would stop whimpering feebly on the sidelines and get your act together, you Democrats would have no competition for my vote. But give me something to vote FOR, Democrats. I don’t care who your leader is, although I was a bit disappointed when Natasha appeared in ‘Thatcher Blue’ suits and began talking stridently about MY party, I want some action.

Tell me that you want to rewrite the companies act, so that the protection of limited liability also carries responsibilities and restrictions other than (but still including) protection of major shareholders rights. How about some really stinking penalties for running a business into the ground without warning? How about making the responsibility for avoiding that clear and unmistakable, so there can be no arguments about who is liable?

Tell me that you want to restrict executive remuneration to a fixed multiple – say 5 – of the lowest salary or wage paid in the organisation (the Commonwealth bank used make it 10, but they seem to have given up now – and why not, when nobody else followed suit?). Tell me that you will force companies to link management bonuses to number of jobs created in the organisation – and make them negative for jobs destroyed.

Tell me that you want to overhaul our lunatic legal system, so that it doesn’t take an army of lawyers and several courts to determine the law. (And ignorance of a law that even the bloody lawyers and judges can’t agree on prior to charges being brought, should be an absolute defence.) Tell me that cases will be decided only on the basis of a just outcome, in accordance with widely understood and agreed principles (those things which keep the majority of us law abiding now, like not assaulting people or taking their possessions or liberty against their will) rather than a performance like a third rate television contest). Tell me that people who use physical violence will be locked away in extreme discomfort for a significant time – which automatically doubles for each succeeding offence. Tell me that non-violent transgressors will be subject to inconvenience and irritation, and detention as a last resort, but never in the prisons, which should be solely for the violent. Tell me that fines for everyday misdemeanours will be tiny for first offences and double for each repeat, so that accidental infringements cause no burden and deliberate repetition gets what it deserves. And make them proportional to disposable income, so that the rich are hit as hard as the poor. And tell me that nobody will be handed the equivalent of a lottery win by the courts for any reason whatsoever.

Tell me that you want to provide health care without charge for every essential need – and get tough on malingerers and hypochondriacs, who wreck the system at the expense of the needy. Tell me that people with mental health problems will be treated and cared for, not turned onto the streets.

Tell me that you want to provide education without charge for all who are prepared to work at it – but not for those who already know so much about how to run a country, or a university, or the world, that they parade the streets, buggering up other people’s lives, in order to get their own way at everyone else’s expense.

Tell me that we are going to admit that the Aboriginal people were attacked and their lands taken by force – exactly as has happened to just about every race in the rest of the world, several times in most cases – and that despite the dreadful unfairness of it we are not going to fast rewind history, so lets just get down to living together in the real world now, and get some real resources into education and medical care, so that Aboriginal people have the same opportunities as any other Australian.

Tell me that you would process refugee claims within 3 months, and automatically grant refugee status to anyone whose claim processing is not completed by then. (Of course you’d have to stop the bloody lawyers from being able to disrupt the process with frivolous ‘appeals’.)

Tell it NOW, Democrats. Or at least do something constructive. Thousands of Australians are just looking for someone to offer a fair go. A lot of them thought Pauline had the answer, because she listened to what they cared about. Maybe if you listened for a bit you could do even better than she. And maybe you should note what internal bickering and public scandal did to her party’s initial successes.

For the last time, Labour and Liberal have NOTHING (that’s spelt ’ABSOLUTELY SOD-ALL) to offer most of us. So get off your backside and walk all over them. Or make way for someone who will.

Don’t make me have to choose between those useless drongos again!

Euthanasia

In October 1940, Mr. Neville Chamberlain, former Prime Minister of Great Britain, was found to have inoperable cancer and told that he had not long to live. He wrote:

‘…this is very helpful and encouraging, for it would be a terrible prospect if I had to wait indefinitely for the end, while going through such daily miseries as I am enduring now.’

How well that evokes the horror of facing just such a ‘terrible prospect’ and enduring such ‘daily miseries’ – miseries that can only increase with time.

I find it difficult to believe that any thinking person could fail to understand and sympathise with that sentiment. Surely a majority of Australians do not wish to condemn anyone to an indefinite term of increasing ‘daily miseries’ that can only end in death; yet our Parliament, supposedly the voice of the nation, continues to support the minority who have the dreadful inhumanity to oppose voluntary euthanasia. Mr Chamberlain died in November 1940. Less fortunate people have been sentenced by the rest of us to suffer for decades.

I know that I ought to pray that the opponents of voluntary euthanasia should find themselves confronted by exactly that ‘terrible prospect’ to which they are so glibly and callously eager to condemn others, but I cannot, for then I should be no better than they. I can only wish that in this, as in many other things, our system of government would reflect the beliefs of the compassionate many rather than those of the arrogant, self-centred few.

In this, as in many other matters, I see no difference between the major parties, each of which panders to the whims of a solidly entrenched, bigoted, self-centred minority. I have to believe that such people are in the minority; what hope else is there of a life without barbarism? Yet apparently their votes are sufficient to ensure that one or the other of those parties receives a mandate to ride roughshod over the rest of us. This can only happen because many other people are conned by the old shibboleth that a vote for other than the major parties is wasted, despite the evidence that those parties do nothing for them..

The supporting argument is that a parliament that is not ruled by some absolute majority cannot provide adequate government, as it will be unable to agree on many decisions. This hangs on the unsupported but often heard claim that even a bad decision is better than no decision. There is absolutely no evidence that this is the case – in fact the conduct of the 1914-18 war, the campaigns of the Somme and the Dardanelles in particular, well illustrates that bad decisions simply cause appalling misery for no gain.

In thinking of how my single vote can be made to be in any way effective, I have concluded that I must never, under any circumstances, vote for a major party. A vote for any other candidate is preferable. Only if a majority of Australians take this course can we hope to break up the entrenched ‘establishment’ – which is supported by Liberal and Labour alike – and gain representatives who will listen to and represent our views. It may not work, but it is better than unintentionally supporting the twisted, narrow and self-serving policies of the cliques who control the legislative machinery of the major parties. A parliament of individuals with the guts to think and act for themselves, rather than a collection of party lapdogs begging for scraps, would be a wonderful thing.

Unfortunately I cannot now recall the title of the excellent book that provoked the following outburst. And the use of mobile phones in vehicles had only very recently been banned.

Policing

?? book about members of the Victoria police force should be required reading in schools – at an early age. (Or any other). And it might be a good idea for young people to be aware of the difficult and distressing nature of much police work. If young offenders’ only awareness of the police is as a group of people bent on interfering with their lives and spoiling their enjoyment, they will be positively encouraged to break the law. That said, there is quite a lot else that could be done to improve relations, (and cooperation) between police and public.

• It is not the fault of the police if they are required to enforce unpopular laws. However, as citizens themselves, police officers have a duty to object to foolish or unworkable legislation, and should use their capability as a coherent pressure group to influence politicians against promoting or supporting such legislation.
  There is, of course, no guarantee that politicians will have either the sense or the responsibility to listen to them.

• The police should be discouraged from the practice of creatively interpreting laws – as, for example, when a driver was prosecuted for using a hands-free phone, despite the fact that there was at the time there was great promotion of the use of such phones as a safety measure. This prosecution fails several tests of fairness and commonsense:

1. It is stupid and unfair to prosecute someone for what is generally accepted and encouraged as responsible behaviour, without having first made any public protest at the widespread promotion of that behaviour.
2. It is a waste of public money, and of numerous people’s time, to use the courts for this purpose.
3. Since the police constantly complain that they are under resourced, the time that they waste on such pointless trivia could be better spent on serious matters.
4. By creating the impression that they are trying to ‘catch out’ law abiding and responsible members of the public, the police encourage lawlessness and create sympathy with lawbreakers. By definition, if they want to make it a contest between them and us, they are forcing onto the side of the lawless elements of society.

• The courts should not be allowed to inflict any penalty on any person for an offence that is so obscure or lacking in commonsense that a person would probably be unaware of its existence, and for which no one has been prosecuted within living memory.

• There should be a constitutional guarantee that no law, however worded or interpreted, shall contradict the fundamental tenets of fairness and justice.

• All members of the police force should be on the lookout for aggression or bullying tactics toward the public by any officer, and this should be stamped out severely. Such tactics simply reinforce antisocial tendencies, creating more harm for the public and more demands on police resources.

Public Transport

Some years ago I sold my car. Now that our children have left home, my wife and I decided that surely we needed only one small car between us, so I have never replaced mine. We were living in Queensland then and found public transport in and out of Brisbane excellent – provided that we travelled within a narrowly defined commuter period. Beyond that, the service deteriorated rapidly and long, chilly waits were its most memorable feature. For a period prior to that time, although we both had cars, I used to travel from Magill into Adelaide CBD by bus and experienced the same problem. I only had to work and hour or so past the general leaving time and I was face with a long wait for an alternative service and then a long walk from its nearest stop to our home.

It seems to me that public transport can only be really attractive if it is usually available to take you reasonably close to wherever you need or want to go, and willing to transport whatever you need to take with you. The moment you are obliged to run a car in order to reach one destination, transport your pet, or carry heavy or bulky objects, all of your other trips in it are made at marginal cost, since you have to pay the same registration and insurance regardless of overall distance travelled and number of passengers carried. And that is always cheaper than bus and train fares, unless you have an incredibly thirsty car or park in the city centre.

The bus might be an attractive option if you want to go out for a drink or just don’t want to drive home tired after a visit to the theatre. But that is when you discover that the services nearest your home are discontinued after 6 pm and the closest alternative runs only at two-hour intervals and passes no nearer than half a kilometre from your street. And when it does arrive it may well be carrying people who make the prospect of a 10-kilometre walk home in the rain look like an attractive alternative.

And you don’t have to be enjoying the dolce vita in order to suffer. After a recent visit to my doctor’s surgery I had to wait for three quarters of an hour by a main road, in a freezing wind, with nowhere to sit, for my first bus. When I reached the interchange I found that the service nearest my home was no longer running, but after a half-hour wait, standing in the same freezing wind, I was able to get a bus to within three streets of my own.

Actually with the new, improved, services, that is the closest any bus comes now. Luckily I am neither ill nor handicapped and I frequently use a bicycle. But proximity to a bus route was a definite consideration when we bought this house, less than two years ago, so I am unlikely to harbour any friendly sentiments toward Trans Adelaide.

We could easily introduce a system of small, economical feeder buses operating off the main routes. In Sri Lanka, some years ago, we were impressed by the tremendous number of small, 35 seater, buses operating everywhere. When we commented on this we were told that businesses that operated a public bus service in additional to their other trading received government tax concessions on all of their profits. With this incentive, just about every business ran a bus service as well. Those buses were frequent and they were full; because people could take their goods and livestock with them and knew that there would be a bus home at any reasonable time afterward. But we will never see enterprise encouraged in that way here; Australian governments of all persuasions are obsessed with introducing ever-increasing masses of restrictive legislation aimed at forcing all business into the hands of a few, favoured, large players and keeping it there. And we’d be pretty stupid not to understand why.

You get what you pay for, don’t you?

Should we pay our politicians much more? Surely we would like the country managed at least as well as any good company.

Does money buy good management? In the press, statements about the need to pay unimaginable sums to attract the right leaders of industry are interspersed with reports of the criminal trials of some and the breathtaking severance payments handed out to get rid of others. This suggests that a shotgun approach is in use. The theory seems to be that you can only get the best people by paying out a fortune but you can’t tell which they are, so you take on the most rapacious of the applicants and hope that they will turn out to be of some benefit to you.

I don’t know whether rapacity is itself a valuable quality in anyone charged with the direction of a great organisation. It seems to me more likely that the ability of large corporations to support grossly inflated remuneration at the top causes the rapacious to claw their way to the head of them; we will never know how much more successful those organisations might have been under the people who were elbowed out of the way.

That’s a bit of a problem isn’t it? Ol’ Sol Trujillo is pulling down the best part of nine million dollars a year from Telstra, even though, according to all reports, his past history does not demonstrate any great competence in successfully running a telecommunications business. Marcus Clarke wasn’t kept short of a shilling, yet he managed to bankrupt not only the State Bank of South Australia but pretty much the State also. Judging from what has been written about his past record he must have been the only person who put his hand up for the vacancy. Giving the job to the first person in the CES queue could hardly have created a worse outcome. Then we have Bond, Skase, Williams, and numerous other examples of the quality that a high income attracts.

If paying excessive amounts is the only way to obtain excellent management we should not be surprised at the mediocrity of the majority of our present politicians; rather we should stand amazed at the quality of the remainder. And surprisingly few appear to be actively dishonest, although that could be due more to lack of opportunity than strength of character.

So should we raise the Prime Minister’s salary to, say, a nice round ten million dollars, hoping that this would attract the sort of person who is capable of managing a large organisation competently? There would have to be a proportionate increase for other ministers, MPs and senators, of course. Would we then see in them a corresponding increase in the sort of behaviour that we have come to associate with the top end of the corporate sector? Or would we get people who were committed to doing useful work instead of constantly having pointless slanging matches with each other?

I don’t know the answers, but I’d like to see the experiment tried. It could be financed by a special tax on high-income recipients, to be deducted from the gross before any other deductions.

This again is very dated, though the sentiments are not. More recently I was astounded at the furore over Christine Holgate’s award of watches as a bonus to a couple of people who had negotiated a hugely profitable business deal for the Post Ofice. It seemed that the problem was mainly that these were CARTIER watches – always spoken of in a breathy hiss, as though they were something obscene. The actual cost was, adjusted for inflation over the years, rather less than I, when a very minor manager, received for some work that provided a minor competitive advantage for my employer. I wonder if poor Christine had simply given them sacks of cash nothing at all would have happened. Interestingly the lady was snapped up pretty quickly by someone who had no doubt of her capability to get the best out of people.

Fair’s fair – or is it?

Just suppose that someone wanted to build a just and equitable society. Nobody has done it in recent times except possibly in some remote parts of the South American jungles that we are unaware of. And I’m talking of a society that is fair to everyone, not confined to a single group or nation. Adolf Hitler promised it to the Germans, together with a motorcar for everyone, but it didn’t extend to the places that he conquered and he got most of the Germans killed anyway. (The Volkswagen lasted longest but even that is a fake now.) The Founding Fathers of the USA tried but they didn’t consider blacks and poor whites to be part of ‘The People’ and what small part of the government eventually became ‘of, by and for’ them is being rapidly eroded. And they aren’t at all happy when foreigners freely elect governments that they don’t like – well as freely as they can with electoral processes that are as flawed as those in the USA.

So where do we start? With Adam Smith, or Jesus Christ; Karl Marx or Mohammed?

Let’s start with old Karl, who enjoyed a far more comfortable existence than did the unfortunate subjects of his social experiments in the wonderful world of communism. ‘From each according to his abilities; to each according to his needs.’ Let’s ignore the gender implications, which may have been unintentional, and take the second proposition first. Who decides these needs? Did Alan Bond need money to buy artworks and yachts more than the pensioners whose funds he squandered need money for food? No doubt he thought so. And if he created nothing much of value in return, perhaps he lacked the ability to do so. Wow! That’s both criteria met. He really was being a good communist.

What about Adam, then? His only problem seems to have been blindness to the degree to which rapaciousness and plain crookedness distort the workings of the ‘free’ market. His reasoning was perfectly sound but his conclusions resembled a house of cards built in a strong gale.

And Jesus? No doubt he meant well but his words on the subject of camels and needles don’t seem to carry much weight in the Vatican and nor does that bit about selling all that thou hast and giving to the poor. And as for all the effort his dad put into chipping away at those tablets of stone, did the Crusaders ever even read that bit about ‘Thou shalt not kill’? It’s pretty evident that Geo. W Bush Esq. hasn’t.

O.K. Mohammed perhaps. The idea of Muslims not going in for usury seems to be slipping a little and a few of them are skipping the prohibition on booze but mostly they seem to be logically consistent. It’s O.K. to kill people who don’t share your religious beliefs – and they do, whether Shia or Sunni. They don’t have rock bands and bingo sessions in their mosques. Their legal system is somewhat harsh by our standards but ours is quite puerile compared to theirs. Towards serious offenders that is. If you commit some minor misdemeanor under our system or are a woman under theirs you can expect little justice or mercy.

None of the above seem to cater for a wide spectrum of beliefs and yearnings. I haven’t mentioned the Jews. They just seem to want to work and study hard and not hurt anyone but it’s difficult to join if your mum isn’t Jewish. I’m looking for a system to cater for greater numbers and total diversity.

I think I should declare an interest. I am an individual. So what I am going to suggest will not appeal to that section of humanity that wishes to force people to join, conform, obey and generally subjugate their own wishes to those of others. I am willing to surrender some of my interests in the interest of the greater community but I want it to be as few as possible and I want to ask as little as possible from others. So why should I surrender anything?

For protection. If everyone is free to do as they wish then anyone who wishes can rob, assault, torture, bully, enslave or even kill me. I would prefer that they don’t do that.

For diversity. If we all grow our own food, make our own shoes, build our own houses and perform our own brain surgery we will not have time to develop art, architecture, music, drama, education, philosophy, sport, or any other of the non-productive trivia and useful skills that we value so much.

So I am in favour of both government and infrastructure. And I am prepared to spend more time than I wish doing something that I don’t particularly like doing but can do reasonably well, so that other people can devote their efforts to whatever they do well. That’s how division of labour works.

Before reforming the world, perhaps I should look at things at home.

Here in Australia we frequently hear whining about how dreadful it is to want to cut down ‘tall poppies’. Well I come from a farming background so I know that tall poppies are showy and useless, consuming resources intended for more beneficial crops and capable of causing misery for many people. The parallel with Alan Bond and Christopher Skase seems evident to me. Let’s not confuse notoriety with worth. I am extremely anti fatcat. Nobody ‘earns’ at ten or a hundred times the rate of anyone else who works reasonably hard for 40 hours a week. Such disproportionate incomes owe more to scheming and manipulation than to socially useful activity.

So much for unfairness in the workplace. How about our ludicrously misnamed ‘Justice System’. How accurately George Orwell anticipated the use of such names, in his classic ‘1984’. Let’s start with fines – ignoring for the moment the question of whether guilt and innocence are fairly determined. Let us say that a person earning $500 a week is fined $50. That is a terrifying sum. After paying for food and rent, fares to work and other essentials, there is practically nothing left to start with. To inflict the same degree of punishment on Kerry Packer or Rupert Murdoch you would have to fine them billions of dollars, and even then they would have the contacts and the credit to avoid actual hardship. Even to a person on $50,000 a year it would be no more than an inconvenience. Yet fines are not set to cause the same degree of pain and despair to the affluent as to the poor. No justice there.

But of course, Kerry and Rupert would not be found guilty. Nor would they have to waste their time and suffer the ignominy of a court appearance. If a couple of phone calls to the right people were not enough to get the matter dropped, enough legal firepower could be brought to bear to stop almost any prosecution in its tracks. The law holds little terror for those with well-lined pockets – they even have a good chance of bringing counter charges and making a profit thereby.

How about taxes? Taking even 80% from someone who still has enough to live like the proverbial pig in shit is far less onerous than taking 25% from someone who can barely make ends meet. And the pig can hire accountants and take part in schemes to virtually avoid tax altogether. And what is it all for? Most of the services that our taxes pay for are principally for the benefit of the rich, or at least the tolerably well off. Income tax is a farce that needs to be abolished. The fair way would be to tax money when it’s spent. That way, people who can afford little would pay little tax. Nor would those who saved – until they spent it.

The Australian Democrats once proposed to simply tax money movements – a scheme also proposed by Pauline Hanson during her brief but horrific moment of fame. It is perfectly practicable; fids and bads seemed to work efortlessly enough. The risk of creating a cash economy would be easily avoided, by making cash deals over, say $5000, illegal and reissuing the currency, in a different format, every five years – with a maximum exchangeable amount of $5000. Banknotes wear out and have to be replaced anyway and any extra printing and distribution cost would be more than balanced by doing away with the ATO. It wouldn’t take many people to ensure that the banks were complying – and the threat to take away their licences if they fiddled should be enough to keep them in line. Opulent offices and excessive salaries for tax commissioners would no longer be needed and thousands of tax accountants could be redeployed on constructive tasks. Tax dodging-whether evasion or avoidance – would simply cease, and criminals would find money laundering difficult; even if they succeeded they would at least pay tax.

Of course taxes are used as a political lever. A country that apparently needs eight governments – six State, one Territory, and the Federal – to control a population slightly smaller than that of one of the world’s major cities offers plenty of scope for political tomfoolery. The wretched GST, which imposes a considerable load of useless work and worry, particularly on small businesses, seems to have been created mainly as a political tool. Unfortunately it is probably too much to hope that we could simply tax the money flowing through the financial institutions and give the job of running the whole country to Brisbane City Council. We would at least get a decent ‘bus service that way.

I note that the almost universal use of credit and debit cards that has occurred since that was written makes such control ineffective. Unfortunately it may be difficult to harness the brains that created this, admittedly useful and convenient system, to create suitable controls against its misuse.

The Third Alternative

The present limited options of Capitalist and Socialist ideological politics, are each based on the identical concept of ‘More for Us at the expense of Them’.

I propose instead that both legislation and behaviour should be governed by the concepts of fairness and equality. But because those concepts are so widely misused and abused, I have defined the following tenets, with which all behaviour and laws should comply.

• No one shall deprive any citizen of their liberty or possessions except by their informed consent to the performance of a lawful and fair transaction, or by due process of law, as punishment for an infringement.
• No person shall subject another to physical assault. (But the reasonable and restrained correction of children’s behaviour by moderate physical punishment shall NOT constitute assault.)
• No law shall contradict the concept of fairness. The outcome of every legal action shall be subject to the test ‘is this a fair outcome’ and shall fail if it is not adjudged to be so. The final, optional, course of appeal shall be to a jury of 12 citizens, none of whom shall be members of the police of the legal professions. The decision of a two-thirds majority of this jury shall be final, and shall determine between Confirmation, Acquittal, or Retrial.
• No one shall purchase a legal advantage.
• Ownership and disposition of wealth shall be kept within reasonable bounds, so that it does not excessively disadvantage other citizens.

I do not expect to see any significant progress toward these ideals during my remaining life expectation. My experience of Facebook and Twitter – both of which I have now severed all contact with – revealed such a startling proportion of people lacking any form of tolerance or understanding of others that it seems that greed, selfishness and stupidity are the defining characteristic of the vast majority of the human race.

And yet perhaps the persistence of the socially responsible few will still prevail.

Dear faithful fans (who?) I regret having starved you of my elegant prose for so long and I apologise.

(Actually I re-read most of the past writing and decided it was simply mindless drivel, so I ought to back off and try to find something better to say, and say it better!)

Now I have other things that I must do but I will make a determined effort to entertain you soon.