Thanks, Marko.

A thoughtful and useful article.

We are truly caught between a rock and a hard place at the Federal level. On the one hand there is an incompetent pro-business Labor Government that is wasting vast amounts of money in order to 'stimulate' our business sector instead of just spending the money directly on worthwhile Government projects.

On the other hand we have an Opposition that every day moves closer to reclaiming the appalling legacy of the Howard era that less than two years ago it tried to disown.

In Queensland the State Parliamentarians are completely beyond the control of the rank and file. On the Queen's Birthday weekend the state Labor Conference didn't even have the backbone to oppose privatisation even though the Government has no mandate whatsoever to privatise and 84% (now 86%) of public opinion is against privatisation.

I think Queensland would be much better off to see the end of this Government sooner, rather than later, for this and many other good reasons.

There is a risk that we could end up with a nasty Kennett style Coalition Government, but if Queenslanders don't stand up to this Government we stand a much greater chance of getting that anyway, whether the Labor Government becomes such a government or whether the political demoralisation of Queenslanders allows a newly elected Liberal National Party Government to become that Government.

Slasher, I agree that when economic rationalism means reducing all values to dollars and cents, that's a disaster. I spent the last decade of my Commonwealth public service career trying to combat the excesses of eocnomic rationalism and managerialism.

When you talk of "the left", do you mean people whose concern is mainly for community (social interest, rather than just economic interest)? I believe the fundamental objective of public policy should not be "efficiency" (however a powerful means to an end that CAN be), but the well-being of people in our community.

But how do you measure well-being? People are perverse enough to differ on how they see THEIR well-being. They vary a lot in extent of materialism. Some are irredeemably selfish.

You give three prescriptions for the left:
1.quantitative monetary measures, ie regulation - like the very prescriptive lending guidelines banks had to observe 30 years ago? Also, should Keating have used quantitative import restrictions instead of the blunter instrument of interest rates to deal with the collapse of commodity prices at "banana republic" time? The longer-term policy states were high.

2. "democratizing corporate Australia". What does this mean? Employee representatives on corporate boards? I can't think of what else. Are you talking of representation, or control?

3. Influencing the investment cycle. How? By fiscal policy (as now, with the government's Keynesian stimulus package)? Or by forcing companies to spend at least some of their money in a particular way? That has been tried in the past with mandatory local processing requirements from mineral developments. It came in for lots of criticism on economic efficiency grounds, including longer term viability of such forced investments.

I certainly believe that economic policy should have a heart, but it can't cut off the head!

What do you think of Lindsay Tanner?

Glorfindel,

Quantitative controls are simply having different reserve ratios for different sectors. This means when asset bubbles form the reserve changes the ratio of reserves that must be required to be held with the reserve bank. http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=9401.
Secondly democraticising corporate Australia is much broader than employee reps on boards, eliminating the Tamany Hall influences such as purchased proxy votes by non-shareholders to be used at shareholders meetings (BrisConnections), eliminate ballots where the board can track outcomes during voting and hence round up votes for the results it wants, identify key issues that require shareholder ballots and allow individual unit holders of superannuation and managed funds to exercise proportionate votes rather than the trustees of the funds.
Thirdly to influence investment cycle we need to establish industry funds where corporations place pre tax profits into funds to invest in future projects similar to Swedish investment funds. see http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=8678

The ALP has not represented the interests of ordinary Australians for decades. Working men in particular have seen their children abused by the anti family, loony, left, lesbian, femanazi, paedophile policies that labour have been promoting and implementing for years. If you want to abuse children vote labour. Q, What does ALP stand for? A, Associated Lesbian Paedophiles.