I have lived in Australia for 20 years. I feel that there is an acceptance of corruption and a lack of will to call people to account. It seems to be a sort of "live and let live" or "she'll be right" or "that's just what business/politics is". I have never got accustomed to this mentality. I see the vast waste of resources and opportunities that it causes.

I think that this attitude has been strengthened by the false belief that business can answer all our troubles and that it is the role of government to assist business. Victoria is a prime example of the corruption/faq no 4 linked to in the article- ie expensive projects that are white elephants.

Can we rename the “Governments Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme” – “The Spiv’s charter?

Kellie, I’ll leave the sub-issue of climate change alone, but the corruption issue is interesting.

Difficult though it seems for us to choose good over bad, the shear complexity of our societies has made things a thousand times worse. Industrialization has created more needs, wants and desires. It has created “things” that others have. It has created a vast and ever growing infrastructure that requires more and more input to feed our increasing desires. It has also created a treadmill that we are terrified to abandon for fear of losing what we have or not gaining what we desire. The net result is that we humans increasingly accept compromise and mitigation as our excuse for choosing to be bad. Simply put, we must do bad things to other humans because this is our way to “survive”. We adopt the attitude that if we don’t hop on the bandwagon, someone else will.

What we see as a result today, is the extreme levels of cheating and corruption throughout every single society and institution across our entire planet. I have tried hard to find institutions that have yet to hit the media for corrupt action by humans, there are a few.

To further compound our ability as a species, to engage in meaningful debate about the real issue of our human state, our media, religious, political, financial, social commentators focus our entire attention upon the symptoms rather than the causes.

The debate is endlessly focused by commentators upon the rules, who and how they were broken and what needs to be done about it. Read any newspaper; listen to any news broadcast or current affairs program.

All you will ever read or hear will be who broke the rules, how they broke the rules and what if anything should be done about it. In most cases of course, this ends up with the usual and predictable result. Blame someone else, make excuses, increase the penalties and/or make some more rules. Our acceptance and mitigation of “wrong doing” has reached truly staggering proportions.

The UN is sadly, no different.

Corruption is part of human fallen nature. Blind Freddie can see that. The problem is when people think they are exempt from this category. Whether it is stealing a pen from work or ripping off Centrelink it is corruption. The Only incorruptible One was and is Jesus Christ. The distaste for Him uncovering the hypocrisy of many lead them to causes such as saving the environment or stopping domestic violence or saving the whale. While these might be noble causes often the activist use these causes to try and display some sort of superior morality. Unless a man has his heart cleansed from corruption and hypocrisy nothing will change in the earth. In fact the downward slide continues. I am amused at the self righteous historians who paint previous generations as barbarians while endorsing the slaughter of unborn today.

Well said Kellie. Systemic corruption. You've named it.

Perhaps we need to put electronic trackers on all lobbyists and monitor every meeting they have with pollies. And post their meetings on the internet. Figuratively if not literally. And election campaigns must be publicly funded, with very low limits on individual donations.

Does that include Green-Left NGOs, Geoff?