You have *total* control over whether you buy a service in the private sector, they are liable to account to you, and are liable for misrepresentation, failure to perform, and fraud.

Businesses are *totally* subject to the sovereignty of consumers, because profit and loss means if they don't provide what consumers want, they disappear.

None of that applies to government. Voting is compulsory. You only get to vote once every three years. You get only one twenty-mllionth of a say. In practice you have no control over what politicians decide. The competing parties all have an interest in presenting the same policies to get the same majorities. You are forced into the result whether you voted for it or not. The laws against fraud or total failure to perform do not apply. Politicians and bureaucrats are not accountable to anyone they take the money from. People can force someone else to pay the costs. The more the bureaucracies fail, the bigger they get. They are incapable of economic calculation in terms of profit and loss except by reference to the private sector. Without economic calculation, if things are not to be done for a profit, they can only be done for a loss.

How is that better or more representative of the good of society?

Do you feel any responsibility for the houses that got burnt down because of your support for this dopey scheme? No. Are you going to hold *yourself* accountable? No.

It's like dealing with the creationists. You point out all the evidence and explaining power for the theory of evolution, and contrast it with the total lack of evidence for creation, and they retreat into the ignorance of asserting that's it's all a matter of opinion.

Your mentality is the same as that which in former ages burnt witches at the stake, refused to consider the irrationality of your own belief system when it was pointed out, and continues to insist that arbitrary irrational violence is the only possible basis of a better society.

[Comment deleted for abuse and poster suspended].

[Deleted for abuse and poster suspended]

[Deleted for abuse and poster has been suspended]

Peter Hume,

Did I just hear the word "challenge"? - closely followed by "liar" and "idiot" - sounds a familiar scenario.

This is a grown-ups forum. I'm afraid you'll have to learn to stop calling people names when they disagree with you.

The Governments biggest problem was that they put too much trust in the integrity of the small business owner.

It's not the Government that's ripping off the taxpayer and rorting the system, it's the multitude of greedy mini-capitalists milking the system for a quick buck.

However, the Governments failing was their haste in getting this programme out.

When they were looking around for some sort of rapid stimulus they found this scheme sitting on the shelf - left behind by Malcolm Turnbull when he was Minister for the Environment.

Instead of going through the usual protracted administrative methods they just pushed it out into the marketplace and hoped for the best.