Well said.
Alas, the conservatives do not have the concentration span necessary to get the main points so this essay will be misunderstood, but nice try.
We need some crafty solutions to counter the self serving corporate powers, which include the entire mainstream media.
It may help if the Australian Bureau of Statistics came up with some relevant yet transparent metrics such as a quality of life index, a wealth disparity index, a real GDP that takes quality into account, etc. instead of the traditional opaque and meaningless "economic indicators" such as GDP, inflation and unemployment. (Which are *supposed* to represent true economic activity but do not.)
The fix must come from the bottom up as they apparently shoot statesmen in political parties before they can mature these days. Maybe the core is just too rotten and we are destined to follow the US into national decline until we are conquered or embark on conquest. That would be sad and very costly. It's kind of hard to be optimistic when the lessons from the Bush/Howard decade are clearly being ignored. Folks *still* insist that Howard's credit bubble and economic regression was "good management"! How can you learn when denial is so strong?

The system isn't devoid of idealism. Only YOU'RE not meant to know what the IDEALS are ..

The Anglo MultiCultural scam only survives by preferential votes.
Anglos PREFER a democro-oligarchy where in a pretend multicultural system they dominate & control Federal politics, the TAXES, GST, police, armed forces and public service bureaucracies.

Yet the anglos can't survive with economic growth unless the keep immigrating our 'skills on the cheap', our GST contribs and OUR world market and political INFLUENCE so LABOR and LIBERAL alike can live as capital 'K' Kings in a little 'd' democracy.

All very clever really. But foreign borns are 31% and will soon enough reach 50 or 60 % of population. Then LOOK OUT!

We're gonna take over everything and kick those lazy anglo bastards out. Then we can raise GST and tax the population & the 'twiggiless miners' silly. And we will send all the big profits back to Europe, China, Africa and India where they BELONG.

Australia after all is the WORLD's mine. It doesn't belong to a bunch of lazy anlglo ex-convicts, or 6 billion boat people looking for 'better lives' in what we'all know is a cruel 'survival of the FITTEST' EUROPEAN's world.

We'll keep the anglo PVC -dioxin pollution from Auburn all the way up&down the M4 to kill all the babies in the western suburbs & the increasing bacteria laced biodiesel exhausts to decimate anglo numbers and 'will' across the nation & we'll keep their killer EPA bureaucracies that turn a blind eye while profits are at stake.
When we take over we'll clean it up for the betterment of OUR kids.

Thanks to Klaas Woldring(http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/voters-power-is-immense-so-lets-use-it-20100818-12epf.html?posted=error#makeComment) for raising this issue.

The PREFERENCES must go to Euro immigrants and sooner than later! The preferential anglo system can first be replaced by a proportional voting system and stay that way till our numbers pass 50%.

Then we take over.

Great essay.

Orion Magazine http://www.orionmagazine.org has been telling us this for years. Wendell Berry has always been a constant presence there.

As has Resurgence http://www.resurgence.org and the Schumacher College.

Both promote the Small is Beautiful concept.

It's all well & good to harp on about the handful of industrialists who collect all the profits through an economical model which is no longer workable or so we'll see very soon. Not only do we need to look at the industrialists who make insane profits via their respective industry but we need to even more look at bureaucracy which costs us more then the industrialists without any contribution whatsoever. We keep saying that we can't just keep having growth and rightly so but how come no-one says anything about halting the growth in the non-productive Public Service ? This is the real threat to our society, too many are getting handsome reward for doing nothing or even worse for throwing spanners into the works. We are spending billions on decease research when the greatest & worst decease wreaking havoc on society is greed. Ill will fare the land & it's people.