This is a useful discussion, and the kind we don't hear enough. I fear that the vacuous pronouncements of Julia Gillard are unlikely to help. Will someone please tell the Prime Minister that her empty slogans just don't cut it from the chief policy maker in the land. Is she really so lacking in the art of politics that she can't talk intelligently but plainly about issues? Or does she really think the electorate is full of morons who can't tell empty rhetoric from real ideas? Even stirring rhetoric seems to be beyond her, given the bland and banal language she employs in public. The Australian people to whom she so often appeals want and deserve better.

Good article.
What is progressive? Is the fine art of balancing "freedom" with waste due to inequality.
Once wealthy, the marginal benefit of $100 is minimal compared to the marginal benefit of someone on the street, who might sleep undercover and eat well for that sum. For the wealthy folk, the $100 is a night on the fine wine or fine steak.
This is *not* to say that we should equalise all wealth nor steal from the wealthy...just that diminishing returns means that vast inequality is not optimal for generating utility from economic wealth.
More importantly, the wealthy get more value and the economy is more stable and productive when inequality is lessened.
The freedom of the well off to work and achieve more should not be curtailed (on that the loony Left are wrong), however their ability to leverage that wealth and keep the poor poor *must* be curtailed: hence anti-trust, anti-monopoly, and "progressive tax" laws.
In the last decade or so real wages have fallen, real corporate profits have risen, executive salaries have exploded and housing inflation has boomed. Full time work is now not sufficient for most people to raise a family, so taxpayers are bailing out all parents, wealthy or not. Those fortunate enough to have paid off their houses before the age of easy credit came along made hundreds of thousands of dollars for doing nothing! The effect of this has been massive wealth transfer from asset poor youth to the asset rich older gens.
The GFC was a reset moment, when the fake credit profits should have been dissolved like the digital figments they were...instead the governments took on the risk and allowed the faux-profits to be realised. By doing so we now face an ongoing depression: all that fake money will take years to pay off because it is the entire economy doing so. All this to maintain the "profits" of banks and bankers.
This is the opposite of progressive: It is regressive (and Evil!) to protect the profits of billionaires by stealing from the rest of us!

godo "does she really think the electorate is full of morons who can't tell empty rhetoric from real ideas?"

Yes, and it seems to be working for her

How long do you give abbott at the front. 3 months.

In a word... yep.

h and 579

Are you blokes so one eyed that you cannot evaluate history accurately?

Really how long do you think it is going to take Hawker/Britton, Shorten, Arbib, Howes and the rest of the faceless morons, who still run the Labor Party, to twig to the fact Julia is still unelectable.

I reckon till the first Abbott engineered crisis.

After Rudd was elected I predicted he'd disappoint a lot of people.

Now I predict between them Brown and Gillard will confuse people, try to take advantage of that confusion and then will enrage people.

She's only PM because David Hawker, from Hawker/Britton, as chief adviser to the two witless cranks, managed to find their basest price. Windsors was to protect the fortune he's received from the coal miners and Shuttlecocks was the stench from ministerial leather.