PH, I don't think any of us want the state to force people to do anything, other than abide by the law of the land, but, if possible, to encourage people (not force them) to be honest and responsible, thoughtful citizens - and maybe even be good to one another?

One the other hand, what I think We Want is for the state to be responsible in its administration of fiscal, infrastructure, and immigration portfolios, so that Oz may continue to be a good place to live, and so that current shortcomings in services may be overcome - such as in education, healthcare, aged care, welfare, public transport, housing, environment, etc...

We expect a lot from our government, as we should, and an important part of our expectation is that Oz population growth will be managed in a responsible way (particularly with immigration), so that Oz will continue to be a stable, secure nation, all of whose population may continue to enjoy a good, and progressively improving, standard of living, security, employment and quality of life.

Hazza
If all that is done, what specific difference will it make?

1- Why “except maternity/paternity leave”?

And I presume you include scrapping public funding of schooling? No? Another exception? And scrapping public funding of children's medical care? No? Another exception?

>2- Counteract social stigma of contraceptives, condoms and abortions
How? Make it illegal to stigmatise? You are treating the state like a wishing well, a fairy godmother, a god.

> 3- ensure all property development is at the discretion of local voters
Why just property development? Why shouldn’t the voters also veto food production, sexual intercourse, pregnancy, childbirth?

> 4- Counteract the culture that older employees are a liability
How? More state-worship.
Have you ever employed an older employee?

> 5. And repeating 5- reduce demand for workers by continuing implementation of automated substitutes.
The problem is Hazza, you don’t understand the issues, and then when it’s explained to you, you *still* don’t understand them.

Saltpetre
>PH, I don't think any of us want the state to force people to do anything

>One the other hand, what I think We Want is for the state to be responsible in its administration of fiscal, infrastructure, and immigration portfolios…

(good luck with that)

>…so that Oz may continue to be a good place to live, and so that current shortcomings in services may be overcome - such as in education, healthcare, aged care, welfare, public transport, housing, environment, etc...

Saltpetre, obviously you haven’t given this five seconds thought in your whole life. So because non-one here wants the state to force people to do anything, we should abolish the tax department tomorrow, is that what you’re saying? Funding of government action in education, healthcare, aged care, welfare, public transport, housing, etc. should be voluntary, not forced?

Squeers
Your question of me is disingenuous, because you criticize “rationalism” as an intellectual method remember, and haven’t answered my *much* earlier and thrice-repeated question whether Pythagoras’s theorem can be rationally proved or disproved – obviously because you know very well that your answer will prove you a fool either way.

You answer me first.

You miss my point Peter. Human imaginings are peripheral and completely subordinate to the more essential, over-riding planetary force of biodiversity. Governments and Nation States are both as equally imagined, and as disposable in the natural scheme of things, as is the Free Market of your dreams.

To the extent that any of these contrived forms act deleteriously toward the assets and the function of biodiversity, and all of them inherently and consistently do so, they are counter-productive to the long term benefit and basic freedom of humanity. They are agencies of self-harm and potential extinction, not productive evolution.

Far from being a conduit to efficient production and distribution, the ‘Free Market’ is a mechanism by which well-leveraged resource owners can freely dominate and abuse the vast bulk of less well-positioned and/or less ambitious citizens. In terms of resource sustainability it has been said that the capitalist free market is the most effective means ever devised for turning natural resources into landfill – aka useful form into useless entropy.

Leftist cries for the many and various nanny state interventions that you (and I) abhor are entirely predictable and humane responses to the socio-economic violence proven to inevitably result from the indulgences taken by powerful players within unfettered capitalist markets.

That these interventions are futile and self-defeating due to the scale and corrupting power they give to the corporation of the state is lost on the average leftist. Their advocacy becomes an embedded facet of social identity, and possibly also an attribute of employment, rather than a clear-minded idealism.

I acknowledge the (relatively) more clear-minded idealism of the free-marketeer, which is to become economically predominant as an individual. Ultimately, however, this is a muddled view as it leads to ecological, social and, thereby, also individual destruction.

While humanity’s supporting superstructure of biodiversity burns under the torch of insatiable human greed, the political debate fiddles furiously with itself within a blinkered dialectic of left and right. It’s a complex manifest form of the simple song lyric about the village idiot amusing himself by abusing himself and catching it in his hat.

wallumi
So you are not in favour of any policy on population?

I am not in favor of policies that actively promote population increase. The fact is that population growth trends underway in this country are largely, if not entirely, due to such policy.

I am in favor of policies that engage and assist people to better understand the framework of physical reality that surrounds them. The balance between human demand and local resource capacity is one of the most vital of these realities.

The free market you advocate works contrary to both of these views by way of such functions as manipulative advertising, agglomeration of media ownership within limited range of very large corporate entities, general acts of self-interested socio-political thuggery by the large corporate players, etc.

And Peter hummmmm, the point is, where are they going to go! They see right through us:) You might be here to play, but a bigger population in or round, will end up, as you well know.

Lets put more ban-aids on a problem we knew we could of avoided.

Now your all pissing up a tree.......and starting to piss me off:(

The numbers game is up!

Your now called out.

What now with the masses......are you going to fix?

I cant wait to here this one.

LEA