Pericles,
If someone looks around the world, we are being left behind.

There are plans to create 800 new universities in India alone, not even mentioning the mega billions that countries such as China are spending on education.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/28/international/asia/28universities.html

We will simply not be able to compete and create a knowledge based society by importing.

To create students and teachers that are innovative and likely to create a knowledge based society, there has to be a stop to how much the education systems are importing.

If they want to spend taxpayer funding on technology, they have to start spending that money within this country.

There also has to be an ethos to produce something, and not taking the laziest approach and import everything.

Unfortunately, I can’t see that occurring in the current education system.

Renew,
There might be something someone in Australia has installed into an imported dump truck.

An "I Love Catapiller" sticker perhaps.

Pericles here is my "Not Much" Derivatives are the $600 trillion or more gorillas in today's financial room. There would very and quite simply not be anything remotely approaching the tense talks on Greek debt that we see if not for the derivatives exposure of some of the main parties (banks) involved in these talks. It's not about a handful of billions of dollars the IMF will or will not fork over; that's what these guys literally pay for their peanuts. The problem lies in the bets, the wagers, in the shape of default swaps, to the tune of trillions of dollars, that are out there, and that risk being triggered by a default being declared a "credit event", either by the ratings agencies, or the International Swaps and Derivatives Association, or both. A mjaor part of this is that nobody knows how big this is.

Credit-default swaps are the kind of derivatives that were behind the blow-up of the American International Group and the near meltdown that followed in the global financial system.

In his recent confirmation hearing to be the next leader of the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi, the central banker of Italy, warned that no one really knows who is on the hook for these risky financial instruments. “Who are the owners of credit-default swaps? Who has insured others against a default of the country?” he asked.

Warning of a potential “chain of contagion,” he argued against requiring banks to restructure Greek debt — which could involve extending repayment terms or writing off principal — even though Greece’s apparent inability to pay in full makes a restructuring all but inevitable.

It's 2050 in the old Christian calendar, year 3 in the new world order when every person over 16 years had the opportunity to cast an electronic vote for the world government.

The world's richest woman Gina Rinehart Junior won the World presidency by popular vote on the strength of her acclaimed efforts in exceeding the old United Nations millenium goals, a project achieved in collaboration with her independently wealthy partner Maxim Sinalot.

The new world order was a long time coming, but when it came, people asked why it took so long for the human race to wait for the catastrophe before getting its affairs in order.

I notice that you carefully avoided the question, Geoff of Perth.

"Where would the money go? More importantly, where would it come from?"

I suspect the reason for is that you do not have an answer.

But don't feel bad. If "Mario Draghi, the central banker of Italy" doesn't know, there is no particular reason why you should, I guess.

For myself, I'd be amazed if the risk hasn't been hedged into oblivion, especially given the length of time that has elapsed since CDSs were discovered to be toxic.

And vanna, there is one small problem in your reasoning.

>>If they want to spend taxpayer funding on technology, they have to start spending that money within this country.<<

But we don't have any suppliers, do we? And if we did, the cost would be prohibitive which would render it unaffordable. There is a reason - in fact, there are many reasons - why we don't build stuff here. The main ones are that we don't have the labour force, nor the economies of scale that they have overseas.

Don't think we haven't tried. In 1990 there were somewhere around 350 individual manufacturers of PC hardware in Australia, mostly mom-and-pop outfits plugging boards into chassis, but a few were quite significant for a while. In the end, though, it just didn't make sense, as the price of overseas finished products kept falling, and local costs did not.

The future for us is far more likely to be as the destination of choice for middle-class Chinese tourists, of which quite soon there will be hundreds of millions, than "the clever country".

Assuming that we lift our game substantially, that is. Being a service industry is not something we are very good at.

And it occurs to me that you didn't answer the question either...

"What would you propose that we teach our students? And who would teach them?"

Pericles,

a couple of very simple facts that you need to take note of:

Global finance and banking (all money whether paper-coin/electronic) is derived from "Fractional Reserve Banking System" i.e. released at interest.

To permit this economy to function you need to have growth, its imperative to pay off the interest on money loaned into the system.

To permit growth you need cheap energy, energy above about 6% of GDP stalls growth in all economies.

Hence, loss of cheap energy, loss of growth, then the whole Ponzi scheme falls apart. Pretty basic when you think about it. How's that for answering your question?

So Vanna we should go back to paper and pens cuase we don't make computers here?

To the Author great vision but we don't have the political foresight to make it happen. We have n't got a governement whom ever is in power to either make it happen or get out the way to let someone else do it. oh well