Are you lot all mad? I most definitely don't want anyone to govern my life.

Even more so, I don't need or want any leader.

Just think of a few of them, Caesar, Napoleon, Hitler, Churchill, The more you name the more dead people you can find. Leaders, you can keep them.

Then lets try governments. Every time there is something to do, they stuff it up. Could anyone other than governments have given us our fool railway gauges?

Water grid, & desalination plants anyone?

How about bush fire control & planning?

Our health care system?

Iraq, or Afghanistan?

Do I need to go further?

Betsy, do these type of articles really get you a masters? It does require some substantiating evidence to support your theme. See above.

What we need is protection from leaders. A simple manager would perhaps be able to get transport, health & education working a little better, But no leadership, or governing thanks.

Yes "Trashcanman":

Anti-homosexual
Anti-immigration
Anti-Education
Anti-Asian
Anti-progress
Anti-Julia Gillard
Anti-Tony Abbott
Anti-Coles and Woolworths
Anti-Anti gun laws
Anti-Anti dog laws
And that is just a few "pet" (so to speak) hates.

This article lost me after the first few paragraphs. The premise of Australia being a free market system is so patently false that I didn't waste my time with the rest of it. We are so regulated that complexity has become the issue, no one understand the vast behemoth the foul hand of Government has stirred from their cauldron.

As to a free market utopia being promised, it's simply put forward as a better solution then others. Truly Governing ? is not being paternalistic.

Diverdan; it is not the ‘holier than thou’. It is the perception of acquired privilege, that assumption that a learning institution can exempt one from working for repaying the services exacted from people relegated to menial tasks.

I will stand corrected if anyone can name one rubbish collector that has the hobby of studying, say, History of philosophy. In truth I met a man engaged in Mycology working as a rail guard, but that was nearly seventy years ago when I arrived to this country, and, working at CSL as bottle washer, I marveled at the down to hearth attitude of scientists ‘with calluses on their hands’. I vividly remember the stature of the director of that place, a Dr. Percival Beazley, who eventually was sacked for torpedoing the ‘Queeny’ Mr. R G Menzies’ plans to sell those Labs to British interests.

TrashcanMan, yesterday I saw an acquaintance that had been to visit his place of birth. He told me: “if anyone wants to know how well off we are, should visit the Balkans.

We are rich, judging by the wealth we fling into bins, when we don't strew it on trains and parks, wealth that soon will regret having wasted.

In the last three weeks I have been visiting a not-well-man at the Royal Melbourne hospital where I could not help noting that the greatest part of the caring staff were from pacific and African countries.

Great people that our Government would so much wish they drowned before reaching the shore of this ‘our’ country.

Again, I would stand corrected if one could show me one Australian-born graduate in any subject other than medical, making his/her crust in menial or para-skilled hospital work

p s

Dr. Beazley left this, his country, that he had served as soldier in WW2 and as a scientist after that war, virtually exiled by a run of the mill politician.

He died in the land of his old friend, the renowned Dr. Jonas Falk, father of the Poliomyelitis vaccine.

Sceptic:

...You talk of a lost world from the past the moment you mention "Bob Menzies". "Pig-Iron" Bob, as was his nick-name at the time; branded for selling pig iron to the Japanese prior to the WW2 conflict, which assisted greatly the Japanese war effort against the west. How dislocated was he?

...Well things haven't changed a great deal Sceptic. Still the same dislocation displayed under a new political guise of the moment. A dislocated rule pushing the rights of poofters as more important than the right of the aged in our community to affordable heating in winter, for example, by increasing power prices by 60% in eighteen months before introducing a carbon tax to hammer home the reality of status.

...There are too many signs of evidence of the dislocated rule of the overeducated, those born to rule, and the impact this is having on the normal folk of our society.