I spent a sizeable chunk of the weekend watching The Slap again. If you take that show to be representative of Australians and the way they live, then yes I think you could easily be led to say that we are a) miserable, b) have a sense of entitlement, c) xenophobic, in the sense of being suspicious of anyone except Me, and d) live in a place entirely devoid of a sense of community and shared culture, and it's only the tortured relationship we have with our stuff, and our fragile sense of existential angst in the face of the vast meaninglessness of it all, that engenders any sense of purpose in our existence.

And OK, if you live in Melbourne, as the show's characters do, then that's quite possibly a good summation of your life.

But here it just looks like we are seeing another case of someone who puts too much store in economic matters, and who is forgetting that life consists of more; that consumption facilitates your existence, and not the other way around.

My sense is that this is the mistake that people in politics and other areas of public life have been making since... well, since the departure of Paul Keating we just don't seem to talk about anything interesting any more, except how to make things better - which is difficult when we don't know what "good" is in the first place.

But people are so wonderfully adaptable that they can believe in anything they can observe might possibly be true, as long as it suits them. So ok, I can see where the author of this article is coming from, but unless it is meant as a think-piece then I'd say it's pretty thoughtless.

Why shouldn't we be unhappy? We live in the richest land on earth, with the most prosperous and still functioning economy? Yet, the rich just seem to get richer, the poor get comparatively poorer, the former middle class is being progressively absorbed into the ranks or the poor, or those who live below the poverty line; thanks to things like exponentially expanding gap between the haves and the progressively expanding have nots!
Our riches are being plundered by foreign interests, who used nothing more substantial than a letter of credit of debt funded equity, which by the way, we eventually pay for in full and then some, to extract from us, our national wealth and or treasure.
We are unhappy because the Greens will not settle for practical pragmatism, but want perfection, even if that perfection reduces us to little more that a stone age agrarian society.
We need to get rid of this tail that wags the dog eco-fascist element, while we still can, even if that means formerly unthinkable alliances.
Alliances, that finally allow practical pragmatism to prevail, and unlock the wealth of low carbon energy resources the greens are currently trying to lock away, under the guise of environmentalism.
We need to take the possibility of another Great Depression very seriously, and stop shooting ourselves in the economic foot.
Instead of listening to endless green negativity, we need to crack on with growing the economy, and those things we already have to capture and store carbon, like farmed algae.
Of course we are dissatisfied, with endlessly repeated more of the same old, same old BS and power struggles, when everything that is happening around us, demands the sort of progress, only ever available, through genuine bipartisan cooperation and consensus!
Rhrosty.

The lack of Net-Free-Energy derivitives (Coal's pollutants disqualify it) and the media sexualisation and subsequent overpopulation of a finite & desertified Australia ensure it will become a 3rd world nation within a generation under a rich-poor divivde that sets 1% of the nation against the other 99%. Glen Stevens must know this.

Meanwhile closer to home we have fools like Ken Henry and Julie Bishop who want increased economic growth by more immigration. This causing lower living standards for 99% but bigger net profits for their proposed, schemes. These schemes of course under scrutiny, turn out to be PONZI schemes, Pyramids of social classes replacing what used to be DEMOCRACY.

Hell if low intellect, low breed politicians and their fiscal apparatchiks can screw us over in ILLEGAL Ponzi schemes at will under phony electoral mandates why is Glen Stevens rebuking us about our attitudes to entitlements? Clearly we have no entitlements at all:

Jobs are offshored,
Education is trumped by immigration of no-frills skills,
Police are mistreated, understaffed and likely to be privatised,
Hospitals Are too busy treating sick immigrants (visit any emergency dept and hear the foreign languages)
Aged care is carefully sequestered to private companies who use drugs and poisoned carpet with underfloor heating that reduces lifespan. There will never be an ageing problem only a windfall surplus from aged care in future budgets. The aged dilemma will prove to be Ponzi's best trick for increasing immigration to continue building the base of the Australiana Pyramid scheme.

Seguay to song:

I wanna make a POnzi scheme
Just like Barry OFarrell
I wanna Build a Ponzi city like Sydney
Paid for by NSW
I wanna make Ponzi castles
And treat all of its citizens
To big fat TAX, polluted air
Just like dirty rascals.
Da Dat Dah Da dah dah dah!