Cheryl, can you provide link to Aust exporting $60 billion of food stuff.

WTO data shows $34 billion for all Aust agri exports in 2011, so I am quite interested in your claim.

"Even so, John is right in so far as one day energy prices will drive production costs higher. ..The nation must do more to find and develop new energy sources."

That's the flaw in the socialists' reasoning. Just because there is a problem of some kind, or a shortage of economic goods of some kind, does not justify the conclusion that THEREFORE "the nation" [translation: the State] must "do more".

The reason is because, in reality, doing something, anything, always has costs. The question is always whether a particular action is worth it, or whether the resources that had to be withdrawn from some other usage to fund a policy action, would have been better off being devoted to other uses chosen by voluntary and peaceful means, rather than the state's monopolistic coercion; whether society would have valued more highly those alternative uses.

That is the question that John and Robert never answer, and are incapable of answering, except by abandoning rational thought, and just *emoting* slogans.

It is simply invalid to assume that government can presumptively allocate scarce resources to their most optimal, most valued, most important, most urgent uses. If it were true, we could vest total power in government, and totalitarian government would be the best society *economically* speaking. It's just total nonsense, it's nothing but rank idiocy that has been disproved thousands of times over and over again, at cost of hundreds of millions of human lives. It's just wrong.

Another way we know this, is because the advocates of this idea ALWAYS rely on illogical arguments, or a double standard, or self-contradiction, as Robert just did. On the one hand they argue for government control, but at some stage denying it inconsistently with their own argument. They have nothing but mush-brained yarble-yarp.

Cheryl,:

Until you call yourself by your correct name and gender, Malcolm paddy King, I suggest that anything you say will be meaningless and we would all benefit from your absence .

As soon as I read "peak oil" I know I will be reading the musings of a left wing ideologue and not a well thought out piece of logic, and I wasn't disappointed. Nor was I surprised to see association with Malthusian ideas or "zero carbon".

The truth is the community doesn't need, nor does it want, a "revolution". It wants a steadying hand on leadership and that's what it voted for.

Anyone who thinks we can 'future proof our communities' -- or anything else -- is so evidently off with the fairies that arguing with them would appear to be pointless. There are by rough estimation well over a billion factors influencing the future of any one Australian community, and those which we have any power over at all are in a tiny minority. The notion that we can somehow seize control of all of them -- by wishing really, REALLY hard, perhaps -- is a sign of incipient megalomania.

What we need -- and, let's hope, what we've now got -- is a government pragmatic enough to adapt to new challenges as they arise, rather than trying to fit every crisis into the mould of its predefined ideologies.

Cheryl "how shockingly poorly the Stable Population Party did."

Maybe Malcolm King can shut up about them now.
New target: Palmer United Party?

"it was a rejection of their right wing social engineering agenda"

And the fall in the Labor and Greens votes were an endorsement of their left wing social engineering agenda?