Lego, not sure what you mean by a socialist. Perhaps you mean communist? We've never ever had any of them in our parliament Unless it was as former members who'd allegedly seen the light.

I certainly don't think, with the best will in the world, even someone as ideologically driven as you would attempt to reclassify, Sir Robert Menzies as a socialist. Albeit, Sir Joh once boosted and on the public record as saying, at heart, I am a social democrat.

Sir Robert was a liberal pragmatist. In his parliament a lot of goodwill and bipartisan pragmatism. A place that was awash with future vision and a genuine contest of ideas. Moreover, a place genuinely committed to real bona fide nation building. And presided over a post-war period of unprecedented prosperity that made us the third wealthiest nation-state on the planet, and a creditor one at that.

You as do all your ilk, confuse cooperative capitalism with socialism. And two very different animals. Suggest you take a day trip to Maleny, here in the Sunshine Coast hinterland to see what cooperative capitalism looks like. And how much better off the entire community is for it. Notwithstanding recent exploitative capitalism's attempts to elbow its way in/root the community/change the very attitudes/cooperative capitalism that made it the jewel in the crown of Queensland.

Cooperative capitalism is still welded to both free enterprise and free market competition. And remains a model that fully utilises all the flow on factors in an economy and one where one dollar does the work of seven or more and stays in the local economy until exhausted.

The one you and yours would sell off ASAP and to hell with the people and the nation!

And because that's happened in recent times, we're mired in huge debt and now rank down with a few banana republics at round number thirty and owe the world a debt far beyond the capacity of or grandkids to draw down. Have to hand it to you guys, you certainly know what you are doing!?
Alan B.

//«nobody will stop you from going to an airport.»

Oh really? They may allow me to use the airport's shops, receive others and see them off, but without their proper paperwork and complying with their body-searches they won't allow me to use the airport's primary purpose.//

Nobody will stop you building a flimsy raft and taking to the high seas, either. You're free to go whenever you want.

Alan B

You submitted a post complaining that Australia had privatised state owned industries, and this you implied had made us much poorer. State control of the means of production, is one of the foundations stones of Socialism. That does not mean that Australia or any of it's states were socialist, but it was far more along the road to socialism than say, the USA. Australia's road building, telecommunications, ship building, electricity generation and distribution, postal service, airlines and railways, were all state controlled, and were shining examples of overmanning, featherbedding, waste, and inefficiency. If you are looking to the reason as to why Australia's prosperity ranking has slipped, then I suggest you look for other reasons.

Good reasons might start with the rise, and rise, of the welfare state, and a non discriminatory immigration policy that sees the importation of crime, terrorism and welfare prone ethnic groups. Add to that, useless state funded university courses such as "Gender Studies" that does nothing for productivity, but instead churns out thousands of entitled and unemployable diplomaed progressives who think that the western world is so awful it must be destroyed.

I take exception to you claiming that the privatisation of Federal and State businesses in Australia has made us poorer. Privatising industry increases efficiency and innovation, and every western nation has already figured that one out. Even Communist Russia and China have figured it out. Yet we still have people like yourself with this child like faith in the idea that state ownership of commerce is a good thing. And then you say that socialism, is bad. Are you just advocating both sides of the argument so that you can never be wrong?

You are one very confused young man.

It was just like in your previous posts where you said that you didn't like Islam, and then you defended Muslims.

Lego, you need to stop lecturing/verballing me with your revisionist view of factual history.

Am not a young man but one who remembers as a living witness things as far back as the forties. Without question, we were once the third wealthiest nation on planet earth and during that period of unprecedented prosperity!

One wage enough to purchase an affordable house, a serviceable motor vehicle, and feed clothe and educate a family of four. With enough left over for a modest annual family holiday.

Moreover, during this unprecedented period of post-war prosperity! Repeat, unprecedented period of post-war prosperity, we were not only the third wealthiest nation but a creditor one at that! But when fiscal illiterates like John Howard quote-unquote, got their hands on the nation's treasure and income earning assets, they squandered and blew it.

And in so doing changed our direction and prospects, every which way. I mean before his involved and the progressive dismantling of the last vestiges of cooperative capitalism, our dairy farmers were able to get a fair price for milk. which incidentally is now cheaper than bottled water!

Yes, we have come a long way since the seventies and most of it, all downhill. Now we have privatised and corporatised power and the highest power prices in the world?

Fully privatised banking and a list of corruption and abuse of power indictments as long a the river Nile.

And a generation who will for the first time in our history, worse off than the preceding generation, Record levels of homelessness and housing made so unaffordable only the privileged and rapacious avaricious landlords can afford their own!

Yes, we certainly have come a long way since the seventies and it been largely all downhill! No question!
Alan B.

To Alan B

I will stop lecturing you on Australian history, when you stop claiming that the privatization of formerly government owned businesses is the cause of Australia slipping from what you claimed was once the third wealthiest country on earth.

I have been around too. I remember the boys going to my high school on push bikes. Today, we are so wealthy that every high school is surrounded by cars with "P" plates on them. Even young girls, once dependent upon a boyfriend with a car, now drive their own cars. Most people bought second hand cars, worked on them, and serviced them themselves. It was not uncommon to see people washing and polishing cars 30 years old. Almost every car wrecker in Sydney has gone broke because people just don't buy parts for old cars anymore. There is hardly a car on Sydney's roads over 10 years old. It is not uncommon today for a household of four or five people to have a car for each person. Some poverty.

"Poor" people today sport consumer goods which would once have been entirely the preserve of the very wealthy. Air conditioned cars. Name brand clothes. Iphones. Adolescent girls wearing Manano Blanik heels and Prada sunglasses. I have cherished photo of my own mother as a barefoot adolescent girl in Kentucky, NSW.

The problem is not that Australia has gone backwards, but that the once very poor Asians have gone forwards. The problem with Australia is, that we have been so prosperous for so long, that people seem to think that wealth is a natural law of nature. They have lost the survival edge. Any type of organism which stops fighting to survive will die out. So we have these childish obsessions with nuclear power, greenhouse gases, gender neutral toilets, human rights, aboriginal recognition, and gay marriage.

We will still be arguing about the appropriateness of gender neutral pronouns when the first mass murder terrorist outrage in Australia kills 200 Aussies in one go, or when the first nuclear tipped ballistic missile from the mullahs in Iran hits us.

Alan B. and LEGO,

It's not as simple as "private is better than public" or vice versa. Certainly the public sector was very inefficient in the 1970s, But so was the private sector, with a wall of tariffs designed to keep inefficient industries afloat. Both the public and private sectors underwent massive reform in the 1980s, so we should be extremely wary of pre-1990 comparisons.

Also keep in mind that the headline statistics don't tell the full story. For example the railways used to play a huge training role (no pun intended) taking on far more apprentices than they actually needed, but most efficiency comparisons don't take that into account. I trust you aren't sufficiently stupid to infer from this paragraph that I doubt the bulk of efficiency savings were genuine.

The private sector has its advantages. It is IN GENERAL quicker to innovate and better at managing people than the public sector. But blindly assuming that to be the case is asking for trouble.

The private sector also has the disadvantage that efficiency savings may not be passed on to customers (though in some cases that's also true for public sector corporations). And there are some private sector operators who just try to make fast money, with no regard for long term value.

The public sector has the natural advantage of cheaper finance, but it can't always use it - sometimes the politicians stupidly block it, claiming it's unfair to private sector competitors. Worse still, in some cases the spending is under political control, resulting in many false economies (and much worse value for money than the private sector).

And finally there's timing to consider. It's generally a bad idea to privatise something just before a huge rise in value that would happen irrespective of ownership. Sydney Airport is the obvious example here.