kartiya,
You have my total support on your last post. Too many operate on the blame and hoplessness of the past, rather than on a clear vision and hope of the future. Gathering food involves expenditure of energy to capture the prey or waiting for the crop to mature. This is the same in every society.

Good footy analogy Kartiya, I have coached and played football and let me assure you the team will go nowhere if people are not committed to themselves, each other and the team.
You can guide the team and tell them what you want and even try to inspire them with words of wisdom but ultimately it is up to the individual to have a go and do the best they can.
Very few premierships are won with passengers or people who are not willing to put in the hard work.
Which is all I advocate - people putting in an effort, regardless of their ability.
From what I have seen from my former community, there were a lot of people who didn't put in the effort because they could rely on welfare.
You can't help people who don't want to be helped or won't help themselves.
t.u.s

Mollydukes – I agree, you are entitled to your silly comments too.

My “simplistic and naïve” view (as you call it) has been refined by doing more than just reading Womans Day, TV Soap magazine and back issues of the socialist worker (which, from what you post, would seem the likely sole source of your insight and philosophy).

As for vulnerability to disease and matters of selective breeding etc., if you had “read” any of my posts, you would have picked up on my view of eugenics. I suggest you go “read” before you make “simplistic and naïve” (where have I read that before) assumptions to what I might think.

Your own “naïve and simplistic” perception of “good” and “bad” displays the sort of tunnel vision which makes you impervious to the process of “lateral thinking” (outside the square).

Your rapid defence of compulsory degrees for nurses ignores the issue of over-skilling in different “trades” which produces pointless barriers to the less academically inclined to pursue a worthy vocation.

You probably did not know of the studies that have identified, people rely on a range of capabilities or competencies to function in life, yet schools focus almost exclusively on just the one, the “academic” (and that the socialist minded think they should not measure). Through one on my involvements, I am engaged in a project to represent these diverse skill sets in a comprehensive assessment tool. Hardly the sort of pursuit for someone with the “simplistic and naïve” perspective which you, in your complete and utter ignorance, presume to label me with.

t.u.s. keep up the good work, like me you have found, the only path for a successful life is the one we cut for ourselves. Mollydukes’ socialist super-highway has been worn smooth with the countless steps of the sheep who went that way before and washed with billions of tears when they arrived at its end to find an empty wasteland where the only available skill was to ask how to get the handout – but no one skilled in making anything happen.

In your haste to find someway to denigrate ideas you perhaps do not understand, col (and tus) you have strayed from the point of this forum.

The point was that although Peter Saunders may have pointed out some problems with the way we judge poverty, the ideology that comes from the economic rationalists at the CIS is not the way to address these problems,

The economists there ignore the cooperative aspect of humans. Humans eveolved in groups, not as individuals and some of us find it very hard to be totally self-reliant because we are not made that way. The economic rationalists fail to acknowledge that cooperation is an important aspect of a decent society.

The CIS believe that valuing things other than material wealth is dangerous and that conserving things rather than buying new things is not good for the economy and so these things should not be encouraged. They actively want everyone to 'aspire' to more economic success.

Selling Telstra is one example of the error of their thinking. Telstra is an asset that brings revenue to the government. If the government sells all their/our assets then the only way they have to make money to provide services, is from taxation.

But the CIS is happy with this because they do not want any government services. They believe that private industry can provide almost everything, including police and prisons.

Col get a grip! Maintaining that humans are cooperative as well as competitive and asserting that governments have provided many of the things that have made our lives so good, is not being a socialist.

Helping those who are not as capable of being self-reliant as others does not mean that one is a communist - can you understand that? There are many positions in-between, free-maket captialism and socialism.

Does everyone here realise that CPI adjustments in Australia stopped taking cost of housing/land a few years ago?

It's worth thinking about why that might be when considering the idea of poverty as a relative concept.

I would say that land-poor and land-rich is a pretty useful way of thinking. In a country where there is little industry except speculating on rising landprices, if you don't have more than one property you are doomed to pay the costs of property inflation without any of the benefits.

It sickens me that churches and welfare organisations are too much impressed by having rich people sitting on their boards making them look respectable to really slam what is happening. But then all those welfare organisations are knee deep in land speculation themselves.

I work in a hospital where we discharge patients to sleep on the beach because they cannot work and cannot afford to pay rent. Many of our patients have rotting teeth by age 20. Many come from third generation unemployed. The situation reminds me of London during the creation of the Gin Lane paintings by Hogarth.

My impression is that I am looking at the dying off of people at the margins of Australia's population at the moment. Aborigines, old people, young people - all those without shelter and security, no place to cook, no place to lie down safely.

It's a pretty mean materialistic society we have here. I don't think we should wait until most of us are as poor as Ethiopians to feel justified in protesting.

Kanga

Thank you, Kanga.

I knew I smelt a rat when I read, in defiance of my own experience and of common experiences of other people, figures of how the quality of life was supposedly improving so astronomically, not just the rich, but for everyone.

This further confirms some of what I had long suspected.

Now, perhaps the learned Peter Saunders would care to comment on whether he thinks it is appropriate that the cost of such a basic necessity as shelter should be excluded from the figures on which he bases his conclusions about poverty in Australia.