Gee whiz, we now have people writing for dead blokes. It would be nice if the person/people who wrote this were game enough to put their name to their work.

Besides stating the obvious, that our spending is greater than our income, there seems to be some expectation that ordinary folk should support the rich.

How are the IR changes supposed to hedge us against the doom and gloom of recession? With less money in workers pockets, company profits will fall. People will not work harder for less money.
Looking at the wealth distribution of the world, it is concentrated in the hands of very few elites.

What will happen to the wealth of the landed gentry, the owners of expensive land in Sydney etc, when people can no longer afford to pay their rent? They will sell out to their wealthier mates.

Please no more justification by the far-right for their deliberate exploitation of workers. The attempts to re-introduce a feudalist society are simply obscene.

Good if its a downtown. We can make even more money.

"The attempts to re-introduce a feudalist society are simply obscene. "

Sorry, we ARE a feudalist society and what better person to enforce it than King John.

Some things about the Downturn:

1. Humans are basically Thermodynamic machines. The efficiency of our population's output and expectation of happiness are proportional to the free energy available (energy sources like oil) and the purity of our waste disposal sinks (oceans and atmosphere). With both our thermodynamic source and sink shrinking and our population growing, thermodynamic theory predicts a violent, catastrophic adjustment to global population numbers as a new thermal equilibrium is established in the biosphere. Things like ethics, memories of past wars, the veil of humanity and the veneer of civilisation mean NOTHING in a thermodynamic context. It will take people some time to realise this truth but realise they will.
The dynamic situations resulting from adjustments in these energy equivalences have been seen in Rwanda, but most people still believe these were backward historically diseased people. WRONG! And the thing with catastrophes. The thing is you never know when its going to snap.

2. Governments pretend to invest in alternative energy whilst they are not investing in alternative energy research. This is a Clayton's investment. Their feudal empires are built on OIL and it's hard for them to let go. Further, their answer to the coming catastrophe is to build markets and thus populations so they have the capital to invest in military equipment and new technology. This allows them to KILL and CULL most efficiently when the eventual thermodynamic catastrophe occurs. They get to keep their feudal empires no matter what the outcome.

continuing ..

Continued ..

3. When oil effectively runs out in the next 20 years, we will be back to the 1800's and coal power in thermodynamics terms. Since the world population then was around 2 billion people, it is easy to see that 4 billion of the current 6 billion people will have to be killed for thermodynamic equations to balance. There will be no rhyme or reson, no causes or deliberations, it will just happen. World governments KNOW this. It's time ordinary people put aside their squeamishness and accept the physics involved. Only then will we get to vote on how our future pans out.

People do not need terrorism to avert the coming wars and woes. The trick is to form and vote for governments that put a cap on population and market growth and a gilt edged priority on cleaning coastal oceans (energy sinks). A government that will put a cap on immigration and a show a willingness to pay for pure research and whatever else it takes to deliver alternative energy sources here and now.

For example Australia can afford to PAY to convert every vehicle to gas NOW and expand pipeline and refill services to meet demand.
That alone with zero net immigration will solve our alternative energy problem for at leat 20 years.

Australia can also afford a specialised Packet Switching non-manned flight space program with the sole purpose of setting up boiler/dynamo systems to generate and relay power from Earth orbit and eventually from as far away as Mercury orbit where energy density is 12 times that of Earth. We have the technology!

This latter initiative also shows that we don't need to stunt human growth forever. We can take a few steps back, 20 or 30 years maybe and develop space markets and populations to fulfill every Type 'A' personality's wildest dreams. But not here, not now .. Yeah?

kaep, keep off the green stuff brother.

The "miracle economy" appears to be largely paper based. It seems to rely on billions of investment (? super and other managed funds) dollars chasing a limited number of shares and limited amount of property. As in the 1930's, it will contract.

As for the solution that continuing to depress wages and demand through ever more reactionary IR laws might I suggest that much of the grass roots economy is based on the ability of ordinary workers to spend their disposable incomes. As wages decrease in real terms, and prices increase (which they are despite the official inflation figures) these ordinary people will respond in the only way they can. They will reduce their spending. Indeed they will be forced to as they cannot earn more, nor will financial institutions be forever willing to lend more given a reducing capacity to repay. This will result in a strong contraction of those employment creating industries such as tourism and entertainment and hospitality. Ordinary people cannot run a deficit household budget for long.

As we all know the cycle of contraction can spiral out of control very quickly yet the 'economists' seem incapable of learning from economic history and they and their fellow travellers in the right wing media continue to propose more and more strong medicine for the workers as the 'only' option. They are wrong. They were wrong in the 1890's, the 1930's and they will be proven wrong again should they, their monopolistic business masters and their compliant politicians persist.