Oh my,

Yes Australia is going to collapse into a deep depression at the next pin drop, yes welfare states like France are going to collapse even further, possibly into the realms of a third world nation.

Yes, these problems are caused by greed, greedy workers. Workers in Australia who happily live here in utopia and send some crumbs over to the third world. The game worked for a while, we all got fat and plump, we forgot what 'real' work was.

However, the we're been caught, the third world realised something, something amazing, if they work really hard for a very low amount of money, they can substantially improve their lives. So they go into their sweatshops, they make our shoes, build our tables and process our resources. Then one day, we look at our current account deficit and realise that Australia is headed for a collapse of biblical proportions. So we search around for answers, yet blinded by our own ignorance we go around chasing white elephants.

Instead of taking a hard look at our selves and realising if we took away the minium wage, allowed people to freely enter our country and slash taxes, we could reverse our decline. We put up more walls to immigration, we set up an arbitrary commission that cannot lower the minium wage regardless of economic circumstance and we refuse to part with our precious tax revenue, instead calling upon the government to spend more and more on nostrums of increasing enormity.

Australia is the titanic headed for that iceberg, when will we see beyond the haze?

DLC,

You want to live like a King, waited on by immigrant slaves while we run out of petrol, head towards Mad MaxII and need less people than ever to avoid coming chaos and mayhem.

That is not only OBSCENE it is selfish and stupid.

Petrol will all but run out within the next 20 years and the best strategy for SURVIVAL is to stop immigration and research alternative energy strategies including unmanned Space options. We need to ensure total independence from foreign oil in the 20 years of cheap fuel we have left. Otherwise, Australia will have its killing fields like all other nations when planetary thermodynamics rebalance to account for missing oil and gas energy inputs.

Thermodynamic endpoints are not negotiable and human civilisations are neither invincible nor infallible.

Me? selfish? Not at all, I simply wish to allow people in other countries to share in the capital that exists in this country because of the resource boom. Working in Australia on 5 dollars an hour would be 100% better than living in one of the many failed states in the pacific region on less than a dollar a day. You simply wish to keep them in their prison of poverty and depravity so that you may bask in your fools utopia, you do not even consider them as humans you deride them as some sort of thermodynamic unit.

Petrol will not run out in 20 years, that is a great fallacy, I am surprised you could go far to make such a claim. The most Liberal estimates I have heard on the subject are far closer to 50 years. In any event, you fail to note that running out of oil is a good thing, if we run out oil will have to turn to alternative energy sources, even coal when used in a steam engine is far cleaner and more efficient than a petroleum combustion engine.

This is how a market makes a transition, as one resource dries up it gets more expensive, as that resource becomes more expensive, people begin looking for alternative resource that can perform the same task at a lower price.

Of course there's going to be global economic meltdown, "Peak Oil" will see to that. Here's what ex-USA President Bill Clinton said on the 28th March 2006 (London Business School):-

"We may be at a point of peak oil production. You may see $100 a barrel oil in the next two or three years."

Link here:-

http://www.energybulletin.net/15300.html

And here's my direct questions to Australia's 2nd largest pension fund investment manager (QIC), vis a vis "Peak Oil." They originally told me to "Get lost" (in not quite those words), but I'm persistent:-

http://www.kimspages.org/qsuperletter.htm#six