Interesting article with some good points. Canberra having near full control over the states would no dbout see business granted a big juicy wish list, to the detriment of a lot of ordinary people. So long as the conservatives are in power that is. It could also go against them if another government suddenly decided that a change of course was necessary.

Of course they are like brain surgeons trying to plumb a bathroom. What they are unable to accept and factor into their worldveiw is that we do not live in an economy. We live in a society. Economics is only a part of the story.

Col Rouge, In my Post, sincere apologies, but was trying to get all my annoyances out at once. They are:

1. Do not like a world dominated by Big Biz, as us cockies called corporate style business during the Great Depression. It was Big Biz that helped bring on the depression with Dreyfus and Bunge dominating the grain trade. Australian cockies beat them by turning agrarian socialistic, holding their produce back and living off the land. Won’t work now because the world is again dominated by Big Biz - Corporatism, with Dreyfus and Bunge and the like all back again.

2. A corporatised unipolar world as we have now with America and its collossal armoury, could be well on the road to collapsing. According to the former Soviet leader Gorbachev the US could be beneficially replaced with a balanced bi-polar system, with America dominating one side and China, India and Russia possibly on the other.

3. These are the possibilities talked about in the Murdoch School of Humanities. Including the one about letting Iran go nuclear to match atomic Israel, creating a classic Middle East power balance.

Of course, the master of power politics, as you probably know was Bismarck, who is said to have gained more by diplomacy and less by war, than any other leader in history.

PS, Almost forgot to give reminder concerning Reagan and Thatcher that linking them with Big Biz or corporatism, was not about big government being the present problem in our world, but rather by imperfect government, as the imperfections of economic rationalism have so much shown in our world under globalisation

Bushbred, I am not a fan of big-business any more than I am of big-union.

Whilst most of the workforce are employed by small to medium sized organization and whilst individuals can still go out and develop their own enterprises and benefit from their individual success, like Bill Gates with Microsoft (as an atypical example), we will remain free of the autonomy which you seem to fear.

You claim you beat big-bus by holding back supply, as is your prerogative, all power to you.

Gorbachev would be one of the last people on earth qualified to comment on American ability to survive, considering his track record firstly in his “democratic” rise to power and then his capacity to deal with that power when he got it (Gorbie might seem a nice bloke but his skills in managing a free-market economy have yet to be tested).

As for imperfect government, well I support what Churchill had to say

"Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."

The years have convinced me, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. With that maxim in mind, I will remain in favour and fervently support “small government” over “big government” and whilst most folk remain employed by small to medium companies (as much in USA and Europe and Japan as here), retain some sense of security that the big-corporations are a minority which can, in the long term, be managed. I was always amazed that the Coles-Myer and the Woolworth-Safeway mergers were allowed to pass the monopolies test, but since I have never voted for the flavour of government which allowed those travesties, accept no responsibility for the outcome.

Note globalisation - there is a difference between removing tariff barriers and market domination. The two debates are mutually exclusive and not co-dependent.

I do favour fewer tariffs and fewer quotas and greater free trade and hope to engage in more myself. That goal can be achieved as readily without large multinationals as it can with large multinationals.

I like this article, quite a lot. Nice to see a writer from the corporate sphere with a different take.

One thing to consider however, is our governmental system in historical terms is pretty arbitrary.

Power based on territory and a collection of loosely joined cultures meshing to create what we call a 'nation.'

Not all cultures are geared to this system as evidenced by problems in tribal Africa. Some kind of a system based along tribal allegiances rather than hastily drawn colonial settlements may have caused a little less historical strife, then again, it may have caused a lot more.

In any case, in a world of corporate powers, whose to say the nation-state in its current form will remain relevant? As core services are privatised, perhaps corporate entities will supercede the role of government.

(I don't think this'll happen anytime soon, bear with me for a hypothetical system).

Say we have a world divided along corporate lines - employees are commodities first, citizens second, core services are provided by corporations paid for by citizens - tax is bypassed direct to service providers.

Social security for the aged and disabled is provided for via a kind of body corporate collective agreement - as an employee of a particular company, you've the right to be cared for in a particular institution, probably through a sub-contractor.

Ownership of resources is on a rotational basis through a series of established firms who agree to provide services in return for resource entitlement, which is administered by the vestiges of government -now more of a shareholder entity themselves, as they derive profit via clients.

Law and order is via security firms, largely through enclave situations as evidenced by the growing popularity of gated and planned communities. Life is more difficult for the marginalised, but in the demand for growth there is always room within the corporate ranks for hard or intelligent workers.

In this vision - a dream or nightmare depending on your political affiliation - the state is no longer the chief arbiter of power. Is this such an unrealistic system of governance?

Guess you are still rather young, Col Rouge. Still haven't lived enough. Even a bit like our grand-kids still running the farm. Give them the credit for being able to use minimum ag', etc, with the help of chemicals. Trouble is they have joined Barry Court's Farmers and Graziers, the same Big Biz backed crowd but with a different name we knocked out during the Great Depression.

So they have never learnt to really rough it, and never learnt how to get together to knock out Big Biz in order to make a profit. The French still know all about it, though one wonders because they are all now protected with subsidisation.

Similar to the Yankee cockies, whom GW Bush guaranteed 80 billion dollars in sub's when he first got in - over more than his next 8 years to make sure the Republicans get elected again.

Yet you can survive both by experience and knowledge of history, matey, which means also that neo in marketing means not only new, but now - meaning that times have not really changed, and it is all coming round again, similar to our Anglophilic bastardry in the Middle East, the danger made ten times worse by us letting the Israelis go atomic

TurnRightThenLeft,

I hope your Orwellian vision of the future never comes to be realised. You are describing a Corprateocracy- a lassiez faiere type system in which democracy is irrelevent and you get as many votes as you have currency units. No currency unit - no vote. Important decisions would be made based on human greed rather than any notion of the commen good.

Individual self interest must be balanced against collective interest, public purpose, the common good. When one trumps the other completely, we have an unbalanced society, one whose days are numbered. Karl Marx's vision of a world in which absolutley everything would be owned by the state, was as unjust and unsustainable as one in which everything is privately owned.

The idea of a fully integrated, one world economy, in which nation states are nation states in name only and are otherwise irrelivent, and where everything is privately owned is now slipping away. It was supposed to have happpened years ago. Australia is not a "world leader in privatising". We are one of the last few countries whose government is railroading it down a path already tried by many others and rejected as having been found to be a failure in delivering the promised benifets and not in the best interests of their people.