CONTINUED FROM PREVIOUS POST

C) the ongoing petrol price gouging identified by Keith, which has created an ongoing constriction on social life and minor pleasures in daily life - visiting, shared tea-drinking, etc. - now abandoned as unaffordable frivolities by the large number of people who can now no longer afford to drive, except for a pared down list of absolutely essential trips. I'm not against redesigning cities to minimise non-essential driving, I support every effort to find non-nuclear sources of replacement energy (solar, wind, thermal, whatever). But these are long term, and in the short term people's daily lives have been dramatically shorn of all purely pleasurable elements, reduced to work, eating and sleeping. BTW the fracas over reduced support for solar heating for those filthy rich middle class environmentally minded folk who were going to get a subsidy to offset their expenses in shifting to solar - that didn't go down all that well as a straw in the wind either.

D) Finally, a the ballyhoo around community consultation is disappointing also. I didn't even try to go to the 20:20 "summit", realising well ahead what a feel-good no-possible-results exercise it would be. They need a sociologist on the ALP advisory board! But disillusionment on this is intensified by a 3-4 month hiatus in dealing with correspondence. By the time you get an answer, you've forgotten the question! Not exactly a dialogue happening there either.