I have lived in Australia for 20 years. I feel that there is an acceptance of corruption and a lack of will to call people to account. It seems to be a sort of "live and let live" or "she'll be right" or "that's just what business/politics is". I have never got accustomed to this mentality. I see the vast waste of resources and opportunities that it causes.

I think that this attitude has been strengthened by the false belief that business can answer all our troubles and that it is the role of government to assist business. Victoria is a prime example of the corruption/faq no 4 linked to in the article- ie expensive projects that are white elephants.

Can we rename the “Governments Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme” – “The Spiv’s charter?

Kellie, I’ll leave the sub-issue of climate change alone, but the corruption issue is interesting.

Difficult though it seems for us to choose good over bad, the shear complexity of our societies has made things a thousand times worse. Industrialization has created more needs, wants and desires. It has created “things” that others have. It has created a vast and ever growing infrastructure that requires more and more input to feed our increasing desires. It has also created a treadmill that we are terrified to abandon for fear of losing what we have or not gaining what we desire. The net result is that we humans increasingly accept compromise and mitigation as our excuse for choosing to be bad. Simply put, we must do bad things to other humans because this is our way to “survive”. We adopt the attitude that if we don’t hop on the bandwagon, someone else will.

What we see as a result today, is the extreme levels of cheating and corruption throughout every single society and institution across our entire planet. I have tried hard to find institutions that have yet to hit the media for corrupt action by humans, there are a few.

To further compound our ability as a species, to engage in meaningful debate about the real issue of our human state, our media, religious, political, financial, social commentators focus our entire attention upon the symptoms rather than the causes.

The debate is endlessly focused by commentators upon the rules, who and how they were broken and what needs to be done about it. Read any newspaper; listen to any news broadcast or current affairs program.

All you will ever read or hear will be who broke the rules, how they broke the rules and what if anything should be done about it. In most cases of course, this ends up with the usual and predictable result. Blame someone else, make excuses, increase the penalties and/or make some more rules. Our acceptance and mitigation of “wrong doing” has reached truly staggering proportions.

The UN is sadly, no different.

Corruption is part of human fallen nature. Blind Freddie can see that. The problem is when people think they are exempt from this category. Whether it is stealing a pen from work or ripping off Centrelink it is corruption. The Only incorruptible One was and is Jesus Christ. The distaste for Him uncovering the hypocrisy of many lead them to causes such as saving the environment or stopping domestic violence or saving the whale. While these might be noble causes often the activist use these causes to try and display some sort of superior morality. Unless a man has his heart cleansed from corruption and hypocrisy nothing will change in the earth. In fact the downward slide continues. I am amused at the self righteous historians who paint previous generations as barbarians while endorsing the slaughter of unborn today.

Well said Kellie. Systemic corruption. You've named it.

Perhaps we need to put electronic trackers on all lobbyists and monitor every meeting they have with pollies. And post their meetings on the internet. Figuratively if not literally. And election campaigns must be publicly funded, with very low limits on individual donations.

Does that include Green-Left NGOs, Geoff?

Spindoc
I agree with you on this one.
Particularly
>"To further compound our ability as a species, to engage in meaningful debate about the real issue of our human state, our media, religious, political, financial, social commentators focus our entire attention upon the symptoms rather than the causes."<

I would add "To do the latter would show us as individuals are wanting, even by our own standards and would require us as those same individuals to do something. However, that would be "an inconvenient truth" and as such resist it with all the emotion we can muster."

Sadly rules are necessary to act as marker posts by which we can measure our behaviour. These markers are only needed because we forget the obvious truth that with every benefit that comes from living in a society comes an equal responsibility. Failing that society will disintegrate into social chaos.

Kellie

I also agree with your points. I have often wondered why tools created by mankind to help mankind have become the master or at least the surrogate, a curtain through, which we can do things we otherwise couldn't get away with without opprobrium.

Despite our undeniable cleverness as a species we still find it difficult to live up to our own standards. I remain an optimist in that I believe we can if we expend the same effort to, as we do to avoid..... eventually

Kellie, you say "We need to address corruption and we need to start now. Unless we do that we won't be able to formulate the best available solutions to climate change, and climate change isn't waiting for any of us". Apart from the known political and systemic corruption within governments and their policies in general, why would you use climate change as a vehicle to fight corruption, when to a growing number of our society the political term "climate change" is a plaything used by the lost and politically corrupt themselves.

"The problem of corruption in Australia is recognised internationally"

You might want to read this and change feet, Kellie:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/11/18/2745801.htm
("Australia is 8th least corrupt country")

Spot on Kellie and posters so far. The worst corruption i have ever seen is the green, loony, left, communist, femanazis, spin doctoring their rhetoric, over & over & over again. ETS or GFC? Credit default swap or carbon default swap? Derivative forestry futures or shares in Timbercorp, Great Southern & Storm finance?

They want YOU, to pay more for everything so that the money can be handed over to the millionaires factory. Whats the bet that Bob Brown, Penny Wong & Peter Garrett end up on the board of some merchant bank or carbon credit, trading house after retiring from a lifetime of not serving any of us?

Of course none of this has anything to do with phasing out incandescent light bulbs for energy efficient miniature fluorescent light bulbs, which has already been done, by the previous government, without an ETS, (some of them contain mercury, BTW.) or the newer better, leds & quartz halogen bulbs which can run on 12 volt dc power? Or phasing out electric hot water systems in favour of solar? Etc, etc, etc.

Of course nothing is more corrupt than a left wing, femanazi, paedophile. How dare they apologize for child abuse that occurred between 40 & 80 years ago in order to spin doctor and cover up child abuse that has been occurring over the last 40 years, still is and while they are planning to radically increase future abuse by taking more children away from the safety of biological fathers to the known danger of deadbeat, single mothers and worse still, corrupt, social workers. All so they can create more "jobs for the girls", truly, sickening.

Clownfish -

Yes, follow ALL the lobbyists, bring them out into the sunlight. Even including green NGOs and Left NGOs (are there any?) which are not the same thing at all. If you can't tell a socialist from someone who understands we are totally dependent on the natural environment then you're not very perceptive.

Greenpeace or FOE are increasingly driven by an anti-capitalist and at times misanthropic ideology as much, in fact probably more so, than environmental concerns.

Witness, for example, their campaign against GM: much of it is driven by ipso facto opposition to multinational corporations than any evidence-based environmental concerns.

Now, opposition to multinational corporations is all well and good, but dressing it up as a pious concern for the environment is deceitful.

Personally, I have my reservations about unregulated capitalism, but I am adamantly opposed to holier-than-thou shysters, whether it's the Catholic church or Greenpeace.

Given the scandal enveloping Phil Jones & pals, this article now seems hilariously ironic.