Ahh, privatisation - leads to "Private Affluence and Public Squalor".

I think it's too late for Electricity and now Private Water will have a foot-hold due to the desalination plant. It's just an easy step from here to ramp-up the public/private ratio until the whole thing is gone.

This is the result of many idealogies - particularly coming from the World Bank at the top and right down the food chain to greedy investors who are scared they'll miss out on a piece of the action.

The local pressure is the result of all politicians being terrified of deficits and failing to maintain public utilities adequately by cutting costs in vital areas.

Big projects, like power generation, is what overseas borrowings were for.

What was our last large-scale national infrastructure project? A railway line to Darwin?

We will never see another Snowy Mountains scheme or even an Opera House. This will be as good as it gets - unless someone can make a dollar out of it in the short term, why build for the next generation?

Voters should have made their voices heard decades ago - from Keating and especially through Howard - but now it's too late. There were some people warning us about "the thin edge of the wedge" but these were dismissed as troublemakers. Many of the blatant politicial lies (Alston on Telstra for example) were left unchallenged by the media so they got away with it.

Now the money we've saved on Government interest repayment debt is being outstripped by dividend payments to overseas investors as even more wealth pours out of the country.

Somebody is laughing all the way to the Bank, but it's not the public.

It certainly won't be our children.

In my previous post I posed the question: "..... Could he [the Governor-General] not co-ordinate the appointment of ministries in all seven Parliaments if the Constitution has been so sabotaged?".

My use of the word 'Parliaments' was incorrect, and possibly misleading in the context.

Had I been less focussed upon meeting the word limit, I may have used a term like 'sovereign jurisdictions' or 'components of the federation'. The point I wish to emphasise by now making the correction is that appointment to the respective State and Commonwealth ministries has always been entirely at the discretion of, respectively, the various State Governors and the Governor-General. I was not implying that any ministerial appointees in such envisaged circumstance would necessarily be from among the membership of any of the seven Parliaments.

Now, back to the future.

B_D,

Your 'CATO' is not to be found in any of the seven Parliamentary Oppositions, nor, for that matter, among the parliamentary membership of parties currently 'in government'. Your 'CATO' is, nevertheless, already known by name to most Australians having any interest in public affairs. Why, then, does 'CATO' not speak up?

Perhaps 'CATO' is unconvinced that you have correctly identified the 'CARTHAGE' against which he, or she, must be on guard.

To identify only the performance of the present NSW government as our figurative 'CARTHAGE', a substantial threat to the Australian polity, is to fail to observe that deception, rather than venality, may better explain the perceived (generally declining) performance of many Australian politicians and governments, State and Federal, over the years.

If, over more years than any of the present 'pre-selected elites' have lived, there has operated in Australia a covert systematic process of unlawfully influencing, and/or misrepresenting, electoral results, then such a system could over those years steadily divert parliamentary representation of all political colours into service of interests other than those of Australians at large. Such a system would have, quite apart from influencing the outcome of any election, become a profound influence upon pre-selection for endorsement in any political party. Could this be 'CARTHAGE'?

Wobbles... indeed! see Forests post.

Forrest....

ur scaring me :) I think you began to touch on something that is probably known to some, but not to many, and yes..I could easily believe that what you described is indeed our true 'Carthage'....
But who is Cato? now that I'd like to know :)

Perhaps, what you described, ever so circumspectly, is the reason that state governments 'look' like the Carthages against whom we must struggle... when in reality, there is a darker force out there pulling their strings.

In a way, you are touching on that sensitive area for which men are ..or... have accidents...and that twilight zone where right and wrong are blurred into 'national (vested elite) interest'.....

Clearly you know more than I do here.. so guard your steps mate.

Let's pray that our Sovereign Lord will over-rule the machinations of men.

Oh well, at least the thread started well. Unfortunately, it has now unravelled into the frootloop territory of dubious historical analogy and paranoid conspiracy theory. A pity, really.

CJ... not really a pity.

You see... thus far I've not seen anything really solid about what to DO about this.

I could whip together a video I suppose.. and try out for YOUTUBE :) and may still do.. if time allows.

Once you raise the issue, and most are in agreement with it.. what more is there to say? So.. I guess that's the point where it drifts...

Forest was touching on something I think is important..and using the Carthage analogy is pretty much the subjective 'devotional' approach sometimes applied to the Bible in home Bible study groups. Of course it's not academic, but we can't always be dry and stuffy can we?

I think it's also a rhetorical device (using Carthage) as it links directly to something we have already been discussing, and while it might not be 100% analoguous, there are elements worthy of mention.

History is all about competing forces right? Don't be so sullen :)
Come and have a whack at me in the Kaysar thread.

On that.. I do hope you have the ability to see systematic argument, and to verify sources and chronology of events. If yes...then you might have something worthwhile to say on the Trad thread.
Have think, and try to avoid simply voicing ad hominems, but actually look at the evidence presented, and evaluate that.
cheers.

Wobbles,

"We will never see another Snowy Mountains scheme or even an Opera House. This will be as good as it gets - unless someone can make a dollar out of it in the short term, why build for the next generation?

If you are talking about transnationalisation in Banking and the corporate sector, the Chinese oliarchies could prove masters wuth a brother or sister in each all the Western countries and a familial patriarch with guanxi connection on the mainland.

China really was Communist under Mao or at least didn't adopy many of Marx's system [Pye]. China and Russia are developing into billionaire dictated oliarchies, closer to the old Mercantilisn than Capitalism or Comnunism