Yes well their 'wants' are more in tune with their 'needs', whereas our people's wants are way above their needs, however, instead of doing something about it, our people (generalising) prefer to take the easier option of allowing someone else to provide it for them.

Stop the handouts!

Now while this may not provide an immediate solution, it's a pretty good place to start.

The sooner people are made accountable for their personal 'life choices', the sooner the rest of us can relax about having some sought of a decent retirement for our time after work.

Although with the recent suggestion of raising the retirement age for self funded retirees to 67, just so the handout brigade can continue their enjoyment, there may not be much to look forward to after all.

Yes, we are fooling ourselves, however, rather than dealing with the issues, we are simply applying band aid solutions without addressing the cause.

So long as there is a 'free lunch' available, there will always be those who take it.

We simply need to move from 'hand outs', to 'hand ups', whereby the monies taken must be repaid at some point.

Rehctub,
I don't know how you would go trying to introduce a system where the social security payments were repayable. I suspect though that at some stage it will be necessary to do something about the handouts as we have had it far to easy for far too long. We have riden the sheep's back through the 50's and 60's then the mining industry progressively to the mantle. The truth is mining is finite and we need to plan and consider where we are going and how we will get there.
Yes i support your handout crusade, but no i don't agree about retirement age. I commented on your thread about this. 65 was the retirement age when life expectancy was no more than 68-70 for most men. things have changed and we are living much longer so we need to work longer or earn more to retire. Plenty of people are able to achieve this but if anything goes wrong in life, like divorce, it's gone.
As a single parent running a small business i would loose significant benefits if your plan was introduced. This would impact my standard of living but not my quality of life. Fortunately quality of life has little to do with material asset.

Forget about retirement rehctub. The plutocrats are going to make sure you work till you drop and there will be no money in the cookie jar when you reach 65, 67, or 77. Watch over the next few years as wealth just vanishes into the hands of the robber bankers and their lackey's the plutocrats. We'll be left with nothing but worthless pieces of paper. And note how our Aussie money is now plastic, a further insult because it's even useless to wipe your arse with it :(

From the Cambridge Catalogue website:
"Power Crisis, by former minister and Labor historian Rodney Cavalier, is the latest volume in the Australian Encounters series (jointly published by Cambridge University Press and the National Centre for Australian Studies (NCAS), Monash University). It will be launched in Sydney by Senator John Faulkner, who may well have some words about the current plight of Australian Labor, and MCed by Dr Tony Moore, commissioning editor of Australian Encounters and Director of NCAS.“This is a forensic and penetrating analysis of the crisis facing modern Labor. Cavalier is unrivalled in his ability to identify the dilemmas of the present but locate them in historical context.”
– Paul Kelly, The Australian“Rodney Cavalier analyses the root causes of the crisis to explain why government in NSW has become a grim game of musical chairs. He reveals a bitter conflict between an elected Labor government and the party that created it. The problem for modern Labor is the hijacking of party and government by a professional political class — operatives on big salaries with minimal life experience or connection to the broader community”
– Dr. Tony Moore, Director of NCAS
I get the impression that Australia is no longer regarded as an advanced nation, but is subsiding into a “3rd world” country. I get this impression because of the wholesale selling of our national resources, and the import of all our required manufactured goods. The prices of our resources is determined by the purchasers in foreign countries, not by a responsible person in our own country and they accept that the negotiators in our country are persons of low intelligence and probably low integrity, which of course, they are, I doubt if people can genuinely disagree with that assessment. It has gone well past the stage of accusing the Labor, Liberal or the LNP, I can see no sign of intelligence in the manner of their pursuing – any of them, in what they consider, the path to a profitable successful future for our country.

Merv09,
Australia's policy of short term gain and selfishness is a major contributor to the slide of our position as an advanced country. We have reduced our funding of the CSIRO, sold off organisations such as CSL and seen the quality of our educational facilities slide to buy a degree. With the loss of most of the manufacturing sector due to poor planning and an over inflated view of our own value we are left hanging on to an economy based on the finite mineral wealth and deteriorating tourism due to the dollar.
We as a country need to start to rebuild our secondary industry and face facts about our standard of living. We live way beyond our means and have one of the most inflated house prices world wide. There is a need to take a step back and realise the need to take back all the government handouts and channel them into developing new industries that will again lead the world. Renewable energy would be a good one, if we took the risk and developed a workable system of sustainable renewable methods we could be supplying the world in 15 -20 years time.

The comments about employment and apparent happiness with life resonated with me. A little under a year ago, I spent some time in Vanuatu. I suspect that they make Thailand (a "developing" country) look positively developed and bustling. The schools were in a horrifying state, some of the villages looked like African shanty towns and the roads were a mess. That said, I felt perfectly safe there at all hours of day and night. The people were unaggressive, well-employed (again, often doing jobs done by machines here) and seemed happy. I had been worried that I would be treated like a "rich, arrogant foreigner" (a fair call, probably) but the people were so friendly and happy to have irritating Aussies poking around their neighbourhoods. I was so impressed that, despite the shortage of material wealth, the warmth and happiness exceeded anything I have seen in a developed, affluent, Western nation.