Lexi, do you really think you can get any truth from a propaganda organisation like that?

With it being so bad, I wonder why they don't just go home.

Yabby, nice try. Life though, is hardly about 'balance' is it, unless you omitted the word 'bank' in front of 'balance', by the sound of you?

You are quite right, I do apologise.

Anna Blight has decreed there is to be a law preventing mining companies from mining in town centres and two kms from that spot.

I'd forgotten her hard-hitting tough laws to curb rapacious mining companies.

Funny really, that she'd sacrifice a single square inch of the top soil from the buckets-of-doom, but then, as you say, the 'state' owns the minerals, although not the people who live within the state, so it seems. And if you doubt that, just ask the farmers on the Darling Downs and in the Liverpool Plains, NSW.

You are sounding very 'brave' about the Aus$ Yabby. Taken a hit recently? Wishing for a policy reversal or feigning a disinterested stance?

Do please write to Stephen Smith and offer to run a mercenary force. You could staff it with third world warriors just to give them a job. Nice gesture. Save us all a lot of taxes too. Very popular in the neo-lib circles I'd say.

I see 'open borders' being entirely consistent with free trade Yabby, and am shocked to think you would baulk at that link.

How can we get the cheapest, sorry, best price for labour if we are unable to undercut the local shirkers with foreign workers?

Trade is trade after all, and people are just widgets to be traded like all the other junk we all buy.

Perhaps you are shipping people in now Yabby? Someone is, apparently.

*Life though, is hardly about 'balance' is it*

Of course it is, TBC. We think and we feel, they often conflict.
Learning to think about what we feel and why, lets us examine life
from various perspectives, not just the one. The emotionally engulfed
commonly have a sad ending, despite all the dreams. The law of
unintended consequences is never far away.

*'state' owns the minerals, although not the people who live within the state, so it seems.*

Ah TBC, democracy is indeed full of faults, but its the least worst
system available. The majority of the people did indeed vote for
Anna Bligh. So she has a mandate from the people of Qld, like it or
not.

*Wishing for a policy reversal or feigning a disinterested stance?*

As I rely on exports, I indeed take a hit. That does not change the
fact that the market value for something makes more sense to me
then a politician deciding the same, based on his/her urge to be
re elected.

*I see 'open borders' being entirely consistent with free trade Yabby*

Not so TBC, for free trade is commonly beneficial to both parties
and is about win-win. That is not the case with open borders.

Comment, as it often does, has moved from reality, the impacts of the high courts ruling.
The wishes of most Australians, to the pain and suffering of SOME OF the boat people.
We too, are side tracked to questions about our humanity, and ignorance to that suffering.
A Democracy remains as always unable to please every one.
Surely it however should serve the will of most?
If today Sarah Hanson Young was our leader, controlled both houses, apart from my mate TBC being overjoyed.
Australia would be over run!Say no! tell me I am wrong, but no it is true.
Refugees who come here risk death, risk being sent back, risk every thing.
And they pay, about 5 years income in those country's.
If it was certain at the end of the trip they faced certain entry?
Australia, must soon, confront the fact it is over crowding and shortage of food that brings the refugees here.
Are we to put our selves in that position, cut the cake in to even smaller slices?
Pretend that once here we do not see intrusions, on our rights in our country.
I know, without doubt, the Greens are best served by not putting us on notice they in those numbers, care little for the view of mainstream Australia.

Belly, I have to tell you that if Hanson-Young were to become PM I would be very upset indeed.

I might vote Green, out of sheer desperation and with a desire to participate in the process, but I regard Hanson-Young as being on a par with Pauline Hanson, albeit for different reasons. And no, it's not the close association of her name with Hanson, although, maybe, if we turn her surname around she does become a Young-Hanson, so who knows?

I cringe when I see her come on to the news and feel somewhat unsettled as I vote 'Green', probably as many ALP voters do with Gillard, or Rudd back when he was PM, and, one hopes, Coalition voters might with Abbott.

That may be unfair on her, but she does not impress me at all.

As for the meaning of 'democracy', it's a bit of an unsettled definition as far as I can see.

Take our partner nations, the UK and USA, for instance.

Hardly anyone votes in either nation, so disengaged are they with the process of politics, leaving the path clear for complete idiots to take control and be voted in by their equally brain-dead supporters.

This leads to Belly's 'best practice' model of democracy, the leadership of the herd, the baying of nincompoops being the motive power of politics, the complete Westie Model.

There seems to be a view abroad that democracy has been with us always. Not so, it's quite new and fresh in the West (not your Westie West Belly, the West as a concept of where we sit geo-politically).

I have a book here, 1831, concerning the Duke of Wellington- the one who beat Napoleon and became an English PM.

In discussing the rising tide of democracy, in particular the 'troubles' of Ireland seeping over to England, Lord Byron comments that 'democracy is only an aristocracy of blackguards', while Wellington says, 'A democracy, if a real democracy could be formed, would be the strongest of all governments; but then, remember, the strongest is the most tyrannical'.

The Duke, of course, supported strong sovereigns who attracted 'good men' to run the nation, a model I am just as doubtful of.

But Belly, your model supports and endorses such as Palin and Bush, Clinton and Obama, Blair and Cameron, as well as our political misfits we suffer from here.

Where do all the other nations in the world send their refugees to, to be processed off-shore?

Our desperate need to find a solution to a non-problem is not to be found, as far as I am aware, anywhere else in the world.

If anyone could supply a list of, say, a dozen nations who are doing what The Westie's demand here, I would appreciate it.