Dear Jayb,

Winning at someone else's expense is an old paradigm and
an increasingly obsolete model of success. Separation
leads to disintegration and joining leads to miracles. ;-)

Dear Joe (Loudmouth),

I think its a shame that the government has made far too
little progress in repairing the damage left after a
decade of poor economic management by the Howard
government. Hopefully things will change after Monday.

Dearest Lexi,

At the risk of mucking up my chances at that barbed-wire fence, and as an ultimately-Labor-voter, isn't it true that Labor came to power on the back of Coalition (i.e. Costello) budget surpluses, which they squandered within a couple of years ?

I hate to express the slightest praise for the Coalition but isn't that what really insulated us from the initial effects of the GFC ? Then the mining boom kept us sort of inoculated from the after-effects of the GFC, in fact right up until now ?

Like you, I absolutely hate to give any sort of credit to the fascist, neo-colonialist, male-chauvinist, right-handed, thin (and pro-American!) coalition, but we surely have to acknowledge reality if we are to move into the future ?

Love forever,

Joe

Lexi,
you really need to see or talk to someone. You really do need help in differentiating between reasonably good & utterly incompetent. Don't worry though, you're not alone.

Dear Joe (Loudmouth),

Ian McAuley, a lecturer in public sector finance at the
University of Canberra and a fellow at the Centre for
Policy Development tells us that:

The Coalition has had the fortune to hold office in good
economic times - including the postwar boom of the
1950s and 1960s and the period from 1996 to 2007 when the
Howard government enjoyed the dividends of the Hawke-Keating
economic reforms, and the world economy was enjoying a long
speculative-driven boom. Good luck, perhaps, but not good
management.

Talking about leaving the books in surplus - McAuley stresses
that the Howard government did achieve a series of surplus
budgets. That is not diffcult in a time of strong economic
growth which delivered very high tax revenues.

However, the Howard government also left Australia with significant
liabilities in terms of our physical and intangible assets -
our common wealth. McAuley points out that the Howard government
neglected our surface transport - our interstate roads, railroads
and urban public transport. It starved our tertiary education
sector of funds. It neglected investments which could help
us to cope with the challenges of water shortages, climate
change and fossil fuel depletion. In short, it let fiscal
impression management displace sound economic management, and
directed political attention to only one side of the public
balance sheet, the debit side, while ignoring the asset side.

As McAuley points out, if the Howard cabinet had been the board
of a publicly listed company, the shareholders would have
thrown them out for weakening the company's asset base.

Therefore I again state that it was thanks to Labor that we survived
the global financial crisis and they still have a lot of progress
to do to repair the damage left after a decade of poor economic
management by the Libs. Hopefully this will continue to take
place after Monday regardless of who the Labor leader is.

Loudmouth: Don't worry about what Jayb writes, with his bile against women, he's probably a closet Islamist. He probably believes that all cultures, i.e. all male-dominated systems of belief in backward societies, are 'equal' and therefore both un-criticisable and unassailable.

Well loudmouth you definately picked the appropriate pseudonym. Wrong on all counts. Darrrh! You're out. I supported the equality of women from the early 60's. I pulled the boards of the front of the house which became "Elsie House" in Sydney. You had better look "Elsie House" up. I lived 3 years in an Islamic country. Definately not a closet Islamist or an Islamist of any discription. I believe in equality for all. Not a greater equality for some because they are women, or a different culture etc which is what happens now.

The gist of my arguement is that, there are Left & right wing Politics & their followers, who are blinkered by there own paticular left or right wing Dogma & they won't look beyond that view for the sake of good Governance so we are stuck with the crap Politicians we have now.

So, as the name implys, Loudmouth, Empty vessels make the most sound.

Dear Jayb,

There are politicians and there are politicians.
We have our fair share of seat-warmers, hacks,
carerists, adventurers. However we also have
ones that belong to a different parliamentary
tradition. They're the unpredictable ones who
go into Parliament to bring about particular reforms.

We can only hope that they are the ones who will lead
our parties and achieve positive outcomes for the good
of our country and its people.

Of course most people tend to see the world from a
viewpoint of subjectivity - an interpretation based
on personal values and experiences. If the world
consisted simply of some self-evident reality that
everyone perceived in exactly the same way - there might
be no disagreement among observers. But the truth of
the matter is that what we see in the world is not
determined by what exists "out there." It is haped
by what our past experience has prepared us to see and by what
we consciously or unconsciously want to see.