Sudanese migrant after living in Australia for several years, said that she was financially much better off than before, but spiritually much poorer.
Aries54,
I wonder how many OLOers can relate to that. I know I can only too well ! Culturally, the British Colonists have failed this Nation. One just has to look at Adelaide where most Colonisers came from the Continent. A totally different mentality there !

Aries,

Thomas Piketty ?

Joe

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Dear Chris,

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I don’t often agree with ttbn, but I do when he writes :

« … I fear that the West is under threat, mainly from within. We have lost faith in ourselves, and we can longer be sure that the West will not go the same way as other great and successful civilisations have in the past »
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The root problem, in my view, is the way our hybrid political system of representative democracy has been designed to operate.

Representative democracy is a hybrid political system that combines characteristics of both democracy and oligarchy. While party candidates are democratically elected by the dêmos (people) to be their representatives, they continue to owe allegiance to their political parties and are held to toe the party line at the risk of exclusion.

Democratically elected political representatives are simply puppets on a string acting on orders from their political parties, not in the common interest, but in their own interests and in the interests of the economic elites and organised special interest groups.

The first to take advantage of our so-called “representative democracy” were those who had positioned themselves, right from the beginning, at the very heart of the system: the political parties. The rapacious economic elite and well-organised special interest groups were quick to follow suit. All three (political parties, economic elites and special interest groups) perfectly-identified and understood the weakness of the system and learned how to influence and manipulate it to further their own interests, in complete impunity, under the pretext of democracy.

They are killing the hen that lays the golden egg.

Our hybrid system of representative democracy has been operating far too long almost exclusively as an oligarchy. The mandate of our elected representatives should be limited to the daily run-of-the-mill matters. All major issues should be dealt with by direct democracy.

It’s time we took stock of the situation and did something about it. If not, we’ll end up with some form of authoritarian rule.

The rich and powerful are robbing us of what little freedom we have.

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Yes, Banjo.

I agree we must change within if we are to reverse our relative decline.

A lot of the policy elites claim they are for the people, both left and right, but we need more ideas debated between them to show people how we can make sacrifices in order to gain.

As it stands, it is a brawl between various interest groups.

But perhaps I am being too idealistic.

The rich and powerful are robbing us of what little freedom we have.

Banjo Paterson,
They don't even have to try to rob us, we're jumping in ahead of them buying what they eye sees. They're merely obliging to good old greed.
The real robbers are our bureaucrats, those faceless ones in high office but we never hear of !
Each political party has a stack of them ! They have a network known as the Public Service.

Loudmouth2

Thanks Joe, that's him.