Hell's Bells & Buggy Wheels, do we ever need more articulate & well-publicized protest against the creeping 'devil-take-the-hindmost' ideology drip-feeding into the National-led government's veins!
Not that it wasn't there in the first place, but it flares up whenever society's immune response drops off a bit. It's not so much "Bugger you Jack, I'm OK" as "Bugger you Jack, why can't you be more like me?"
The impetus for this mini-rant is..
I've not long read Anne Else's piece on the government's Welfare Working Group, and it's even more depressing than I'd thought. It was bad enough watching the almost criminal naivety of some of Treasury's denizens in the movie "Someone Else's Country" (or was it the successor movie), but the WWG really takes the cake!
And as Anne Else points out, the devil is in the lack of details, with the WWG simply ignoring the issues fundamental to the 'welfare problem' by saying that it wasn't in their terms of reference.
Good old Ts of R! Whenever you want a forgone conclusion, just grope around under the skirts of your Ts of R; you'll be AOK, mate!
Reminds me of W H Auden's "Ogre" piece on the occasion of the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.
He has quite a few interesting things to say..
It's taken me years to figure out why all the pollie-blather about
"improving this country's economic performance" is just hot air.
Our overseas currency-earning commodity exporters still dominate the economic landscape here.
Almost by definition, commodity producers are price-takers, with two glaring exceptions: oil, and the US dollar in which most (if not all?) oil markets are denominated (and even that's not rock-solid any more).
Price-takers can improve their overall income only by lowering their "overheads", e.g.. wages, taxes, import duties of all kinds, and materials and energy inputs.
Low wages run with high unemployment;
lower taxes mean less Health and Welfare spending (two big-ticket items of government expenditure), to say nothing of Superannuation;
lower import duties mean import-substitution industries (providers of employment) die in the face of sweated-labour imports;
cheap energy means the rest of us pay more for our power.
Strangely enough, the proponents of that grim hit-list are often very vocal about "Law and Order", and say they are prepared to spend big on it, more prisons, harsher punishments.. they're a logical consequence of that same hit-list.
Makes sense, I suppose.. Someone somewhere will have done their sums and decided that it's cheaper and less bothersome to make the legal process their enforcer rather than their potential adversary.
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