The idea that governments should spend freely for their constituents, and institute bad policies such as Protection, made many Australians in the twentieth century consider government to be essentially a giant honey pot for their benefit. This attitude is best summed up by Norman Lindsay’s book The Magic Pudding. The more that one eats the more that there is to eat.

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“It has been a difficult lesson for me to accept that despite the severe damage to our forests and even a fatal fire in our nation's capital, the political decision has been to do nothing that will change the extreme threat to which our forests and rural lands are exposed.”

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David Packham in 2002: “For almost three decades State and Commonwealth governments have been warned of the potential of a 1939 repeat fire disaster. Those warnings by fire managers and fire researchers have been ignored, discounted or discredited."

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This year’s Media Watch started (February 10) with a flashy new introduction and Jonathon Holmes sitting at a new angle to the camera — but still looking like the cat that had caught the ABC canary. Well actually while it was yellow, what he caught was more like an ABC lemon.

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Not since Whitlam has a government been so profligate.  The latest, a massive $42 billion package with a $200 billion line of credit, is demonstrably the worst thing a government could do. It is elementary that it will do little to counter the recession, but every cent will have to be repaid – not by the Rudd government, but by the Australian people.

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The Institute of International Affairs in Melbourne has got a new life. One result is that on 5 Feb, 2009, we had a brilliant presentation by Greg Sheridan on Obama and what he might mean for US foreign/defence policies and for US/Aus relations.

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Waking up to hear the ABC rambling on about Kevin Rudd going ‘bats’ was enough to get the old heart up to operational speed. Bats, they must be crazy?

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"It's time to build a strong country, but that can only take place if we accept the relevance of the right values.”

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Population control movements and eugenics are not new. They have actually been around for a long time. It’s just that today the rhetoric is different, and the true aims have been concealed. But the outcome remains the same: dead human beings.

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The Great Depression, in most places, began with the share market crash in 1929 and by the end of 1933 was already receding into history. In 1936, well after the Great Depression had reached its lowest point and recovery had begun, a book was published that remains to this day the most influential economics treatise written during the whole of the twentieth century.

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