Planning for the Future - NOT!

Having commented yesterday on the lack of sound childrearing practices among at least some of the population at large let me comment today on the lack of planning for the future by our elected officials.

I have been increasingly horrified by the realisation that our governments (and I do mean plural) at the state and federal level of all political persuasions over the last 30-40 years have been doing nothing about the future of the country that they knew about and that was predictable some 50 years ago.

The so called Baby Boomer generation was born immediately after the war so there is no excuse - certainly by the 60's for people to remain unaware that there was going to be a large cohort of people who would be leaving the work force taking with them their intellectual property, their labour and their expertise. It is thus surprising that only in very recent times has there been a caterwauling set up by the Treasurer about how expensive this is going to be for the economy and how people will simply have to work longer and not expect pensions and not expect health care and so on.

Why not? We who are in the baby boomer generation have paid for all of the services that have been handed out to others during our working lives and we expected - however foolishly, that the government having the best interests of its citizens in mind would behave like the proverbial squirrel and put some money aside for the events that they could predict were coming. THAT is what is meant by risk management and risk mitigation.

But no, KNOWING the certainty that people would be getting older and leaving the work force, knowing that as they got older they would want to avail themselves of the same 'rights' and 'entitlements' that they had paid for with their taxes and knowing that they would require health services as bodies aged and failed what did the governments do? They preached good sound management to everyone and then did bugger all about it themselves.

As people reach the required age to leave work after thirty or forty years what are they faced with? The leisure time that they worked their proverbials off to attain in those years? Hell no! Work longer and work harder because the costs of everything are going up, it is now a user pays society, there is not enough money in the kitty to refurbish our infrastructure, to make health care affordable, to provide education to those who need it and can benefit from it without a crippling cost and all the while simply RAKING IN the tax dollars from those of us who are mad enough to work for a living on a pays as you go wage.

The companies get to pay less tax, and then can offset their expenses while we have to pay more and are unable to offset our expenses. Indeed we now pay more GST on everything we buy while governments get billions more in revenue, still don't fix things and then claim they are poor and badly done by.

Where is the money going?

Well we spend nearly two billion dollars on a donation to the people of Indonesia, and that's just the donation God only knows how much the operational costs of the defence forces are. We go to Iraq for goodness sake - why? What do we get for this expenditure of the taxpayers money? We have the highest costs of petrol ever with the government raking in 38 cents in the dollar in excise and then another 10 cents in the dollar for each transaction between the wholesaler and eventually the public.

It's a rip off!

We are not getting out money's worth. What's even worse people are actually falling for the crap that is being disseminated by the politicians that the sale of all of the public assets that WE paid for is a good thing because we can PAY AGAIN to buy shares in companies that we 'owned' already as taxpayers.

Is it just me or is the world going to hell in a hand basket and some of us still vote for the people who are taking us there?