Let’s face it, as we grow older, Christmas is very likely to turn into a net deficit position when judged from a personal perspective. I know, I know … the joy of giving and all that.
Certainly, in our family, the rule is nothing for adults … but this begs the question of when adulthood really begins. Many of the politicians in Canberra could usefully ask themselves this question.
Informally, my mother seems to have been given an exemption – but I guess that after cooking 15,732 meals for her four children, attending 43 speech nights, driving children and assorted friends around most parts of Melbourne for 30 years, she deserves the best bottle of gin each year. (My favourite is Bombay Sapphire although Tanqueray is good too.)
Actually, I did very well this Christmas, with a new set of Japanese cooking knives – which I really need to re-commence cooking (with chopping) in view of my weak wrist (yes, you are thinking, am I not milking it for all it’s worth ? Come on, keep that Christmas spirit going, please.)
But taking my cue from an article in the Christmas edition of The Spectator, I have worked up a bit of list for the things I really want for Christmas or at any time, for that matter:
- The abolition of the Social Inclusion Board, any mention of the term ‘social inclusion’ – in fact, the total exclusion of social inclusion;
- A politician who stands up to say: “I believe in small government, I believe that citizens can solve most of their problems on their own or in voluntary collectives, the government is not here to help you because, with very few exceptions, it cannot help you.”
- The banning of the use of Manglish by politicians or anyone in public office – am I on the same page with you on this?
- A sock in Bill Shorten’s gob when he tells us that the Fair Work Act is “working well”;
- Ceasing the pretence that the euro can be saved and that it was not their fault all along;
- And one for Sinc, exposing the role that Freddie Mac and Fannie May played, along with US government policy, in precipitating the GFC. (Pushing loans on people who have no hope of repaying them is NEVER a good idea.)
Look, I have more, many more, but it is important to have modest aims at this time of peace and goodwill 
UPDATE: Example of forbidden cubed from our Minister for Social Inclusion, ”social inclusion encourages governments to build multidimensional policies and services for Australians living with complex disadvantage” We all love a bit of multidimensional policies??? What does this gibberish even mean? But then again, social inclusion, Manglish and governments helping … all in the one sentence.
So you do believe in Santa Claus, Virginia!
bytheway
26 Dec 11 at 11:44 am
A most acceptable list for any sensible adult. Fingers crossed for next year.
Sea Wolf
26 Dec 11 at 12:57 pm
Amen to that.
Viva
26 Dec 11 at 1:23 pm
As someone who’s firmly in the “language evolves” camp, I’m with you completely. Bureaucratese and management jargon are about the supremacy of technocrats, enforcement of an insider culture and adherence to loopy pseudo-scientific technocracy and credentialism.
daddy dave
26 Dec 11 at 1:35 pm
1 The abolition of the Department of Climate Change and also the abolition of any government “initiative” which is founded on any Green agenda/belief at all.
2 The permanent banishment from our shores of Tim Flannery, Will Steffen, and the biggest shonkster of the lot of them: David Karoly.
3 The annihilation of the Gillard government [if that is what you could describe it] at the earliest possible opportunity, including the loss by the Labor Party of the seats held by Swan, Combet, Bowen, Garrett & Plibersek. I would go one further and add the seat held by my own local MP, Roxon, in Melbourne’s inner west, but that would be a miracle not a wish.
That’s a start I suppose – though I could go on ……….
James P
26 Dec 11 at 2:15 pm
Judith, your pragmatic frankness is like a breath of fresh air!
John Mc
26 Dec 11 at 2:17 pm
My wish for 2012 is for some talent to rise in Australian and World politics. How about it Judith, feel like running for office?
Nick
26 Dec 11 at 2:20 pm
Daddy Dave – with you all the way. When shall the executions start?
Judith, thanks: You’ve managed to ask for nearly every one of my Christmas wishes.
Winston Smith
26 Dec 11 at 2:50 pm
A good way to stop Shorten saying how good the FWA is would be to repeal the FWA and NOT replace it with anything.
How about serious tax cuts to force serious spending cuts?
John Comnenus
26 Dec 11 at 3:47 pm
On that last point, I always recommend this:
Architects of Ruin (Peter Schweizer)
The very detailed story of how activists, left-leaning pollies and other influential “liberal” people combined to create the disaster, the sub-prime episode leading on to the GFC.
blogstrop
26 Dec 11 at 3:48 pm
Just read the following comment regarding a newspaper article about the bloated public service (appears to be 100% serious):
Good luck with any of your wishes when Australia is inhabited by such economic illiterates. And probably becoming the norm.
Chris M
26 Dec 11 at 3:55 pm
Chris M
The public sector is filled with these taxeating ignoramuses. It’s impossible to reason with them. Just sack 90% of them and we wouldn’t feel a thing.
JC
26 Dec 11 at 4:01 pm
I hope the new technologies coming on stream in the next 20 years will render all those wishes irrelevant. Once solarpower and battery technology reach pricing parity with current power sources, quantum computing simulate billions of scenarios picking the best in real time, robots to do virtually everything, even the lazy will be so rich ‘redistributing wealth’ will be irrelevant.
Governments will be reduced to picking up the rubbish where they belong.
Forester
26 Dec 11 at 4:23 pm
thats the problem with conservatives, in power for a decade and they just fluffed with the borders of socialist taxes.
irving J
26 Dec 11 at 4:30 pm
I’d be happy with;
A gag order on Tim Flannery to stop him making any further weather doom forecasts.
A fresh nappy for Wayne Swan.
A public humiliation for conroy.
A high chair for shorten
A voice coach for jools (or a larynx transplant)
Carpe Jugulum
26 Dec 11 at 5:00 pm
“The banning of the use of Manglish by politicians or anyone in public office”
Yes, a great idea. But could you imagine the wording of the ban? You would have to ban it before you could ban it.
ar
26 Dec 11 at 5:42 pm
What about using the Canberra Gift Validation Service?
http://catallaxyfiles.com/2010/12/24/new-act-government-service/
Samuel J
26 Dec 11 at 6:02 pm
ar … good point.
Judith Sloan
26 Dec 11 at 6:04 pm
I would like to add to the list. A Constitutional amendment that required spending by all levels of government in Australia to be reduced in real terms by 10 percent per year until it equalled 10 percent of GDP and then never to exceed 10 percent of GDP. Ten percent should be enough to run the police, courts, defence and provide a safety net for those in genuine need.
johno
26 Dec 11 at 6:04 pm
Chris M, it’s been estimated that the cost of employing a public servant at the Commonwealth level – superannuation, accommodation, training, heat, light and power, ITC, office services, stationary, leave, OH&S, illness and injury, general administration etc – is 2.5 times their base salary. So the commenter you mention is arguing that to spend, say, $250,000 employing a useless and/or surplus Executive level 1 is justified because he/she will pay tax of around $25,000!!!!
Des Deskperson
26 Dec 11 at 6:24 pm
ar, Judith.
The banning of manglish should be easy.
Make it compulsory that all government statements and press releases must be comprehensible by a five year old.
That’d exclude half the government we have now from comprehending what was being said, but it will be for the better good.
duncan
26 Dec 11 at 6:46 pm
There is no doubt that the constitution needs to be amended to limit total tax and govt spending to a percentage of GDP. The public can’t be expected to run a campaign against every stupid new tax or increased govt spending. Limiting the total tax take/level of govt spending will cause competing interests to continually justify their need for funding from the taxpayer. It will also prevent one poor govt from running up a huge debt that will cripple the country for a generation.
gary
26 Dec 11 at 7:09 pm
“..it’s been estimated that the cost of employing a public servant at the Commonwealth level – superannuation, accommodation, training, heat, light and power, ITC, office services, stationary, leave, OH&S, illness and injury, general administration etc – is 2.5 times their base salary.”
But Des, if you’re a Keynesian, all that government spending is creating more and more prosperity and wealth. Think of all the growth in jobs for useless OH&S drones, wanky management types and HR ‘professionals’.
Plus… there’s the multiplier effect!! ;p
Art Vandelay
26 Dec 11 at 7:24 pm
Lol, Yea Art.
It’s a stimulus. Da science is pretty well settled on that one.
JC
26 Dec 11 at 7:32 pm
Excellent idea for a post, Judith. (I’m full of Christmas cheer, no grumpiness!)
- The rotting carcasses of Fairfax, Nine and Yahoo! to be put out of their miseries with a market-based bullet to the head. Their death throes have gone on long enough. Time for the new breed to be given their head.
- Someone to start a real, non-government-funded Australian version of HuffPo. Done properly this time, as a long-term viable commercial concern by people who understand the online industry as natives of it, not MSM journos flailing about in vain preservation mode without changing their habits and values.
- Europe to do its business or get off the pot. Enough with the waiting game, we’re all sick of it. This includes, lest you lot accuse me of just advocating bail outs, the dismantling of the excessive elements of the welfare state for 50-65yo retirees and the young unemployed in the PIIGS countries. Some give and take is necessary here.
- Someone, anyone, from the banking sector to be held accountable for the GFC. One conviction, that’s all I’m asking. Even if it’s just a show trial. Please, let us not allow the banking sector to get away entirely scot free for dragging us down into what could so easily have been (and may still be) a global depression.
- One point in TPP per month, until the inevitable Turnspill in December.
m0nty
26 Dec 11 at 7:38 pm
What I want for Christmas?
. Governments and bureaucrats that accept responsibility for their actions.
. Individuals who accept responsibility for their actions
. Governments that stay out of my private life and don’t moralise and which stick to their core business.
Samuel J
26 Dec 11 at 7:58 pm
My Christmas wish was for Santa to bring me a new bike. That wish had as much chance of getting up as all the others in this list.
boy on a bike
26 Dec 11 at 8:44 pm
I wanted a pony, BoaB.
Winston Smith
26 Dec 11 at 8:51 pm
James P has a good list; and Monty is not a complete idiot after all, just a partial [he still refers approvingly to HP which gathers its AGW info from, amongst other rancid sources, Earthfirst]; but I don’t know about this:
“Once solarpower and battery technology reach pricing parity with current power sources”
That will never happen, unless of course you mean parity through massive government subsidisation which still ignores the main point that solar, like wind, can never replicate reliable, predictable fossil, nuclear and perhaps Rossi power:
http://landshape.org/enm/renewables-wake-up-and-smell-the-rossi/
Now that is an exotic worth looking at.
cohenite
26 Dec 11 at 10:04 pm
Great link cohenite, but if we accept that there is no CO2 emission problem we can easily keep on burning coal and gas until some form of nuclear power becomes cheap and convenient. In the meantime we can continue to do nicely selling coal to less fortunate nations.
Rafe
26 Dec 11 at 10:16 pm
I wonder if they met their deadline:)
“Of course, we won’t know for certain until they deliver on their promise of an operating 1MW power-plant by October 2011.”
Rafe
26 Dec 11 at 10:18 pm
A pink pony?
Boy on a bike
26 Dec 11 at 10:43 pm
Johno I agree:
Interestingly this is what the Bible teaches. Also I think Arthur Laffer would agree that somewhere around 10% is optimum efficiency. It wasn’t so long back that all the peasants in England went on strike when the King tried to raise his tax grab to 16%, brought the whole country to a halt.
Chris M
26 Dec 11 at 11:02 pm
“I wonder if they met their deadline:)”
David Stockwell has been following the devlopment closely, as you can from his most recent posts:
http://landshape.org/enm/?s=rossi&x=24&y=19
Apart from that Rossi is getting a lot of internet attention; apparently the first 1MW plant has been sold:
http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/11/rumor-that-navy-spawar-is-rossi-energy.html
Who knows; with wind and solar, and all other renewables except hydro, we know they don’t work yet this brain-dead government is giving the spivs who runs the renewable scams $13 Billion of your hard-earned over the next 3 years; at the very least Rossi deserves some official attention.
With coal, google Ultrasupercritical technology which is dealt with in this article by TonyfromOz:
http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/11/rumor-that-navy-spawar-is-rossi-energy.html
cohenite
26 Dec 11 at 11:14 pm
BoaB: what’s wrong with the bike you’re on? You’d have to change your nick.
m0nty
26 Dec 11 at 11:14 pm
Also, for cohenite: my dream of an Australian HuffPo is not about HuffPo’s politics, at all, but about their business model. That is what I would want to emulate. The politics, that’s another story.
m0nty
26 Dec 11 at 11:16 pm
That Rossi thing looks interesting. Excellent news that it’s in the hands of the military instead of the oil cartel.
“Proprietary catalysts” sounds worrying to me, though. The story on calls to open source the project brought up some fraught arguments.
m0nty
26 Dec 11 at 11:27 pm
“Westerners have abandoned an ethical basis for society, believing that all problems are solvable by a good government, which we in the East never believed possible.”
“… Eastern societies believe that the individual exists in the context of his family. The family is part of the extended family … The ruler or the government does not try to provide for a person what the family best provides.”
“In the West … the government came to be seen as so succesful that it could fulfill all the obligations that in less modern societies are fulfilled by the family.”
Lee Kuan Yew said this in an interview in 1994, around the same time he warned we could become the “poor white trash of Asia” – 17 years ago.
We are not real good at heeding what the successful operators have to say.
Mick Gold Coast QLD
26 Dec 11 at 11:48 pm
Crikey is a sort of Australian Huffpo.
daddy dave
27 Dec 11 at 12:18 am
Not really.
Crikey is an industry newsletter, written for insiders and sycophants as so much of Australian journalism is. Its business model of subscriptions means it is always going to be a niche title with limited appeal, more of a vanity project or a vehicle for political ambitions. It’s more like the Oz than HuffPo in that regard. It’s the model of what Fairfax will be in five years, if its mastheads exist at all.
The Huffington Post is a mass market publication, written by a wide and diverse set of contributors, from the obscure to the famous, intended to be readed by everyone. Its business model is based on UGC by unpaid contributors combined with professional content, which is anathema to the MSM standard. It is part of the solution, not the problem.
m0nty
27 Dec 11 at 12:57 am
The Rossi thing is a scam. Nuclear physics is well established and this would require a lot of it to be simply wrong. Lubos Motl thinks it is in effect a large nickel metal hydride battery. No nuclear at all.
The US Navy is continuing to fund Polywell which is founded on well established physical principles and when last heard was continuing to make progress with no show stoppers identified.
Eyrie
27 Dec 11 at 8:50 am
‘Someone, anyone, from the banking sector to be held accountable for the GFC. One conviction, that’s all I’m asking. Even if it’s just a show trial. Please, let us not allow the banking sector to get away entirely scot free for dragging us down into what could so easily have been (and may still be) a global depression.’
Maybe bankers are being convicted because they aren’t responsible. A disaster of this magnitude is clearly the work of government!
Can someone, anyone, from government be held accountable for the GFC. One conviction, that’s all I’m asking. Even if it’s just a show trial. Please, let us not allow governments to get away entirely scot free for dragging us down into what could so easily have been (and may still be) a global depression.
After all, government got away with it last time. Let us not make that mistake again.
Johno
27 Dec 11 at 9:42 am
“The Rossi thing is a scam”. Maybe, but its a bloody convincing one; consider; if it is a battery, a well travelled objection, then that in itself is remarkable:
http://www.nyteknik.se/nyheter/energi_miljo/energi/article3083834.ece
And nuclear physics are NOT well established, at least at the engineering level; Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann, of the 1989 cold fusion, non-replicable experiment, are undergoing a rehabilitation; and google Exploding Wires[EW] and have a leisurely browse over that extensive area of research; that well known principle is incorporated in Rossi’s device; but noone is certain how and why EW’s occur.
Having said that I’m no expert; David Stockwell has applied his large nerdy brain to the issue and if he thinks it’s worth looking at, that’s fair enough by me.
cohenite
27 Dec 11 at 10:01 am
I never want to hear the term “First bloke” ever again. Or anything to do with blokes and sheds.
boy on a bike
27 Dec 11 at 10:34 am
Monty, perhaps I should have wished for a new frame instead. It’s about the only original bit of bike left. Wheels, forks, pedals, cables etc have all been replaced numerous times due to crash damage or wear and tear.
There can only be one reason why Santa didn’t deliver – it’s all Tony Abbott’s fault.
boy on a bike
27 Dec 11 at 10:36 am
BoaB,
One of these perhaps?
Though this is sex on 2 wheels…
Woolfe
27 Dec 11 at 11:24 am
“
An urger and a spiv, boy on a bike, who never was a “bloke” and wouldn’t know what a shed was even if one fell from the sky onto his head.
Mick Gold Coast QLD
27 Dec 11 at 11:57 am
cohenite re ‘David Stockwell has been following the devlopment closely, as you can from his most recent posts:
http://landshape.org/enm/?s=rossi&x=24&y=19‘
I’ve attempted that link a few times and my norton comes up with the message ‘access to malicious site blocked’
I wonder if Dr Stockwell has had another virus attack – I recall he had problems last year
val majkus
27 Dec 11 at 12:08 pm
val; the link is working for me but I don’t have Norton so maybe my security is more secure, or less!
David does have trouble from time to time with his site but he hasn’t mentioned any lately.
cohenite
27 Dec 11 at 1:01 pm
Your bike sounds like the incredible axe that was still going after many years, the oldtimer boasted it only had five or six new handles and two heads.
Rafe
27 Dec 11 at 1:06 pm
Rafe, we have several of those in the workshop. Dad can show you an historic axe that his great grandfather brought out with him in the 1830s. it’s only been through 3 handles and 5 blades in Dad’s lifetime.
Boy on a bike
27 Dec 11 at 1:12 pm
thanks cohenite – the threat norton exposes is an identity theft threat defined as ‘Items such as spyware or keyloggers that attempt to steal personal information from your computer’
so … makes me a little reluctant to visit Niche modelling
val majkus
27 Dec 11 at 1:57 pm
I must be pissed. I agree with mOnty
Tiny Dancer
27 Dec 11 at 3:26 pm
“I must be pissed. I agree with mOnty”
LOL, well said, Tiny.
kae
27 Dec 11 at 3:28 pm
Cohenite, in so far as exploding wires have anything to do with nuclear reactions it is in the creation of a hot dense plasma where fusion reactions can occur. Nothing here that isn’t within the bounds of known physics, more an engineering problem. I have heard mention of a z pinch fission reaction too. Use Pu 239 for the wire. This may be a way to make very small but efficient fission explosions using what would otherwise be sub critical mass of plutonium. Possible spaceship drive. Mini mag Orion.
The Polywell reactor is more a physics problem in that the scaling laws are yet to be determined. This is the make or break of the concept. If it works as Doc Bussard thought, the engineering ought to be reasonably straightforward.
What I’d like for Christmas is for the US Navy project sponsor)to announce that Polywell works as hoped.
Eyrie
27 Dec 11 at 5:07 pm
“Ceasing the pretence that the euro can be saved and that it was not their fault all along”
Ceasing the constant double standard with regard to centralisation would be good.
Whenever a subordinate body fails, it is used as a call to centralisation. But when a failure of a central body occurs, centralisation is never questioned.
2dogs
28 Dec 11 at 8:13 am
[...] Judith Sloan wants the term banned, the editors of the Australian think it’s bureaucratic gibberish and even the new minister for social inclusion seems unsure about what it means. So what is social inclusion? [...]
Club Troppo » What is social inclusion?
3 Jan 12 at 5:29 pm