Forward One

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Storm clouds pre-Katrina, anonymous photographer.

The speculative, Ponzi mania spread especially to Anglo-Saxon countries and to other developed countries in lesser degree. Australia took to "free" markets, "free" trade, free-floating currencies, deregulation, privatization, globalization, derivatives, hedge funds, private equity, wildcat mortgages and leverage-without-limit as a duck to water... Consumerism raged. Industry was gutted. Debts ballooned. The value of the currency fell at home and abroad. Despite low-cost imports, inflation flourished. In 2008, the Australian dollar can perhaps buy as much in real terms as five or 10 cents did in 1969... Prime Minister Kevin Rudd told us late in March that Australia's economic prospects remain "sound, strong and good". The Reserve Bank of Australia shares that view. Eerily, they echo US President Herbert Hoover in 1929 immediately before the stock market crash of that year.
The Black Death of financial collapse
By James Cumes


Storm clouds pre-Katrina, anonymous photographer.

How this had come to be he would never know. When he moved, it was as if each step was crunching on to a thin brittle veneer across the surface of the world, each step sending out thousands of fine lines. He was mortified, each step frozen, and at the same time comforted by routine thoughts. What he didn't understand was why they let him understand so much. Why was he allowed to see so much of the origins? Were they trying to convert him? Was the mission so accomplished it didn't matter who knew how they got there?

Any attempt to shield his thoughts failed, he could hear them louder than as if he had never tried to muffle them; and so, no doubt, could they. One morning, with nothing to distinguish it from every other morning, he woke up to a woman shaking him. Don't you remember me? Don't you remember me? she kept saying, urgently. No, he didn't remember her. What the hell was this woman doing in his house? He tried to sit up, and she lent over him, almost overpowering him, her bosom undeniably in his direct line of sight. Don't you remember me? and then, moving slightly, I've been so worried. Why didn't you call?

This time he did struggle to a sitting position. Who are you, he asked, feeling sweaty, worried that his breath stank, that every line on his already creased face was clearly visible. Vanity, age, cruelty, lust, he sat up and didn't know how it was that he didn't mind her being here. He didn't believe her, why weren't there pictures of her around the house, but she told the story of their marital problems, how she had gone away for a few weeks so they could think things out, how she hadn't heard from him once and didn't know what had gone wrong, that she wanted to come back, that, like him, she didn't want to live alone, that love took many forms.

He didn't believe her and he didn't care; those curves in his face was all it took for all reason to leave, and so it was that people returned to his life. He had felt the need and the universe, or more likely the network, had provided. His daughter, too, began visiting every weekend, laughing as she reminded him of events in their childhood. The amnesia was so total he just laughed along, letting her, with her enthusiastic, attractive young face, fill in all the gaps, colouring in the life that had been swept away with the coming of the implants.

He had almost always been salvaged from other fragments, happenings, sayings of the moment. Rust mixed with graffiti paint ran down into the gutter. Expensive apartment blocks loomed down increasingly fashionable inner-city streets. Glossy clothes took away any pretence of commonality; they were mixing with the elites and didn't even know it. He just couldn't work out where the network began and ended, why there was no boss, why there were no messianic elements, why he knew virtually anything he turned his mind to. While "they" seemed to conceal almost nothing from him.

The loss of a coherent government identity, a coherent national focus, the dissolving into a single identity, none of it made the slightest sense. Kids chattered as they played games on the library computer. Sweat took him over. He was compelled to make the most of the situation, but there were too many annoyances, grating collapses, discordant thoughts, too much pain and suffering in a chaotic world. The nation was overwhelmed, and like a living organism, the network moved to protect itself. He wasn't part of the mystery. He could stand outside, as he had always stood outside, and pray for observer status.

One day, trying to piece everything together, including the existence of a woman in his bed back at the house, her perfumes and her warmth infiltrating into every corner of the house, the times deeply backtracked, lost echoes, muffled halls, grasping at grey ghosts, sentient flashes in the murky grey, a life within the matrix, all of it he was trying to piece together. The same phraseology kept circling through what was left of his brain. He couldn't understand what had happened to him. White walls, nurses, lots of glass, a wide lawn, lowering pine trees, the crisp smell of escape.

He logged off from his work terminal and without explanation left the building, walked up to the old Social Policy Centre. At first he approached hesitantly, knowing that his moves were being watched, that all his moves were being watched. Then boldly, as if throwing off some invisible shackle, he strode boldly down the road and stood defiantly in front of the ruins. He needed to understand what had happened, even if they didn't want him to. There had been no attempt to repair the building, which surprised him. He had expected the veneer to right himself, the self-repairing organism that was the city to have acted quickly, to hide what ever there was to hide.

And what there was to hide; which no one seemed to admit any more, of which there was no sign on any of the media, on radio, television, newspapers, the multiple Internet formats, not one of them whispered the truth: that behind the facade there was enormous dissent. It was not just a gang of perennial outsiders grouping together; delighting in finding someone else to share their strange obsessions. That out there, somewhere on the network, were others just like him, filled with doubt, with suspicion, who knew that the received dogma was in fact nothing but manufactured rubbish.



Storm clouds pre-Katrina, anonymous photographer.


THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/is-rudds-vision-a-blairsnare/2008/04/17/1208025382072.html

Rudd's 2020 hindsight
Misha Schubert
April 18, 2008

IS IT a great policy rip-off?

Kevin Rudd appears to have nabbed his idea for the 2020 Summit from the former Blair government, which pledged four years ago to deliver universal access to one-stop centres offering child care, learning and health services by 2010.

Outlining the concept in a major speech on Wednesday night, the Prime Minister presented it as his own idea — winning wide acclaim across the community.

But the British government rolled out its first prototypes of such centres as far back as 1998 as part of its Sure Start program to foster social inclusion, and in 2004 pledged to expand them from disadvantaged areas into a universal scheme.

Similar centres are already operating in some parts of Victoria, South Australia, NSW and the Australian Capital Territory — and are soon to be rolled out in Queensland.

The varied models bring day care, preschool and maternal and child health services together under one roof.

In December 2004, in a ten-year strategy for child care and early learning, Britain vowed to expand its scheme for children expand its scheme for children under five, with 2500 centres by 2008 and 3500 by 2010.

It set a goal for "every family to have easy access to integrated services through Children's Centres in their local community, offering information, health, family support, child care and other services for parents and children."

Mr Rudd also appears to have lifted his universal preschool pledge from Britain.

The same UK Treasury strategy laid out "a goal of 20 hours a week of free high-quality care for 38 weeks for all three and four-year-olds with this pre-budget report announcing a first step of 15 hours a week for 38 weeks a year reaching all children by 2010".

In early 2007, Mr Rudd promised 15 hours a week of universal preschool for 40 weeks a year for all four-year-olds by 2013.

Asked about whether he had lifted the idea from Britain and if so, why he had not attributed it, a spokesman last night said Mr Rudd had long talked about research on the benefits of investing in early childhood.

"Mr Rudd has referred to and quoted that body of research extensively including in the press conference today," he said.

The Prime Minister said he had read the work of Nobel prize-winning economist James Heckman, but did not acknowledge the almost identical British policy.

Opposition Leader Brendan Nelson yesterday said the idea of one-stop child centres had "a lot of merit", but warned they would be expensive.

He also questioned Labor's ability to deliver them given that none of the 260 child-care centres it pledged at the last election will be built this year.

Meanwhile, the child-care industry split over who should run the proposed network of one-stop shops.

The Community Child Care Association of Victoria accused Mr Rudd of being "misguided" in his view that a mix of private and public operators should run the centres, saying commercial providers had driven quality down.

But Childcare Associations Australia, which represents private providers, said it did not matter who owned a service, only that strong quality standards were upheld.

State Early Childhood Minister Maxine Morand said Victoria already had 41 multi-purpose child-care centres in operation, with another 10 being built and four more having secured funding.

She said her predecessor, Sherryl Garbutt, had taken the proposal for such one-stop centres through cabinet in 2003.

"I think it's fantastic," she said of the federal proposal to make such centres universal. "It's a great model."

Mr Rudd stressed yesterday that the concept was not yet Government policy — just a proposal for debate at the 2020 Summit — but agreed it would be expensive to implement.

He suggested not every child-care centre would become a one-stop shop, but that universality would apply "if you live in a particular location across the country, you have physical access to such services and it is within your financial reach".

Meanwhile, child-care parliamentary secretary Maxine McKew urged a rethink of work patterns to help parents who were struggling to stretch only four weeks' annual leave across 12 weeks of school holidays.

"We have a work year that is pretty much 48 weeks or whatever, and we have a school year that's about … two-thirds of that," she told Sky News. "It's crazy."


Storm clouds pre-Katrina, anonymous photographer.