Dear Old Codgers: Noise ≠ Speed OR Danger

This morning I had a rather amusing experience. While taking one of my many shortcuts to avoid the Anzac Highway/South Road construction, I was driving through a side street, under 50km/h and saw this older gentleman walking on the footpath... as I approached he stepped out on the road and began waving his hands to slow down... he looked angry.

At this point I had several options... to stop and get angry at him, to totally ignore him... or to make fun of him.

I chose the last option. I begin mimicking his "slow down" motions while laughing... I didn't think he could look any angrier than before but he did. I couldn't stop laughing.

Now, if I HAD been driving dangerously, I wouldn't have done anything other than stop driving dangerously. However, because the guy was making the mistake that noise = speed and/or dangerous driving.... I had to take the opportunity to take the mickey out of him.

My only potential cause for offense to him was the noise of my car, I had just braked to go slowely over a spoon-drain and accellerated back up to the limit, not as fast as I could have, but not slowely either.

In summary... dont get angry, just laugh!

I'm not a "working family"

It seems the catch-cry of politicians these days is Working Families and nobody has pointed this out more effectively than the final montage of The Chasers War on Everything for the year where they cut together all of Kevin Rudd's mentions of the phrase from the last week of the 2007 election campaign.

What is my problem with this? Well, I'm single, upper-middle class, Caucasian and male. For a politician to issue any policy to help this demographic would be suicide and the only time it seems to be mentioned is in the negative.

Do I get any of the promised tax cuts? 3/8's of bugger-all.
Do I get any family tax benefits? Nope.
Do I get penalised for not having private health insurance? Yep!

I could go on but you see the theme here.

With the current world economic condition very finely balanced and the US Federal reserve slashing interest rates to reduce the chances of a recession, our government should be doing more.

Do they realise that with our relatively high interest rates compared to much of the world, its going to cause an influx of capital borrowing from Australia, increasing the value of our dollar in the world markets? Why should we care about that? For these reasons:

• Imports are cheaper, therefore increasing inflation
• Local products are less competitive than imported products, hurting local industry
• Exporters get less money for their products, hurting the balance of trade

During the time of Prime Minister Paul Keating, we had a near impossible situation economically, high interest rates, high inflation and high unemployment.

I'm worried as the policies of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd are starting to show the direction he's going to head:

• Roll back workchoices
• I agree some of workchoices is bad, mainly to do with the fairness test. I believe its going to cause business, particularly small business, much grief and decrease their confidence hiring new staff, therefore increaseing unemployment
  
• Relying only on the reserve bank to control inflation using interest rates
• Playing with a mostly hands-off approach to the economy and attempting to regulate it with legislation rather than economic management and strategic spending will result in only interest rates going up. It was the same under Keating and Rudd isn't giving me much confidence that he'll be much different.
• Failing to control the trade deficit
• Higher than world-average interest rates will increase the value of our dollar on the world market, this will make local products less competitive and encourage purchase of imported products. This will increase inflation, hurt the local economy and hence increase unemployment.
  

So, economically, the situatiuon looks gloomy. As a single, upper-middle class, Caucasian male the government has no interest in supporting me because I'm not a special interest group, nor an Aussie battler, nor an Australian Working Family.

Comments and corrections are welcome.