The Challenge
I wish to offer you, dear reader, a challenge.
1. Make sure you have nothing around you to
2. Watch the video below. Pay close attention and focus only on the video.
3. Try to make it past the 2:00 mark without feeling the desperate desire to watch something else or turn it off entirely.
Please respond with your own personal reactions below.
What Brendan Nelson has learned
So apparently, Brendan Nelson has discovered that there are people in this country who can only afford $30 a week for petrol, and people who can only put $5 worth of petrol in their car at a time.
Wow. It's obviously been a big week for the man. I wonder if his coalition buddies will believe him.
"No" they will say, "that just can't be! How can people live like that. You must be mistaken. Obviously this is all the fault of the Labor Party and their mismanagement of the economy. This kind of thing never happened under Howard. No one will put up with those kind of living standards for long."
Well I guess if he learns only this one small thing then he has at least listened to someone and learned something.
It's a start, anyway.
But honestly, if that's a revelation to Brendan Nelson - no wonder he doesn't get what 2020 is all about. If he honestly needed to talk first hand to poorer Australians in order to work out they exist - or in order to work out that not everyone can afford to fill their tank with petrol whenever they want to... why should we ever expect him to understand an issue like Global Warming, or the importance of education to social equality.
What Brendan Nelson just doesn't get
And in further news - Brendan Nelson wants us to feel sorry for the banks.
Brendan Nelson: life hard for banks
Nelson wants you to encourage banks to make a profit
Banks are people too: Nelson
Yes that's right. Dr Nelson wants us to realise that "Banks are people too"...
Um... no, actually...
They're not...
They're banks... you know - Companies...
They may be, by strict legal definition, for tax purposes, "entities" much like a person. But the day we start taking our definition of "people" from the tax department, I think we've really lost the battle against pseudoscience in our education system.
But wait, hold on, isn't he saying we should feel sorry for the individuals who have to foreclose on people's mortgages - I hear you say.
Well, in this day an age, I'm sure that an individual employee's experience of foreclosing on customers, compared to times in the past, is about as close as fighting a field battle is to launching an international missile strike. Someone sits in a room somewhere and hits a button that causes the printing of a thousand letters. They get folded and packed by machine and posted to a thousand customers. Some of them contain offers of more credit, new loans and investment opportunities. Some of them contain foreclosure notices.
Along with his lack of understanding about how many Australians live their lives with respect to money, Brendan Nelson also seems to have very little idea about how large offices work in the modern society.
Banks, these days, run by rules and regulations. Certain levels of risk imply certain behavior and certain levels of underpayment require foreclosure. No individual favours or punishments. No human interactions. No guilt. Just transactions, payments and foreclosures. The way it should be.
Dr Nelson said people should stop criticising banks and they should be encouraged to make profits. Isn't he just encouraging us to support banks making a profit?, you respond.
Well, yes he is. And in general, we can all support banks making a profit. It's good for the economy. Any company making a profit, in general, is good for the economy. No argument here.
But to encourage the pursuit of profit, blindly, with no other considerations would lead to many horrible outcomes. Imagine a world in which car manufacturers chased profits with no fear of the repercussions of bad safety standards and no adherence to pollution level guidelines. Imagine if we were encouraged to support housing developers profits in the face of buildings that fell down within a few years of being built.
The Solution?
Maybe the people who can no longer afford to pay their mortgages should never have been loaned money in the first place (they might be better off now if they hadn't). And maybe, just maybe, the banks should have to take some responsibility for the (bad) decision to lend them money when they did. Perhaps we could find a way of minimally fining, or otherwise disadvantaging banks for foreclosing on loans. Maybe then we wouldn't have as many foreclosures as less risky loans were avoided.
Maybe then we wouldn't have so many sad banks to be sympathetic for.
Maybe then less people would only be able to put petrol in their car in $5 increments.
Hey - maybe Brendan Nelson's got a point after all.
Then again... maybe not.
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