owain
Post #151
rich306 wrote:
I'd like to one day perhaps take a trip to Australia and see what it's like over there compared to our living.
Well worth doing, and I think you'll be in for a surprise. I have a close friend who's married an Aussie girl and they're moving out there later this year. It's expensive. Very expensive. People get attracted by the high salaries and good weather, but the reality is that the salaries are cancelled out by a greater cost of living and the weather depends entirely on where you live, it's a big place. Some places are just constant rain, others are desert.
If you want to emigrate there and you're over 30, forget it - you're simply not allowed in. You can apply for an exception if you have a particular skill that's in great demand, but even then you have to be able to prove you have a job waiting, and then you're only allowed to live in the area where those skills are in demand, and do that job for a certain number of years before you're allowed to move about.
I'm not saying it's a bad system at all, it makes sense. But it's not all Home & Away, there are a lot of people struggling to run their lives there, it's not easy.
stan_306gti6 wrote:
surely you can understand the point that I (and a few others here) are trying to make? Or am I just stark-raving mad all of a sudden?
Oh absolutely I do, I'm not disagreeing with you completely. If laws are there, they should be kept to. Police should not be allowed to speed on roads if they're not on the way to an emergency, that annoys the hell out of me. MPs should pay full tax on everything and shouldn't be allowed to vote on their own pay. They shouldn't be allowed to claim stupid expenses which amount to tax evasion, and they should absolutely go to prison if they break these laws, just as Chris Huhne did the other day - cases like that really please me.
However there has to be some middle ground - yes, everyone should have to stick to the law, but that doesn't mean that every blade of grass in the country has to fit to some kind of standard. An MP stealing public money from out of our pockets *matters*. It has a tangible loss to people and makes them annoyed. However in examples like this one with the road signs, it doesn't affect anyone if they're wrong. No-one's lost out, no-one is upset by it, no-one's come to any harm, so why spend millions trying to enforce a rule which has never been enforced because there are better things to spend money on.
I completely agree that MPs could do a much better job, and that our economy has gotten flabby and there are many places money could be saved, but that's the same for any large business. The unfortunate truth is, however, that it's better to have people paid to do naff all than it is to have them on the streets.
It's absolutely possible to kick people's arses into working hard, to really knuckle down and make your country great again - it's exactly what China have done. But would you want to be like China? Because that's the only way to do it, run your entire country like an army, tell people what to do and have bad things happen to them if they don't.
I'll stay as we are thanks.
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Posted 13th Mar 2013 at 09:38
