Did they happen to rule on whether Nigerian princes who use cloud services in the US would be covered by the same thing?

Of course. The USA is the USA, all those other places, they're just countries.

I do agree with you on that, but you can't have it both ways. It either raised no money and wasn't effective, or it was hurting people in exactly the right way.

The point of raising people's power bills wasn't to make them hot in summer, it was to make them consider new tech such as the air-conditioners that the power company can turn off suburb by suburb 10 minutes at a time to manage peak load. This stuff is coming thankfully and it should help end gold plating.

I guess I must concede the point that it wasn't effective, because the pressure should have been put on suppliers to make these changes, not allowed to be passed straight to struggling families.

Hoping that you're staying on top of your power bills,

Aaron.

Yeah yeah. It was that horrible tax that was sucking heaps of money out of our economy. The one that was so hopeless it wasn't even sucking any money out of the economy.

Make up your mind.

It's funny what some people consider an unavoidable expense.

My mother recently looked into this, it was $3000 per eye for laser surgery, which she was going to do until she heard that they can now replace your lenses whollus-bollus for $800 an eye.

It was an even scarier procedure, but it worked a charm and she can now read (which she does a lot) without glasses and is basically 20/20.

It's that easy!

Well, they constantly claim that the rockets are targeted at schools or whatever - are they just pushing them there themselves?

Yes, you're exactly right. The best thing the human race could do is turn the entire place into a radioactive crater, then say "off you go, fight over that".

> Can't they stop having too many kids for the greater good?

No, we gave them religion so that they wouldn't want to practise birth control.

Don't worry, it will mainly be used to fix lipstick before soccer matches...

did our parents ever manage to raise us using JUST HATCHBACKS?

Some technology is handy. Other technology just promotes being a wanker.

Only Australia has excluded Australia from Australia's migration zone.

I do agree with you in principle, but that unused land is a long way from where most people live. If it were viable to do anything out there we'd be grazing it.

Not that we can't do both, I guess. :-)

You may be correct, but I've yet to see it happen. Tony Abbot's mantra of "we have a mandate" is almost as scary as the "we don't comment on operational matters" one. They both seek to treat the entire electorate, including a proportion of their own voters I'll bet, like they are completely stupid. You can vote Liberal but still think it's inappropriate for someone else to control who you can and can't marry. Tony Abbot would stand up and say he has a mandate on that too - in fact I'm surprised he hasn't.

I don't think I was indulging or attempting to push any agenda and if I was it certainly wasn't to depose the democratically elected government of my country, merely to point out the sheer numerical weight AGAINST the idea of having a clear mandate on any one topic without having had a specific referendum on that topic.

As someone already pointed out, they voted Liberal to get rid of Labour (an action I find irresponsible but anyway...). That means at least one person didn't vote for repealing the carbon tax, but voted Liberal. Does that mean that they now have "mandate-1"? No, it just reinforces the fact that they don't have a mandate on anything.

That's right, it is if you're rich. You just pay your levy and enjoy your fucking private health insurance.

The rest of us will be paying GP copayments, increased HECS, and all those other things that probably don't affect you, forever.