Last year the NAB made a profit of $AUD 4 billion, mind you, they didn't do anything to earn that, they just made loans shuffled electrons and pieces of paper. I guess the people they did hire did a lot more than nothing!

Absolutely. But their currency arbitrage dealers lost $400 million, thus doing worse than nothing. I offered to improve on that, but they weren't interested.

Likewise, by doing nothing, Rudd has improved on Howard. But we're still not very interested.

By your criteria, no government ever does anything, they just pass bills, issue directives on pieces of paper or speak words.

Not at all. Making legislation or regulation to prohibit, discourage, encourage or mandate certain behaviour is action. Reducing taxes or spending revenue to subsidise what they want to encourage, or taxing and tariffing what they want to discourage, that also is action.

Signing treaties and commissioning studies and writing dates on calendars is not actually doing anything. It's just a vague promise to maybe do something sometime in the future, perhaps if nothing else comes up, maybe, I s'pose.

Our standard of living is high for two reasons: cheap fossil fuels, and cheap Third World labour.

Cheap fossil fuels let us have machinery run cheaply, which lets us produce a lot of food and raw materials cheaply - the $1 loaf of bread, the $2.50 slab of steak, the 10c brick. Cheap Third World labour lets us have cheap manufactured goods - the $5 t-shirt, the $20 pair of jeans, the $500 computer, the $50 DVD player. Because fossil fuels and Third World labour are cheap, our minimum wage goes a long way.

Give us $500/bbl oil, $1,500/tonne coal, and Chinese working for $150 a day instead of $150/month, and our minimum wage starts looking pretty crappy - even the accountant on $100,000 will have to start making some choices.

Our wealth has little or nothing to do with the amount of words we print on paper or speak.