However, Australia has the highest household debt to disposable income ratio in the world; even higher than America; we have big homes, bigger waistlines and the biggest debts; Australia is in the middle of its own credit boom, complete with all the social consequences and financial repercussions.

The chart doesn’t have the most recent data and it appears to show a gentle decline in the household debt-to-disposable income ratio, but since then – due to higher debts and income growth that’s not quite kept up – the ratio has turned up again. It’s around 156% today, largely thanks to the mini-boom in mortgage lending spawned by the diabolical first home owner’s grants. The Fitch Ratings chimed in with a gloomy forecast for Australians overnight; it said that rising interest rates in 2010 would trigger more home loan and commercial mortgage defaults, leading to some “deterioration” in the quality of assets that underpin mortgage-backed bonds.

Does that sound familiar to the Americans …..?

We rarely get to see footage of absolutely destroyed natural areas, malnourished people and the terminal illnesses from contamination because corporations like Shell and BHP line the pockets of politicians, making it illegal to film at these places.

Corporate Government – the Specialists in Environmental Termination.

Last night on SBS there was a story on bees and how crucial they are to the world’s food supply; that a mite has attacked and decimated every bee population around the world apart from Australia and that we are not safe as Papua New Guinea has recently been found to be infected.

A bee ‘breeder’ in NSW sells bees into the USA at 3 cents a bee and the bees are leased out to farmers; the bees do their job of pollination, they ultimately are infected with the mites and die an agonising death.

There has to be a certain type of person who puts themselves above all others, who delights in exercising control.

The Tasmanian government is a perfect example of corporations making decisions on how to exploit the resources of an area and then have legislation enacted to hand over land that is owned by the people (not at the discretion of those elected to represent the people) to make a profit to the detriment of the region.

The Franklin hydro-electric idea was not about the need for energy, it wasn’t about jobs, it was about making money; the corporations involved in building the dam where there just to make money. The electricity authority acknowledged some 10 years later that the demand for energy anticipated was pretty much a fabrication.

In every State and Territory in Australia we have seen corporations – predominantly in the field of resources – move into otherwise pristine areas, agree to vegetation regeneration and rectification – and walk away after leaving the region desolate.

Its hard to say which is more important, but gold and uranium mining, coal and oil are the most damaging to our land and most importantly the over exploitation and contamination of water in what is the world’s driest country.

When it comes to the ETS, we all want change; we know that Rudd is a prissy mouthed media tart, yet he has been given the responsibility to do something. To the question are we becoming disillusioned with his posturing and going through the motions attitude and the answer is yes; did we respect Malcolm Turnball’s willingness to lose his job for the sake of the environment and again the answer is yes.

Does Tony Abbot instil any confidence or is he as he describes his job function, a person who takes and opposing position to the one being put forward by someone else ? Personally, I don’t believe he has any real goals, rather he sees himself as a person who takes on and fulfils other people’s goals.

This morning I heard some radio announcer Madonna (ABC 612) suggest she knew what most Queenslanders thought about the ETS and subscribed to the nut-bag Barnaby Joyce suggestion that it was just another tax.

She went on to suggest that most of the public had no idea of the composition of the ETS and nor did she, yet the media have made no attempt to find out and disseminate the information to the public.

And I noticed Channel 9 is trying to put a positive spin on Tony Abbot who is best described by his own daughter as a ‘gay lame churchie loser’. In an interview immediately after his election as Liberal Party leader, he was asked whether he believed in climate change and he replied he did; however, in an interview to the print media he said climate change is crap.

The reality is that most Australian’s want something productive done for the environment and are prepared to pay more to get it; however, the big problem is corporations want to know how it can make more money out of the public rather than doing the right thing and the politicians will do the bidding of their financial backers / masters.

So how goes it in other countries or more specifically the more affluent polluting countries, can Australia be really taken seriously with the highest per capita greenhouse gas emissions directly and indirectly for the amount of coal and gas we sell to other polluting nations; the USA is another major polluter not just in the north America, but every country where they have a base, are engaged – on behalf of oil companies – in war on the people who own that resource or where they are ‘democratizing’ the people for their own good (countries that have resources or share common borders with countries that have resources).

And now Canada’s environmental image is in tatters from GATS agreements (where resources like fish and timber) to sand oil, where oil companies give the orders to politicians and a beautiful nation has turned into a corrupt petro state via the dirtiest energy source known to man.

In 2006 the new Canadian government announced it was abandoning its targets to cut greenhouse gases under the Kyoto protocol.

No other country that had ratified the treaty has done this. Canada was meant to have cut emissions by 6% between 1990 and 2012, but instead they have already risen by 26% which is similar to Australia increase.

At the end of 2007, Canada a Commonwealth resolution to support binding targets for industrialised nations. After the climate talks in Poland in December 2008, it won the Fossil of the Year award, presented by environmental groups to the country that had done most to disrupt the talks.

The climate change performance index, which assesses the efforts of the world’s 60 richest nations, was published in the same month. Saudi Arabia came 60th. Canada came 59th.

While Kevin Rudd made broad statements here and Penny Wong went her own way, the Canadian government was scheming to divide the Europeans; during the meeting in Bangkok in October, almost the entire developing world bloc walked out when the Canadian delegate was speaking, as they were so revolted by his bullying. The rest of the world must do everything in its power to stop it.

But such is the fragile nature of climate agreements that one rich nation – especially a member of the G8, the Commonwealth and the Kyoto group of industrialised countries – could scupper the treaty. Canada now threatens the wellbeing of the world. But why ?

Canada is developing the world’s second largest reserve of oil, but it’s actually a  mixture of bitumen, sand, heavy metals and toxic organic chemicals. The tar sands (most of which occur in Alberta), are being extracted by the biggest opencast mining operation on earth.

An area the size of England, comprising pristine forests and marshes, will be dug up (unless the Canadians stop the madness) and look like existing scenes of the end of the world, where strip-miners are creating a churned black hell on an unimaginable scale.

To extract the oil from these tar sands it needs to be heated and washed and it takes three barrels of water to process one barrel of oil; contaminated water is held in vast tailings ponds, some so toxic that the tar companies employ people to scoop dead birds off the surface and most are unlined and leak organic poisons, arsenic and mercury into the rivers. The First Nations native north Americans living downstream have developed a range of exotic cancers and auto-immune diseases.

The major concern – apart from the toxic procedures and contaminated land and water is the high embodied energy of tar sand oil, as it requires two to three times as much energy as refining crude oil. The companies extracting the oil burn enough natural gas to heat six million homes. The Alberta tar sands operation is the world’s biggest single industrial source of carbon emissions.

But the usual suspects have their dirty hands in the process, with the biggest leaseholder in the tar sands being Shell (that spent millions persuading the public that it respects the environment) and BP.  Corporate government in Canada has done to Canada’s image what whaling has done for Japan.

It is a dirty war on the environment to line the pockets of people who already have more money than they can possible spend reasonable and national pride plays a poor second.