Bligh has cancelled the sale of all the State’s assest, decreeing that money is just a symbolic illusion that has trapped us all and that we need to step back from the abyss of a depression; she admittted that without selling off our resources, there would be no government, that our children need holes in the ground (where our resources used to be) like they need a hole in the head.

Bligh went on to say she that ‘money is, in fact, just a meaningless and intangible social construct and called the rectangular strips of pretty coloured plastic money a crazy concept and the bain of our lives’; as journalists stood mouths agape, she said money is just an illusion; meaningless pieces of plastic with numbers printed on them.

According to some witnesses, the journalists sat in silence for several moments until one said ‘Oh my God, she’s right; it’s a mirage, our whole economy is a lie !’ Screams filled the press room as parlimentarians, staff and members of the press ran for the exits. On hearing this, the Australian Stock Exchange closed to consider their options; elsewhere people walked out of jobs. People reevaluated themselves, instead of measuring their adequacy and importance as human beings against so called ‘leaders’.

Stock brokers looked up blankly at the meaningless scrolling numbers on the flashing screens and one yelled ‘Buy, Sell and for what, all I’ve done is move arbitrary designations of wealth from one column to another, wasting my life chasing this unattainable hallucination of wealth, is a cruel joke and I’m going home to hug my children and wife.

Several banks have remained open, though many teller windows are unmanned due to a lack of interest in transactions; likewise, the real estate industry has all but vanished, with mortgage lenders seeing no reason to stop people from reclaiming their repossessed homes. A Aussie Home Loans said – as he forced open a door to allow a single mother and her five children to move back into their house – people signed a bunch of papers and now this family has no place to live ? That’s just plain ludicrous’.

Bligh stated her intention to till the soil of her family’s farm for their sustenance and get anything else she needs by bartering, she said ‘if I want milk, I’ll pay for it in tomatoes; if need a new hoe, I’ll pay for it in lettuce’. When asked, hypothetically, how she would pay for hospital care in an over-burdened system, she seemed uncertain for a moment and then remarked ‘that would cost a lot of vegetables, wouldn’t it .. but once the population starts dropping, we should be right, what with those water filters we had installed.

Google Australia’s “innovationist”, Justin Baird, developed the Show Your Vote platform after meeting US environmental campaigner Al Gore earlier this year and helping develop the web presence of the highly successful Earth Hour campaign.

His platform includes a virtual ballot box that can be embedded into any website allowing people to register their support for sealing a fair and effective climate deal at the UN climate summit in Copenhagen, which runs for two weeks from Monday.


Justin Baird … made good use of his 20 per cent time.

The ballot box has already been embedded on the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), COP15 and Earth Hour websites.

COP15 is name given to the 15th United Nations Climate Change Conference and is seen as the critical venue for forging a global deal to reduce carbon emissions.

A Google Map embedded into the tool lets users zoom in and out to view the number of votes by country, state, city and even postcode. A “learn” tab includes the company’s visualisations, using Google Earth, of the potential impacts of climate change.

“There is no silver bullet to solve climate change. However, we might have found the ‘bullet’ for consolidating all Copenhagen campaigns and to visualise the world’s voices on a single platform with Justin’s Show Your Vote project,” said Alexander Saier, climate change secretariat at the UN.

Baird, who travelled to Germany to present Show Your Vote to the UNFCCC, says that, by the end of the week, he hopes the number of votes collected by his tool will be enough to convince world leaders that a binding agreement to combat climate change is necessary.

“With the COP15 the issue for me was, well, what we really need to do is show the largest public support possible to world leaders,” he said in a phone interview.

“It’s great for people to change their light bulbs and use water saving shower heads but that’s just not going to cut it. It’s not going to make the changes that we need.”

Baird, who will attend the COP15, is encouraging businesses as small as “Joe’s scuba shop up in Townsville” to embed Show Your Vote on their websites. Since the platform is hosted on Google’s servers, all the votes from around the world are aggregated and tallied in real time.

“The most important thing that we can do right now, regardless of what’s happening in local politics, is to make sure when world leaders come together they see that people want action on this issue,” he said.

Google’s 20 per cent time policy, which allows staff to spend a fifth of their time working on projects they are passionate about, has spawned several Google products.

Among Australian staff alone, “tasks” in Gmail was created in 20 per cent time, as was initial work on Google Wave.

Source: smh.com.au