Despite overly optimistic, but what should be called laughable forecasts in the budget, wage growth in Australia is now the lowest it has been since the mid-1990s. And it’s not hard to see why.

A burning question arises from Budget 2017. What drugs are Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and his team on? There can be no other rational explanation for the inclusion of a total clanger in an otherwise mediocre and generally anticipated bunch of policies. On Tuesday, 9 May, Treasurer Scott Morrison announced money for health, education, and farmers, more taxes, a hit to the banks and a kick for anti-vaxxers. And right at the end, a surreptitiously adopted populist measure to piss-test the poor.

Where else in the world would people deliberately elect as their President a man who is an acknowledged racist, sexist, a sexual predator, a homophobe, a xenophobe, a conspiracy theorist, a bully, an imposter, con man and would-be dictator.

This of course raises the obvious question as to why then are people surprised when things go pear-shaped on a daily basis.

In the event of war between the USA and any other nation in our region, Australia could not avoid involvement, because of its alliance with the USA. That is the reality we need to address. To avoid the possibility of war, an independent foreign policy for Australia is urgently required. Mr Trump’s presidency only adds to the urgency. 

It is increasingly evident how pernicious the privatisation myth is. Two recent examples have underlined it: the failings in Australia’s privatised energy grid and the usurious pricing in airport car parks. Both examples demonstrated that it is folly to expect a public benefit to inevitably emerge from private profit seeking.  

“Arrogant, disrespectful and shallow … a man who doesn’t understand his job as Prime Minister,” says Anastasia Palaszczuk in disgust, bringing a hapless Malcolm Turnbull down to earth with a bump, ending a flag-waving, morale-boosting, troop-rallying week.

The Queensland Premier pronounces him to be a worse PM than Tony Abbott.

“We are fighting in Korea so we won’t have to fight in Wichita, or in Chicago, or in New Orleans, or in San Francisco Bay.”

-  President Harry S Truman, 1952

It’s a lazy Sunday. There’s not much on. Rain is falling on corrugated roof creating a rhythm of thought-provoking questions that are not easily put aside. The word democracy keeps insinuating itself upon me. I know I have written about it unendingly but the political person who lives within me tells me I must incessantly return to it. Our democracy is in an unholy mess and my desire, before my candle extracts its last breath, is that it is rescued from its dank demise.

The real kicker in the long run is Shorten and Turnbull supporting the insane Von Trump family who are intent on running the US middle class and poor into the ground while saving themselves by joining the inner circle of US war mongers driven by an out of control Military Industrial Complex. He is not simply “Clinton Light” … he is now Clinton’s clone.

“Earlier this week the Australian Bureau of Statistics revealed the typical Australian was a 38-year-old woman living with her husband and two children in a three-bedroom house with a mortgage.

It seems that every new US president has to prove his machismo…or make his bones, as wise-guys say … by bombing the usual Arabs. By now, it’s almost a rite of passage. The American public loves it.

So we just saw the US launch 59 or 60 $1.5million apiece cruise missiles at a western Syrian airfield to express President Trump’s outrage caused by seeing injured children allegedly caused by a Syrian government toxic gas attack.