Just as in the well documented historical cases of the war for American Independence and the Great Depression (among many others), the greatest economic difficulty for centuries now, has been the scarcity of money.

Money is not wealth. It is the measured value of wealth, and is the major means of distribution of goods and services (the real wealth).
It is a ticket system which enables all production to be distributed to all consumers.
The spending power of the nation should not, as is currently the case, be restricted to wages, salaries & dividends - since all the money that Australia can earn is not enough to buy all that Australia produces!
The refusal to address this fundamental issue results in what we see today - the chronic and pervasive lack of purchasing power and the subsequent need to prop up the economy with:
1) Exporting more than we import (to increase purchasing power inside Australia)
2) a. Expand production in an attempt to approach full employment and
b. Increase productivity by maximising automation and efficiency.
This is a paradox - you can't have both!
3) borrow out of future earnings for today's expenses (at interest - which merely forces us all - government included - into the debt cycle)

My suggestion is this:
The Government of Australia should resume its Constitutional and moral responsibility of issuing and regulating money which it abandoned to private banking institutions many years ago.
This will enable government to make effective, manageable policy for the prosperity of the public of Australia without fattening the purses of the money lenders, or having to resort to the massively concentrated efforts on the props listed above.
Then, and only then, will we be able to enjoy a sustainable, and containable economy - a position from which real progress can be made on issues like world poverty and environmental responsibility.

Terence Holmes of Melbourne.

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The government shouldn't have it both ways: they tax you on interest earned, but you don't get a deduction for interest paid on your mortgage. We should get one or the other if they are to be consistent. Another user suggested deductions for interest on mortgage repayments, which I would support as a second option, but I think it's better to simply not tax interest earned (this would reward saving, rather than debt)

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Banks govern us, this is a sad but real fact. They control our economy, they dictate our monetray policy, we are indebted to them via personal loans and our resulting share of the National Debt $600 BILLION. Australia does not print/issue its own money, Note Printing Company of Australia which is a wholey owned subsiduary of the Reserve Bank of Australia prints money out of 'thin air' then loans it to us (our government) with interest. The Reserve Bank of Australia is a privately owned company. So the first course of action is clearly to comply with our Constitutional Rights and issue our own money 'interest free'. Why on earth would one want to be paying interest when they have every right and more-so rights than any other to print and issue their own nations money. If we did this we would not ever have a National Debt and in fact be in surplus.

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Remove the $4,000 baby bonus given for the birth of a child.

Give the $4,000 to males who have an irreversable vasectomy, or to females of birthing age who have a tubal ligation.

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Open up rail as an alternative to aircraft travel between this route... of course we'd have to make sure to aviod potential railway crossing disasters.

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My idea for the summit involves 3 areas alcohol, cigarette smoking and the
public health system in Australia. Australia is facing a crisis at the moment in regards to an increasing
population and a public health system struggling to cope with demand because in part to a lack of funding. In order to help fund the health system i would like to see legislation put in place where ciggarette manufacturers and alcohol companies put a percentage of their profits on an annual basis
into Australias public health system. Binge drinking is becoming more aparent among our youth and so I would also propose that alcohol advertising be prohibited at sporting events and on television in the same manner cigarette advertising was stopped some years ago. Limiting the promotion of alcohol would be a step in the right direction to help solve the problem of binge drinking.

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Allow water rights owners and buyers to come together on an online auction to bid for temporary water rights and allocations. For example, if a farmer has certain water rights/allocations for eight fields, and he's letting one sit for a season to let the nutriants come back, then he can temporarily lease his water rights for that one field to someone else, say a township down river who is suffering from water restrictions. This kind of system promotes the most efficient use of limited water resources.

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The Government already rebates certain environmental-saving devices such as water tanks for houses, LPG tanks for cars, etc. that not only help to save the environment but can also reduce everyday costs for the public who participate in these programs. Windmills are a well established method of producing electricity, and small-scale windmills have been made for single houses to augment the mains supply, in some cases producing enough power to feed the house completely, with some left to feed back into the mains to be distributed to the rest of the neighbourhood. Not only does mean reducing (or even halting altogether) the overall cost for the consumer for electricity, but it is a green (zero carbon footprint) and viable (it works, and it works NOW) energy source proven in its effectiveness by the large amount of power fed into mains systems by large wind farms. Propose that the Government rebates at least a percentage of the cost to buy and install such small-scale wind turbines on houses to protect the environment and reduce the cost of daily living while doing so.

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Many of our education tax dollars are spent paying out licensing fees to companies like Microsoft, as well as upgrading systems simply so they can run the new, bloated operating systems. Not to mention the money spent on anti-virus software, technicians fixing Windows problems such as adware and spyware, etc. Switching all public school computers over to Linux would literally free up hundreds of thousands of dollars each year in paying licensing fees for Windows, as well as virus scanners (since there are less than 50 viruses that affect Linux, most of which are now obsolete). It would teach kids that there are different systems than Windows, and give them a wide variety of FREE tools and programs which can usually do just as well, if not better, than their expensive, Windows counterparts. Anything children need to do on a Windows computer in school, they can do on a Linux computer, at a much cheaper cost to taxpayers.

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