Reading here, teachers in south australia complain that they are fed up with having to teach morals and manners to the children of lazy parents who fail to do so themselves. Teachers insist that this is not their job.

In the past, teachers did teach morals and manners to children. So did parents and the rest of society in a three-pronged attack.

The empowerment of children from the 1970s onwards has now shielded them behind such an enormously hypersensitive protective sympathy that parents find themselves walking a tightrope between effective discipline and child abuse.

There is little wonder that parents often give up and stay well clear of dangerous territory. As for the 'rest of society', people know perfectly well that if they are caught disciplining another parent's child for any reason whatsoever the police are likely to descend upon them like Valkyries with dangerous criminal and civil actions looming.

While the teachers are to be sympathised with for their plight, simply thrusting the onus back on parents is misguided and represents a futile game of Handball. The underlying problem must be corrected before anything will change.

Claims made by the Australian Indiginous Doctor's Association as detailed here that the Howard government's interventionist program in the Norther Territory had done immediate and lasting harm to Aborigines must be viewed with serious doubt.

The Aborigines' own failure to solve what are serious and pressing social, personal and health problems along with their inability and/or unwillingness to rise above influences that are dragging them down individually and as a people are glaring and disturbing.

John Howard cannot be blamed for trying to end inertia and start things moving in a direction that may produce beneficial results. As an example, the investigation that publicly identified large scale sex abuse of Aboriginal children may well be an embarrassment to the Aborigines, particularly as it may be difficult to abolish in the short term. Nevertheless, it must be identified and tackled.

It may also seem to Aborigines that white governments are out to get them. Most Australians are aware that this isn't the case. We all want to see improvement in the lives of Aborigines. But we are disturbed about the fact that after more than thirty years of assistance through measures recommended by their own professed champions, not much progress seems to have occurred.

A Victorian police officer is quoted here as stating that the mental health system had failed a young man who accidentally killed a young mother while attempting to commit suicide in his car.

That is a statement that we hear disturbingly often nowadays. But how realistic is it? Does it convey a misleading message. After all, it would be an entirely different thing to say that the mental health system had failed to assist or cure him.

While the difference between the two statements appears slight, it is actually considerable. The difference is that in the first statement, that the mental health system had 'failed' an individual, there is an unmistakable inference that it ought to have succeeded and was remiss in not having done so. In the second statement, that it failed to assist or cure an individual, it is not held responsible.

Just exactly where did we get the idea from that the mental health system ought to be capable of assisting and curing every individual with a mental or personality disorder? At what point in the past was it ever in possession of such a panacea?

Clearly it never has been. The notion that it ought to be nowadays is wishful thinking. It is also a method of shifting blame and responsibility on possibly innocent heads for purely political reasons.

How long is a piece of string? It's about as long as a piece of elastic can be stretched without breaking. At what point will it break? Who knows?

That is why precisely why the definition of peace must not be elastic.

Reading here today, Greenpeace activists are happy with the light fines they received in a Brisbane court for painting anti-coal slogans on coal-ships. They stated that their peaceful message had been effective in highlighting potential dangers to the environment.

But is that form of protest really peaceful?

At a time when society grapples vainly with out-of-control graffiti vandalism is it reasonable to define the defacement of someone else's property as an act of peace? Is that a responsible message to transmit to the community from an organisation supposedly committed to noble outcomes.

There is a good case for suggesting that such a claim by such an organisation amounts to giving defacto permission to every idiot with a bee in their bonnet no matter how foolhardy or unintelligent to go right ahead and paint possibly offensive signs and slogans wherever they wish.

It's true that enlightened individuals can pick the difference between issues and discern that an action may be appropriate in some cases but not in others.

But shall we count among them the destructive idiots who steal around in darkness defacing our valuable property with graffiti tags? Can we rely on them to sensibly interpret this message from Greenpeace?

I have just seen a demonstration of the video game Grand Theft Auto IV. It is staggering, not just in detailed simulation of a crowded city but also in the range of highly graphic gratuitous violence it offers the player.

What is really ominous is the fact that it is a multi-player environment. Participants engage in bloody street war against other real humans with highly realistic weaponry. That fact is part of the gamer's mental experience even if it is through a simulation medium. It must be part of the attraction or else neither game producers not players would bother with it.

The original theory was that violence in video games didn't produce externalised destructive behaviour in the real world. It appears that on the strength of that video game producers are unashamedly ramping up violence in games that increasingly duplicate reality.

How can we accept that the point won't be reached where young people begin to lose sight of the line between fantasy and reality? What will be the result of that? Will it ever become necessary to begin shooting on sight lots of young people, both males and females, before they can kill other innocent members of the public because their minds have become so twisted by immersion in irresponsible fantasy that they are extremely dangerous?

That may sound far fetched but I am not so convinced. I find it hard to believe that psychologists employed or at least sponsored by game producers aren't involved in determining the likely effect of these games upon individuals in much the same fashion that doctors were employed by tobacco companies to disprove the harmful health effects of smoking.

Those professionals will no doubt find this new generation of ultra-realistic killing games benignly uninvolved in increasing poor behaviour from young people. As with the tobacco experience their arguments will cleverly disguise the fact that their thrust relies almost entirely on the assassination of proofs by virtue of the inability of any proof to be entirely exclusive, since it can hardly ever be disproven that some other factor might be involved. In other words, they will rely upon mirrors, smokescreens and logical trickery.

I also find it hard to believe that anyone, professional or otherwise, really knows where these highly noxious virtual realities are leading society. But I am sure of one thing. If the effect of them blows up in our faces governments, justice officials, criminologists and other social leaders, still sitting on their hands, will lay the blame totally on the public, insisting that it is a community issue that needs to be solved within (and therefore by) the community.

The Cory Party trend is not simply a function of new developments in a new world. It may well take advantage of latest technology such as You Tube for part of it's life-blood. But it is an expression of deeper issues that have been festering beneath the surface for a long time.

It is trouble brewed over several decades from a belief that social controls, particularly over young people, are unnecessary. It is an outgrowth of the foolish notion that children and adolescents ought not to have their minds programmed with existing values, but should be left as free as possible to find their own levels of appropriateness in order to become the maximum that they possibly can. And as discipline is seen as stifling that process, discipline has been thrown in the bin.

The closure announcement of Mitsubishi's Adelaide plant brings to mind some rather unique experiences I had as a territory sales manager with health insurer Medibank Private.

My job was largely to consult with employees about their health insurance, working mainly in workplace canteens and lunch rooms. I called in thousands of Adelaide workplaces, large and small. It was at the big corporations in particular where I saw things that saddened me, but which were the precursors of future happiness, even if the people involved failed to realise that at the time.

John Howard's Australian federal government staunchly refused to make a formal apology to Aborigines over the 'stolen generation' issue. We gather that was due to a perceived danger of an apology being monetized through massive compensation claims, presumably with huge sums going straight into the pockets of lawyers along the way. I have two main reasons for agreeing with this position, or at least, disagreeing strongly with compensation for those affected.

In South Australia you could be more likely to find a crow at a new McDonald's restaurant than on Old MacDonald's farm.