The latest news this morning is that winds have picked up and the 100 fires around Sydney will be accelerating. Thousands of people have now been evacuated.
Also, a 22-year old man, an 18 year-old and three 15 year-old teenagers have already been arrested on suspicion of starting some of the fires. The authorities want to know why they started them. It is my view -- and I'll spell this out now -- that centralised welfare states take away responsibility from communities and individuals and produces a too high degree of dependency among the general population. An increasing number of people assume that the state will take care of everything for them. A report announced yesterday is another exmple of this -- that there have been 65,000 cases of physical assaults in the reception areas of hospitals. Some of them are caused by crazed drug addicts and drunks, but a great number are by ordinary people in need (or imagining themselves to be in need) of emergency treatment -- but having to wait for hours (sometimes more than a day). The doctors and nurses in the hospitals are not to be blamed. It is the overall set-up -- the expectation that the nation-state can do everything for you, the large Kafka-like managerial organisations, a great deal of which never actually come into contact with the customer. So I think there's a direct connection between overlarge, over-centralised, overpowerful welfare states, and an increasing lack of responsibility by an increasing proportion of the population. Keith Hudson __________________________________________________________ �Writers used to write because they had something to say; now they write in order to discover if they have something to say.� John D. Barrow _________________________________________________ Keith Hudson, Bath, England; e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] _________________________________________________
