The light's not shining

However, housing, wholesale funding, currency speculation and even more fundamental issues such as the nature and impact of credit and debt will determine the future of virtually every Australian man, woman and child in very real ways. Their children and, unless we are lucky, even their grandchildren, will be blessed or impoverished by decisions we take or do not take on these issues today.

For example, it is not outrageous to suggest that the global economy will suffer a major collapse between now and September or October. Though they have spent trillions of dollars, the United States remains on the edge of an economic and financial abyss much more menacing than anything in its previous history. Allowing for the smaller scale of our economies, we and many other countries are teetering on much the same sort of edge.

Therefore, in the next six months or not much more, we are likely to experience a situation like 1932 in which every country will look after itself and the devil may take the hindmost. The Group of Twenty has done little to resolve issues or avoid conflict. The United Nations has done even less. Each of us will have to take our own desperate, emergency measures to survive. In 1932, we had a "Premiers' Plan" in which NSW played a major role. Formidably austere, it solved nothing. It made things much worse for everyone, within Australia and outside. However, our Federal and State governments believed it to be the only course to take.

The Premiers' Plan was an austere calamity. We had to endure years of economic misery and war before we began to find solutions. We progressed through such serious, long-drawn-out conferences as those at Bretton Woods and Hot Springs as well as those on the United Nations Charter with its economic and social chapters. Then when peace came at last countries like Australia could implement their economic and financial policies within a well-ordered global environment.

It was a long process about which, for the present global economic and financial crisis, we have not even begun to think let alone plan in any responsible way.

In the meantime, we will likely have a hastily drafted equivalent to the Premiers' Plan forced upon us, probably towards the end of 2011. We can have no assurance but can only hope and pray that our plans and those of others do not deliver such grave political and strategic consequences that they will lead to regional or worldwide war as they did in 1939.

The NSW campaign is unlikely to delve into such issues. That does not mean that whoever becomes Premier will not be confronted, among other things, with debt and other financial and economic problems of broadly the same kind as those which confronted Premier Jack Lang in the early 1930s.

Nor does it mean that Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard have already bitten or will now bite many bullets in preparing us for possible financial and economic calamity.

We have tended to get Premiers and more particularly Prime Ministers of character and purpose only when we have been up against it and we really have no other recourse. Electors are then compelled to exercise responsibility at grass roots level by voting only for those who can genuinely and sincerely carry that responsibility forward.

That is unlikely to happen at the forthcoming NSW elections, if only because the electors seem to see no candidate of the character and purpose needed. We will have to wait at least for the next Federal or State election to start the long process of reform and renewal.

The last time we were in this position, we were in the middle of a war and we got John Curtin and Ben Chifley as successive Prime Ministers of character and purpose. Their eight-year term began in October 1941. Pearl Harbour was just six weeks away.

It was a close-run thing.