What a bloody waste!

Can you believe what we waste in the West?
And when I say West, I mean the entire western world, as well as the entire West of this vast continent we call Australia.
Rampant consumerism brings with it random debris. Enough to sink continents.
I'm a walker and when I go walking, on a beach, along a road, I spend an amount of time picking up rubbish left by others who went that way before me.
It's happened in Israel, in New Zealand, in Holland, in England, in, yes, even, in Switzerland.
The picture on the left is Anzac Cove, Turkey, the scene for a disgraceful dumping by Aussies in 2005 while there to celebrate a glorious defeat. This year those gathered were much better behaved, but I'll bet many of them managed to dump stuff elsewhere.
In Western Australia recently a major recycling plant closed down. Why? Because it was making money? No, economic rationalism.
And already this western third of Australia is a slack third when it comes to recycling, but a champion third when it comes to dumping.
It's not just that we're different to the other two thirds, or that we think we're Texan, we just don't think enough about the consequences of our obsessive consumerism, coupled with our rampant economic growth, it's debris and our responsibility to the folk we're leaving it all to.
My view is that if taxpayers, individually or collectively, are not prepared to take responsibility for their rubbish, then the government must, which means taxpayers will.
Either way, it's gotta be done.
I once stood for election to the Australian Federal Parliament on a deep sewerage platform: the dismantling of it.
Voters laughed at me and rightly so, I was a bloody idiot, but like all fools I had a point: society's problems multiplied when people were relieved of responsibility for their own shit!