Senate must be scrapped, but not as death-bed action of Government

WELL, that was a year to say good riddance to, wasn’t it? The year we lost our independence.

The year we discovered that the total tax take for one year, from all sources, wouldn’t be quite enough to bail out our banks. The year we resigned ourselves to many more years of cutbacks in essential services, because of the political mistakes of the past five years or so.

And it was the year some of our cabinet ministers decided to avail of very large pensions rather than face the electorate ever again. It’s hard to imagine a bigger admission of failure than that, isn’t it.