“No deposit, no interest, no repayments until 2012!” seductively screeches the jingle from the discount appliance store.

In the light of the current financial crisis that’s a bit odd don’t you think? Are we all barking up the same tree here?

As we hang suspended from an ever-inflating debt balloon in our plasma TV-equipped gondola, the prospect of an inevitable crash landing seems very real, at least on the front page of the newspaper. So how come when you flick on a few pages, the rest of the paper spruiks consumer spending as if there’s no problem?

Aren’t all our debts to be paid back eventually? If I nick over to Fyshwick and grab some high-tech consumer goodies and put them on the ‘never-never’ (well, until 2012 at least), I haven’t yet done anything to earn the stuff.

But in a land far away, a worker has clocked on to the factory floor and given up his or her day to make a product for me. While I’m running up a debt, that person, or actually their company or country, is building up a credit.

If we run our economy like this, we’re continually becoming poorer as the debts fall due. Our creditors, on the other hand, are getting richer. The more we pamper ourselves with retail therapy, the less well off we become.

The supporters of privatisation have long used the argument that ‘business knows best’. But it’s now plain to see that paying a person a multi-million dollar salary is no guarantee of even modest competence.

If we’re going to have a society run by blithering idiots, we’d be better off electing them directly, rather than having them appointing each other from the shallow gene pool of interlocking company directorships.

“Fear not,” say these boardroom bumpkins. “We’re not broke, we’re just refinancing.”

And who’s providing all this ‘financing’ you might well ask? It’s the people to whom we owe all the money for the plasma TVs of course.

Our resource sector, our transport infrastructure and our ports are now nearly all privately owned and in they’re in debt. Their overseas customers are flush with cash and looking to invest.

It’s a shocking symbiosis. We’re surrounding ourselves with the trappings of false prosperity while avoiding paying for it by giving away our children’s equity in Australia’s natural wealth.

No indigenous population on earth would do such a thing. It’s a sad admission of our ongoing settler mentality and an indictment of some pathetic political leadership.

It’s all the more tragic because this continent is as well placed as any on the planet to weather the coming social, ecological and financial storm.

But we’ve got to stop chucking the bills in the corner.