What the Canberra Commentators were saying over the Christmas break:

>> May the celestial bodies guide us: Mungo MacCallum in the Sydney Morning Herald, January 13, 2009 http://www.smh.com.au/news/opinion/may-the-celestial-bodies-guide-us/2009/01/12/1231608611888.html

So far the Rudd Government's spending program has been well-targeted - an added bonus has been some long-overdue work on our crumbling infrastructure. But much remains to be done and the money has all but dried up. What should the private sector, particularly the big end of town, do to help? After all it was largely these money-jugglers who got us into this mess.

Unfortunately most of the guilty coterie of clowns, frauds and poltroons live in the United States, immune from the retribution of Australians. But there were willing local accomplices to the explosion of corporate shenanigans and personal avarice. As a couple of indignant letter-writers have demanded, if they caused the problem, why are we the ones who have to pay the penalty? The gloomy fact is that the pain will be more or less universal; guilt or otherwise does not come into it.

But it remains intensely frustrating to see the chief executives secure in their little cosmos, living by their self-made rules in their self-made market, trousering obscene amounts of money with no regard to the consequences of their deeds, accepting their utterly disproportionate rewards without regard for the outcome, at times resembling those generals who measure their success by body counts, including those on their own side.