Terry Barnes, rampant conspicuous consumerism, old pieties, new solutions, and kill the rich.

Having just splurged on a 60" plasma screen, and a blu ray player (which naturally is region free, curse you American studios, damn you all to hell), I can hardly stand righteous in the house of the lord and decry conspicuous consumption.

Let they who are without a plasma hurl the first stone. But I rationalise it this way. Free of commercials, I watch the shows I want to watch, which unfortunately often involve a professional interest, and I watch way less television, thereby avoiding an imminent heart attack for at least a year or two more.

But why am I telling you all this, confessing to my personal vices? So Tim Blair can rabbit on about the cost of running plasma screens, and how it's much cheaper to run V8s? And how hypocrites are ruining the planet, even though nothing is actually ruining the planet, because all's well in Tim Blair's climate change free world? Even if the new plasma is not much worse to run than the bloated CRT we used to run? (Okay, fair cop, it was the biggest size of CRT you could find before they stopped making them).

Never mind, this sudden fear of fiscal impurity and rampant consumerism is actually prompted by Terry Barnes, who is motivated by righteous concern in Consumption at all costs.

While millions of us max out our credit cards at January sales, three recent statistics together tell an alarming story. According to the Reserve Bank, for the first time Australians now owe more in household debt - on mortgages, credit cards and personal loans - than our entire economy earns in a year. That's $1.2 trillion of debt, or about $56,000 for every Australian man, woman and child.

Well of course the trick with those figures is to mingle housing with retail, so that both can be fully kitted out with a rising sense of alarm. Above all we must be alarmed, and live our lives in fear.

After all, a Sydney mortgage will put you in hock for life. Especially if you get glimpses of a harbour view in someone else's window which faces the harbour. So it goes. And so to the question of McMansions:

Despite the rosy economic undertones, the data collectively paint a worrying picture of a community of conspicuous consumers, eagerly buying lots of "stuff" on tick that we don't need or even use, stashing it away in McMansions that gorge energy to heat and cool, and giving the families that live there the carbon footprint of a small African country.

Well actually I will be using the plasma, and I paid for it in cash, and what others get up to with their credit cards is their business. I was always impressed by Mr. Micawber's philosophy on monetary matters, even if Micawber signally and dismally failed to follow his own advice.

But what's interesting is the way Barnes - a sometime advisor to the Howard government in the area of health - sees all the problems being with the nouveau riche, rather than the eastern suburbs rich, and so probably wouldn't be amazed or concerned at the four - or was it seven - kitchen mansion erected in Hawthorn, which we saw while on conspicuously consumerist holiday, and which, we're told, is marvelled at by all who passed by its vulgar ersatz Victorian frontage.

Because the nouveau riche are just hapless pawns when confronted by evil sellers, conspicuous capitalists wanting to pluck the sheep:

Part of this credit-fuelled consumerism is aspirational. We all want to be better off than our parents, and we want our children to be better off than us. Our houses and material goods - furniture, home entertainment systems, second cars, boats, and all the little luxuries that add up on our credit card statements - tell the world that we add up to something. Understandably, property developers and retailers play this to the hilt in their marketing.

Yes, but have you seen a 60" plasma playing a signal coming off blu ray?

But if the house and its contents are funded by dangerously high consumer debt, a McMansion is a house built on quicksand. Once in the debt trap, it's very hard to get out intact. Families struggling to meet their debts face highly destructive stresses, hurting not only themselves but the friends, loved ones, workmates and the wider community who help pick up the pieces.

Apart from shouting at the loved one under the stress of installing a 60" plasma and a sound system, the skills required being of an order which would otherwise qualify you as a pilot on a 747?

Oh dear, what to do about it? I feel so guilty, such an excess of hedonism and sensuous but vile consumerism. How to revive the puritan inside, and return to the good old days of the 13" CRT?

Perhaps the time has come for public policy to signal that consumption for consumption's sake isn't always good. Take oversized housing. In leasing office space, it's normal to calculate the average floor area needed to accommodate an employee. We could apply the principle to residential space and determine that each member of a household has a minimum personal entitlement of, say, 35 square metres (almost four squares in the old measurements) - making 175 square metres for a family of five, plus an allowance for communal spaces including kitchens, toilets and bathrooms. A courageous government could then impose a one-off, or even a recurrent rate-like surcharge, on the excess space when a new or existing house is purchased.

Courageous government? Or council, if its rate-like? Can we have a commission to determine appropriate spaces, and a host of bureaucrats to regulate it all?

Oh wait, I get it.

Devise a fantasy that will never happen in our lifetime, when in fact market forces - the cost of running a McMansion - will take care of matters, and turn some suburbs in to the kinds of suburban wasteland you can currently see in the United States. And meanwhile the eastern suburbs rich who've already got their mansions can see their vast expanses rise in value as others are excluded from their opulence.

How about a simpler solution? Let's storm the eastern suburbs and knock down the mansions of the rich.

Oh wait, I should have read on, that's what Barnes wants:

If it's recurrent, the charge could be adjusted for subsequent additional household members. Either way, the surcharge would be independent of the market valuation or purchase price, and would apply equally to both suburban McMansions and Toorak's grand homes.

Independent of market valuation? So you could still spend a shit load on the kit out, just to keep your sense of social pride, and avoid the surcharge. A giant plasma in a rat's nest? But I've got that now.

As for Toorak, I have to ask Terry: have you seen the way they fight for a space in the supermarket car park in Toorak village? Good luck with taxing the Toorak family mansion - I look forward to you also increasing the marginal tax rate - but meanwhile, let's carry on with the fantasy:

This does three things. First, it tells buyers that houses bigger than needed carry a financial premium; having less space to fill also imposes practical limitations on retail purchasing. Second, it encourages developers to concentrate on marketing homes that are attractive to live in but not excessively sized or priced. Third, it says that we as a community encourage wise use of our scarce land, energy, water and social infrastructure.

Or we could all shift to East Germany and live in boxy flats. Oh wait, the NSW government, in conjunction with developers, is currently busy arranging for that to happen here.

Or we could simply price scarce land, energy and water according to its scarcity and value. Oh yes, I'd like to see Tony Abbott do that.

Or we could build social infrastructure and encourage its wise use. Like public transport. What a pity the NSW Labor party is in government then.

What else you got?

When it comes to consumer goods, we similarly could consider broad-based luxury premiums, perhaps in the form of a GST surcharge. If we truly want something now but don't really need it, we can pay extra for it.

Oh yes, and what a fine new bureaucracy would be devised to tell us what we don't really need. Such as not needing a plasma if you happen to work in the media. Second thoughts that's probably fair comment if you have to confess you have something to do with Australian film and television, as you're better off going to the dentist than watching a lot of Australian content.

Preferably, however, we should adopt more policy and taxation incentives that encourage people to save and invest, rather than simply spend their discretionary income on passing fancies and crippling mortgages.

Passing fancies? That help keep an over-worked nation sane? Crippling mortgages? As opposed to being at the whim of a landlord? Or public housing, which is no longer public if you get the NSW Labor government involved?

Surely there must be a reality check time coming in Barnes' dreaming:

One person's luxury is often another's necessity. Realistically, such policies would be electorally unpopular, even unpalatable.

No, really? Knock me down with a feather and call me a powder puff.

Or call me hard, call me cruel, but personal debt is a personal problem, at least if you can't manage to build it up so that it becomes the bank's problem. (If you owe the bank $100, that's your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that's the bank's problem, and if it's good enough saying for John Paul Getty, it's good enough for me).

Indeed, federal and state governments of both persuasions have long fuelled the McConsumption culture of contemporary Australia, symbolised by the political hot buttons of home ownership and mortgage rates, and reflecting the decline of the thrift culture of generations past. Indeed, we throw public money at the housing and retail markets to keep our economy afloat by stimulating the household spending spree that has now put our entire GDP in notional hock.

Oh dear, the thrift culture of past generations. Would that be the thrift culture that sponsored two world wars, and the great depression, not to mention booms and busts of sharp proportions during the centuries preceding?

Well no doubt a hard rain will fall some day, and so it goes, but one thing's certain, and that's preaching thrift from some long lost golden age to the working human in drudgery at the moment - while everybody else has their noses in the trough - has a Pecksniffian air about it. (Some people likened him to a direction-post, which is always telling the way to a place, and never goes there).

If government tries to implement the Barnes' strategies, they'll be out of office licketty split, and not a single thing will have been done to halt rampant consumerism, and meantime the economy goes to hell in a handbucket. But there is, as Barnes notes, the Micawber philosophy:

In Charles Dickens' David Copperfield, Mr Micawber famously said: ''Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.''

Well it's one of my prouder, if sillier boasts, that I've never paid a cent in interest to a credit card provider, and each time I paid interest on my bank mortgage, I bitterly resented it and paid it off a little bit quicker. On the other hand, it's true that the more you borrow, the more business you can generate, and next thing you know, you're worth squillions - unless you happen to get caught out by a GFC.

Both options are available to everyone. And if times get tough - say with a new depression - no need to worry about government action to rein in spending. And no need to worry about arcane space allocations of an East German kind. Just bump up the price of electricity, and watch the air conditioners wilt.

But in the next financial prang - I'm giving it less than a decade to arrive - can we at least put the banks to the sword first?

In an election year, it is timely to ask whether we truly can sustain household debt exceeding our annual national income, and whether we can keep consuming in the way that we do. Kevin Rudd, Tony Abbott, John Brumby and Ted Baillieu should each tell us what they think - but we are all free to choose not to spend simply because we can.

Well we know what the politicians think already. So no need to worry about asking them, or paying attention to Barnes' rhetorical flourish, which once again mixes debt for housing (because he doesn't like McMansions) and retail debt (because presumably he thinks plasma screens are a vile luxury).

And so we come to the final message: we are all free to choose not to spend simply because we can. Indeed. Choice, always with the choice. You can be a grasshopper or an ant, a worry wart or a spendthrift, a hoarder or a bankrupt, a mad survivalist or a social sponge. Whatever.

And we are all free to blather on in an idle way that encourages people to waste time. And we are all free not to read a prognosis in case it mindlessly provokes.

Sigh, got it wrong again, as usual.

Personally I blame the rich. After all McMansions just ape the rich and their lavish ways. So here's my carefully researched solution as an alternative to the Barnes' proposal. Kill the rich. Strip them of their assets and hand them out in op shops.

Allons enfants de la Patrie,
Le jour de gloire est arrivé !
Contre nous de la tyrannie,
L'étendard sanglant est levé,
Entendez-vous dans les campagnes
Mugir ces féroces soldats ?
Ils viennent jusque dans vos bras
Égorger vos fils, vos compagnes !

Aux armes, citoyens,
Formez vos bataillons,
Marchons, marchons !
Qu'un sang impur
Abreuve nos sillons !

Que veut cette horde d'esclaves,
De traîtres, de rois conjurés ?
Pour qui ces ignobles entraves,
Ces fers dès longtemps préparés ?
Français, pour nous, ah ! quel outrage
Quels transports il doit exciter !
C'est nous qu'on ose méditer
De rendre à l'antique esclavage !

Aux armes, citoyens...

Quoi ! des cohortes étrangères
Feraient la loi dans nos foyers !
Quoi ! ces phalanges mercenaires
Terrasseraient nos fiers guerriers !
Grand Dieu ! par des mains enchaînées
Nos fronts sous le joug se ploieraient
De vils despotes deviendraient
Les maîtres de nos destinées !

Aux armes, citoyens...

Tremblez, tyrans et vous perfides
L'opprobre de tous les partis,
Tremblez ! vos projets parricides
Vont enfin recevoir leurs prix !
Tout est soldat pour vous combattre,
S'ils tombent, nos jeunes héros,
La terre en produit de nouveaux,
Contre vous tout prêts à se battre !

Aux armes, citoyens...

And so on. Prescription: sing loudly and until blue in the face at any branch meeting of the NSW Labor party, with a particular relish for the line Feraient la loi dans nos foyers !

Can it be that Terry Barnes has turned me both into a pleased, almost proud conspicuous consumerist and a mad as hell ratbag libertarian cheese eating surrender moneky? He has, he has ... lordy, that such a thing could be ...

(Below: Isidore Pils, singing La Marseillaise for the first time, here. Looks like bloody rich people in the mayor's office at it again. Does that harpsichord count as a luxury good?)