Thanks Dan.I want to contest the oft-repeated meme that China...

Thanks Dan.

I want to contest the oft-repeated meme that China looks 200 years ahead, while we decadent Westerners look at the next quarter and eat too many hamburgers.

The argument is in favour of directive central planning versus our preference for frameworks, rules and letting private enterprise operate freely within.

If it were true, China would not permit the widespread environmental damage there, allowed by weak laws and supine administrators complacently preferring immediate economic activity over durable, sustainable development.

In good governance, the primacy of the Communist Party ranks above the national interest - a recipe for persistent underperformance through the misallocation of talent and resources.

The jeerers and sneerers will point to China's meteoric rise out of poverty in recent decades... to middle income status, where they will remain.

The real Asian miracle, the country with a genuine claim on farsightedness, is right next door in South Korea, which was devastated and stone motherless broke in 1953 and is now independently, genuinely, OECD rich.

Australia and like-minded western countries DO look far ahead, particularly in the law, common infrastructure and so on.

(my personal politics are of the centre, not the right)

Ash