But reality is often stranger than fiction. Consider the political situation presently being faced in Australia. A national election on Saturday has failed to deliver any party with an outright majority. Granted, that is de rigeur for Italian politics, but rather unusual in an Australian climate. The situation is made more complex by the fact that balance of power in the two houses of parliament are held by different ends of the political spectrum. The lower house, which forms the government of the day, has three independents from the political right who will ultimately determine who has the first opportunity to form government. These rural politicians are generally conservative in their views. In the Upper House, on the other hand, the balance of power falls to the Greens, who are at the left of the political spectrum (arguably the only party in Australia - with seats in parliament - who is on the left). Consider the challenge to be faced by a minority government: to have legislation which meets the demands of the three independent right-leaning MHRs on the one hand, and the Green left-leaning Senators on the other.

Sounds like a recipe for healthy government. Goodbye slogans, hello meaningful debate!

Sometimes the weird outcomes are the most productive~! (but time will tell...)

I'm in no position to preach to Christians, but I'm happy to pass on the views of Dr Michael Schluter, founder of Britain's Relationships Foundation, which will be of interest to a wider audience (and can be found here.

Schluter's beef is against the failings of capitalism that arise from corporations, which have developed as its primary engine.

His starting point is the belief that God is a relational being, whose priority is not economic growth, but right relationships between humanity and himself and between human beings. Christ's injunction to ''love God and love your neighbour'' points to the priority of relational wealth over financial wealth because love is a quality of relationships.

Corporate capitalism's first moral flaw, he says, is its exclusively materialistic vision. It rests on the pursuit of business profit and personal gain. It promotes the idolising of money, which Jesus calls ''Mammon''.

''People are regarded by companies as a resource, or as a cost in the profit and loss account, devoid of relational or environmental context. So capitalism constantly has to be restrained from destroying the social capital on which it depends for its future existence,'' he says.

This focus on capital lends itself to the idolatry of wealth at a personal level, and the idolatry of economic growth at a corporate and national level. Shareholders pursue personal wealth with little knowledge of how it is generated, and senior management with scant regard for pay structures at lower levels of the company, while customers are persuaded by advertising to pursue self-gratification in its many forms.

Corporate capitalism's second moral flaw is that it offers reward without responsibility. In the Parable of the Talents, Jesus implies that gaining money through interest on a loan is ''reaping where you haven't sown''. Lenders may accept some small risk, but they accept no responsibility for how or where the money is used.

Debt finance generally results in relational distance rather than relational ''proximity'' because the lender generally has no incentive to remain engaged with, or even in regular contact with, the borrower.

In the workings of large corporations, shareholders generally have little say in decision-making. Most investors provide share capital through a financial intermediary, such as a pension fund. Often they don't know or care in which companies they hold shares. Even the financial intermediaries generally do little to influence company policy.

Perhaps, Schluter says, instead of ''no taxation without representation'' we should adopt the slogan ''no reward without responsibility, no profit without participation''.

Corporate capitalism's third moral failing arises from the limited liability of shareholders, which allows debts to be left unpaid where the company becomes insolvent. Worse, the unpaid creditors are often employees, consumers and smaller companies supplying goods and services.

Because the downside risks of borrowing are capped, while the upside risks aren't, management has been willing to borrow huge sums relative to the company's share capital and thus expand companies at a frantic pace.

In the finance sector, incentive schemes often reward risk-taking excessively on the upside with no downside penalties, reflecting the risk position of shareholders. Consequent mega-losses have to be financed by taxpayers to limit wider economic fallout.

Schluter's fourth charge against corporate capitalism is that it disconnects people from place. In the Old Testament, the jubilee laws required all rural property to be returned free to its original family owners every 50th year.

This ensured long-term rootedness in a particular place for every extended family. A byproduct was to ensure a measure of equity in the distribution of property, which ensured a broad distribution of political power.

By contrast, capitalism regards land and property as assets without relational significance. This greater flexibility and mobility undoubtedly bring material benefits. But as extended family members move away from one another, and communities become more transient, they can no longer fulfil welfare roles.

Grandparents can no longer help look after grandchildren, and responsibility for care of older people and those with disabilities falls on the state, with the costs having to be met from tax revenues.

Schluter's final charge is that corporate capitalism provides inadequate social safeguards. It has no concept of protecting the vulnerable through constraints on the market. Deregulation limits constraints on consumer credit although the devastating consequences of debt for personal health and family relationships are well known.

Deregulation ensures labour is available for hire 24 hours a day, seven days a week, whereas biblical law protected a day a week for non-work priorities including rest, worship and family.

The adverse consequences of these flaws start with family and community breakdown. ''The greater wealth of some sections of society in capitalist nations has to be set against the greater 'relational poverty' which extends to an ever greater proportion of the population. The danger is that over time these relational problems become self-reinforcing and self-replicating,'' Schluter says.

Another consequence of capitalism's failings over the longer term is a huge growth in government spending. As the number of damaged households increases, so does the size of the bureaucracy.

Government spending on welfare has reached a level many regard as unsustainable, Schluter argues, yet without it many vulnerable people would have little or no physical or emotional support.

As state agencies take over many of the roles of family and local community, they undermine the reasons why these institutions exist and thus further lower people's loyalty and commitment to them.

Schluter's conclusion is that Christians need to search urgently for a new economic order based on biblical revelation.

Ross Gittins is the economics editor at The Sydney Morning Herald and correspondent for The Age. Original source

If I find Him with great ease, perhaps He is not my God.
If I cannot hope to find Him at all, is He my God?
If I find Him wherever I wish, have I found Him?
If He can find me whenever He wishes,
And tells me Who He is and who I am,
And if I then know that He Whom I could not find has found me:
Then I know He is the Lord, my God:
He has touched me with the finger that made me out of nothing.

Back yards are rich and creative places: Walk around most back yards and you will see very creative use of often discarded materials: they are living testaments to recycling. Back yards are also collections of family stories, each place bearing a memory on which life has been built. Most of us build our lives and values on recycling these values - in at least two ways.

The first aspect of recycling grows out of the reminder that it is out of old materials new things can come. Marriage is a setting where most recycling occurs - we sift through the gifts that our parents have given us, the values they have sown within us, the example they have set us. We have to learn from them, share them with our partner, then present them to our children, to our own friends and community, who will do the same. In fact, well before we come to marriage, we have spent our late adolescent years sifting the values which our parents have spoken to us about, and lived before us (the two not always consonant) as we begin to shape our own selves more intentionally.

When conflict arises in a relationship, we sift through it and pick out the lessons so that we understand ourselves and each other better, and learn to move forward together in love. Occasionally we have to clean up the back yard - go through and throw out that which now stands in the way, and create some new spaces. Married couples are still two very different people, and if handled well these differences can be the source of strength and creativity.

For me, the back yard was a place where I learned something about justice. Being the youngest in the family, I was often out-played or outweighed when it came to the rough-and-tumble of back yard matches. I learned to respond to apparent injustice, to rebound when I felt cheated or overwhelmed. I learned my own skills to deal with taller, faster, stronger siblings. I am sure that these skills have impacted me to this very day. I certainly knew how far to push, and when it was better to let things go. I learned to use my own assets in creative ways when a direct one-on-one contest was too daunting.

Back yards are also closed spaces. There are times when you can just chill out the back - away from the phone, from the front door, from neighbours. Here in the back yard it is your space. I remember times sitting in the back yard pondering the skies and my place in the universe, or the wonder of the myriad stars so far from the earth, illuminating the skies. Looking into history - for the light I could see twinkling left its source many years before - I pondered perspective and the bigger questions of life. And in more mature years I would sit in the back yard with my beloved, and share dreams and hopes together, pondering imponderables, and simply enjoying each other's presence. These dreams could be something apparently mundane: we can plant this, we can build that... but the intimacy to be built finds its roots in common dreams, shared values, a mutual spirituality - the essence of all that we consider life to be about, and what we yearn to build for yourselves and for those we love. In our marriage relationship, it is this intimacy which moves into the kitchen, the family room, and the bedroom - where a real one-ness is shared - body, soul and spirit. Such places of intimacy need to be nurtured in our spirituality, in our marriages, and in other relationships.

There are many other ways in which we find our shape in the back yard. They are social spaces - places where you share with others, and they with you - around the barbecue, talking about the garden, and just getting outside to think in a quiet space; they are places where we experiment (I well remember almost burning down the family garage), and where we begin to build bridges with strangers (kicking or hitting a ball over the fence meant an introduction was necessary to retrieve it); they are places where our horizons are broadened with family, friends and acquaintances.

Many memories - stories - which shape who we are, how we perceive the world, and our capacities to create within it. Here is a place where the ultimate breaks into the penultimate; where our perceptions of life, love and God find their roots. It is arguably one of the most important places where our lives are shaped.

As those who live in the West, with access to a computer, we are clearly in the upper echolons of economic value in this world. Resources and opportunities are available to us which the majority of the world cannot imagine. Yet within our own subset, there is considerable diversity of perspective. This is due in no small part to the places where our stories were formed.

The back yard one such place filled with objects and reminiscences of life for most Victorians. But there are others. As I have returned to the routine of a daily run, the places where our stories are formed have been subject to reflection (yes, it is possible to think and run at the same time!)

I can think of a number of places where my sense of justice, value and identity were formed, and will reflect on these in the days to come. Are there particular places which stand out for you?

It actually feels good to go for a run with a clear head.

A blight on us for a perfectly fruity fetish
Our obsession with perfect fruit is a symbol of our consumer culture and greed.
When it comes to the critical problems facing humanity, there is one issue that does not command our attention the way it should, but in its own quiet way is every bit as compelling and troublesome as climate change or the global financial crisis. It's our flagrant abuse of fruit and vegetables.
Sounds like a bit of a parody, doesn't it? But the fate of the banana, the tomato and the carrot have a lot more to do with our environmental and economic woes than many would at first suspect. How we grow, depict and treat produce in the West is a stark representation of the pernickety, self-destructive consumer society we have become.
For some years, the major supermarkets have behaved like a phalanx of door-bitches fronting exclusive nightclubs. They have decreed that the fruit and vegetables they sell must meet stringent standards of appearance, or no entry.
Although this quest for perfect-looking produce is driven by what customers want, it raises some serious agricultural, not to mention ethical, problems.
The issue has been festering for some time at the Victorian Farmers Federation, which in December doled out some home truths about consumer expectations. A frustrated Andrew Broad, the federation's president, said the expectations were unrealistic and growers were going broke.
The problem is simply stated: people only want to buy produce that looks attractive. Any fruit and veg with a few blemishes or a slightly unorthodox shape are shunned. In some cases, growers have had whole crops rejected by supermarket buyers.
The banana provides an instructive example. In Queensland, Australian Banana Growers Council chief executive Tony Heidrich recently admitted to a high level of wastage that he described as "disappointing".
A more apposite d-word would be disgraceful. At least 100,000 tonnes of bananas are deemed not attractive enough for public consumption and are sent to the shredder and buried. Unattractive fruit won't sell. Customers will only take home the perfect specimens.
This objectification of fruit satirically echoes many debates feminists have had about society's objectification of women. In the quest for some totally artificial construct of an ideal, many people are overlooking the single most important fact - that it's what's on the inside that matters.
Where is it written that wonky looking fruit isn't good for you? It is frequently remarked upon that the flavour of those perfect-looking tomatoes in the supermarket is perfectly bland. Any home gardener will tell you that a rough-looking home-grown tomato, blemished though it may be, is utterly delicious next to an insipid, store-bought example.
This is mildly amusing until you think about the implications. Fruit that fails the appearance test is rejected; thrown away or ploughed back into the ground.
This happens to up to 25 per cent of all produce.
When you consider how many people on earth are starving, and that industries are looking to minimise carbon footprints, it is totally unforgivable to throw away carefully grown and tended food just because it isn't pretty enough.
But human behaviour is often perverse. It's frequently said that what the West spends on dieting could, if re-directed, end starvation in the world. Our inexorable quest for perfection - for beautiful bodies, fabulous homes, shiny cars, breathtaking holidays, perfect meals - is largely responsible for the pollution and damage we have wreaked on earth. You don't have to be Al Gore to apprehend that our lifestyle is screwing up the planet.
It's enough to make one pessimistic. What hope is there to solve complex human problems when half the planet is so hung up on appearances that it refuses to eat food that doesn't have the right look?
It's not just the fault of supermarket managers. Until last July, the European Union had set specific cosmetic standards for most produce and oddly shaped fruit and veg were effectively banned from sale. The prohibition has been lifted largely because of the global recession, which has partially recalibrated some of our commercial decisions.
But supermarkets worldwide still insist on crazy notions of perfection and, of course, they blame us, the customer. We've asked for it. No one really knows just how much food around the world is rejected and wasted in this way. It could be billions of dollars worth each year. Is Western culture even more decadent than anyone imagined?
Under the pretext of preserving the planet's finite resources, the media and government often try to whip us into a frenzy of guilt and accountability. We're implored to get roof insulation, to invest in solar power, to recycle our rubbish, to ride a bike to work, to buy drought-resistant plants and let the lawn die. Tell it to the turnips. Until society learns to value and manage food responsibly, what's the point?

My first reflection comes from London - Westminster Abbey, in which only two scientists are found memorialised. I sat for a little while to watch the reaction of passers-by as they paused for a reality check at the name carved into the stone on the floor. One of the two scientists is an Australian, Howard Florey, who was responsible for the development of penicillin. The other, however, has been the source of much controversy within the church for nearly two hundred years: Charles Darwin. In the era in which fundamentalism has carved its voice, it is hard to imagine that Charles Darwin would be welcomed in such hallowed halls as this, and for this reason many people stopped and called to associates to come and examine the inscription. Darwin and the church have a chequered history, but not so chequered as to be outside the embrace of at least one faith community.

I wonder how many people are written off for the public profile they hold... people whose positions remained largely unexamined because of popular opinion. If Darwin's Origin of the Species was so anti-Christian, how does he end up memorialised in such a place as this? Perhaps it is more what those who came after Darwin did with his theories that shape our perceptions.

Darwin wasn't the first and won't be the last one to be misunderstood. When people challenge our perspective on the world, they are sure to be wildly opposed. Maybe even crucified.