What has happened to the Australia I knew well over half a century ago? This is a question which now continually confronts my personal world.

As each day flies by, it seems we have to face yet another major change, often of a dubious nature as far as our equitable living standards were concerned in the 1980s and before.

I clearly remember my father complaining of so-called “changes” that were besetting him in the pre-Second World War years. But these changes in those days were generally only of a very minor social or work nature and did not make deep inroads into one’s daily life, happiness, self-confidence, mental health and personal finances.

Instead, today we are beset by the prospect of being electronically controlled and almost brainwashed by certain Mr. Bigs of our country and overseas. With the advent and widespread use of AI, the credibility of what we hear, see and read is seriously under threat.

As time goes on, how will we be able to perceive the truth of anything that could possibly be the product of machines?  I have special pity for novelists and music composers whose work will be overridden by AI-driven ‘creativity,’ if you can call it by that now newly corrupted name. The historians of the future are going to become completely confused over what is real or contrived history.

We also face the prospects of no longer having our assets and bank cards safe from scammers by the threatened onset of a cashless society destined to make our current living costs even higher with additional bank card and other unnecessary costs.

And what about the wholesale general closing down of rural and regional bank branches which are already preventing very many people being able to achieve person-to-person banking deposit advice or obtaining cash for urgent family cash-only purposes.

One of Australia’s major banks recently announced that it was closing more of its branches due to “the fact” that it was losing a little over $600,000 a year by keeping them open when it’s annual profit was almost $1 billion. If I was a senior executive in that bank, I think I would feel somewhat ashamed!

Another question that has now to be considered by all citizens faithful to our society is whether we are lurching towards a power Armageddon by closing unhealthy fossil fuel power stations before we have even decided on the absolute details of nuclear power and the full complement of new alternative power sources.

How many of us are now dreading our higher — and sometimes exorbitant –quarterly power bills largely caused by past governments of all political persuasions selling off their power networks to commercial interests?

Older Australians will no doubt remember their earlier days when shop assistants could instantly calculate in their heads a customer’s monetary change after buying anything priced from $2 to well into the hundreds of dollars and so-many cents.

To the amazement of many older people now, all money exchange has to be figured out by electronic or mechanical means and, should the power fail, one is told to return to pick up your shopping at a later time when your account can be finally settled.

Elderly Australians will also no doubt remember when their grandchildren wrote them Christmas and birthday letters and cards with perfect prose and spelling, let alone neat handwriting. Today, however, much of this has been lost, partly to this country’s fast falling levels of basic education.

Various O.E.C.D analyses of Australia’s education and curriculum systems have in recent times shown that our young people are not leaving school and university with the same grade of education as occurred in the 1960s. At that time, we had a well-developed education programme and curriculum system which was highly regarded globally.

Two years’ ago by comparison, UNICEF ranked Australia in the bottom third of all O.E.C.D. countries world-wide and criticised our educators for failing to provide the young with access to internationally recognised qualities of education. On a scale of excellence, Australia is at present rated 21st out of a range of 37 international education regions.

This organisation believed that the overarching present problem in Australia is the failure of Federal and State Education Departments specifying exactly what curriculum material largely poorly trained teachers should be using in their classrooms — and just what students should be learning.

As a result, only 10 per cent of our young adults are estimated to be attaining a higher-level degree compared to 15 per cent on average in overseas countries.

According to various leading education watchdogs, including the independent Australian Education Research Organisation, the current national school curriculum sadly fails to provide teachers with sufficient teaching materials. It also does not have the required “specific details” of the knowledge which their students are expected to have to live and work in our modern world.

According to the Australian Institute of Public Affairs, their research has shown that the relatively new U.S. based Woke ideology has made serious inroads into school curriculums in Australia.

Research shows that this highly charged political philosophy currently accounts for 31 per cent of all teaching subjects on offer at Australian universities, causing newly trained teachers to include this as part of their class teaching methods so as to fill in the holes in their official curriculums.

All this negative change is causing increased student ignorance in the way we are teaching our youth. It has also led many academics to wonder whether today’s teachers really have the skills they need for the average classroom. Experts in the field believe that there is now little educational expectancy in both literacy and numeracy in most of our States from East to West.

This is the reason why well over 30,000 young White and Aboriginal Australians are being locked out of the national job market and are trapped in the grip of part or full unemployment for years to come as 48 per cent of all job vacancies now require some formal level of education.