But if they really want the answer, all they have to is to look in the mirror.

The fact is that the whole problem is the result of privatisation which they all seemed to support.

The investors who bought the electricity services were interested only in the short-term profits.

Long-term planning for the security of the electricity services that we once owned were simply not on their agenda.

The experience has been the same where essential services have been privatised in other parts of the world.

The pollies who push privatisation are simply admitting they are incapable of running successful businesses.

Everyone, it seems, is now communicating in English. It has become the international language.

A seven-year-old now learning to read asked why the word spelled ‘said’ was pronounced ‘sed’.

I explained that our language had retained the original spelling of many words and ‘said’ many years ago would have been pronounced ‘sayeed’, but the pronunciation of words had changed over the years.

Today we would have difficulty in the words ‘bright’ or ‘thought’ in which each vowel and consonant was pronounced, although the Scots did retain this pronunciation in some dialects. 

English is a fascinating language. It can be very confusing.

Take these words as an example of how the sound ‘oh’ can be spelled: owe, so, sew, show, dough, low, toe, tote, boat, broach, brooch and even yeoman. 

Conversely, the letter ‘O’ can be pronounced as in: so, to, honey, on, horse, woman and women.

Yet English is not a complicated language compared with most others and that is probably why it is fast becoming the one international language, for which we ‘native’ English speakers should be most grateful.

The past week really showed how poorly Australians are being treated by their political leaders.

It started a few days earlier with that stoush between the Prime Minister and the Opposition Leader in which both discredited their office by a blast of kindergarten-level name calling on both sides.

To see the reaction by the pollies as their leaders (on both sides) ridiculed the other side’s leader was like those clowns in sideshow alley at the annual show, and showing about the same level of intelligence.

It had nothing to do with governing Australia and demonstrated the worst of the characters of both men.

No one won and the people of Australia simply lost even more confidence in their leadership.

The week also started with those blistering few days of excessive heat and the only mention I found of the impact of climate change was from one commentator who called it all a lie. 

It seems that many of the pollies have decided to scrap any involvement in this ‘climate change nonsense’.

There was, for example, the wonderful news that Mr Turnbull’s team is planning power generation in Australia using clean coal.

This could be a boon for Australia’s economy because we have huge stocks of coal and with this invention of clean coal we could make lots of money by selling it to the rest of the world.

But why all the secrecy? Who invented this ‘clean coal’ and how does it get clean?

It must be some system of extracting the CO2 from the gas and burying it in some disused mine somewhere.

That seems to be the only way of getting ‘clean coal’, but if that is the system being planned it would be extremely costly. So there must be some other system.

It must be a good idea because so many pollies are talking about using clean coal and our politicians wouldn’t tell fibs, would they?

So, either drop this pretence or admit that there is no such thing as clean coal and the pollies who talk about it are insulting the intelligence of the Australian people and have no intention whatsoever of doing a thing about limiting climate change.

There was different type leadership during WWII and we all accepted the fact that we had to tighten our belts and do without lots of the good things for the sake of our country.

And, if the deniers are correct and this ancient scribe has been conned by so many leading scientists, would the pollies please tell us where they get the information that leads them to believe that we needn’t worry about the changing climate?

It is an important issue because the scientists are telling us that the world’s temperature, across land and sea, was the hottest on record last year for the third year in a row.

Somehow, it seems easier to believe the scientists than the people we have elected to run our country.

They did look like those clowns in sideshow alley.

(You don’t have to agree with the views expressed in these columns, if you disagree that’s just as good because it shows you have thought about the issues and my purpose has been achieved.)

Ray Williams has been a Post columnist since retiring from the newsroom in 1993.