They are very quick to offer excuse after excuse for their poor performance.

But there are other, more fundamental, reasons why Australian retailing is going downhill. The following anecdotes, drawn from my own experience, may provide some insight.

A fortnight ago, I visited JB Hi-Fi in order to purchase a pair of earphones. Before going to the store, I had looked at the company’s website and decided which one I wanted.

When I got there, the saleswoman told me that the model I was looking for was not in stock. JB is a big retailer with stores all over Australia but its website had no way of telling a visitor that a particular item was not in a particular store. Score one for the retailer.

Anyway, since I had gone there, I did not want to waste the trip; I looked around and chose another set of earphones, one made by Sony, which was marked at $99. The one I had wanted to buy was marked $69 on the website.

When I got back home with my purchase, I decided, on a whim, to find out how much it was retailing for in other outlets.

I was quite shocked to find them for sale for $53 in Britain. Another $9 would bring them to my door in four or five days.

That’s nearly a 60 per cent markup – $62 to $99. And this was happening at a time when the Australian dollar was worth about $1.03 US dollars – if anything the price should have been cheaper.

Australian retailers often try to escape criticism about this kind of price rip-off by saying that the outlet offering the cheaper price can afford to do so because of volume purchases.

But JB cannot do this; it is one of the bigger electronics retailers in the country and can easily buy as much volume as any other trader.

I took the earphones back to JB and returned them. The woman at the counter asked me why I had brought it back and I told her that it was because I was being ripped off. I added that I did not mind paying up to $75 for the convenience of getting it in hand, but that $99 was akin to daylight robbery.

It’s not the pricing alone that puts one off Australian retailers. Shop people have a sloppy attitude and often do not seem to know what is in their own place of work. I went by Rebel Sports that same morning to buy some athletic supporters. The woman I encountered did not seem to know what supporters were. She understood when I used the cruder word, jockstraps.

She then directed me upstairs. On my way thither, I encountered a young man who asked what I was looking for. When I told him (he did not understand the term “athletic supporters” either), he told me they were on a shelf downstairs!

I then told him that a woman on the ground floor had told me very confidently that what I was looking for was displayed upstairs. He shook his head and said he would take me downstairs and prove that he was right; we found a single supporter in the display area there.

On my way out, I asked the woman why she was unaware of the location of items in the store she worked in; she had no reply. No customer would return to that store again after encountering such stupidity.

A third example. A company called Our Deal offers rebates on good from various sources; one has to visit the site and look for deals, then provide one’s location and purchase the deal. Vouchers are then provided to the buyer and these, when taken to the outlet, can be redeemed for the product in question.

But Our Deal differs from the average outlet that accepts credit card payments; in every outlet I have dealt with over the last 10 years, the final screen after the purchase provides a receipt that be printed out as proof of purchase. Our Deal insists on sending the vouchers to an email address – which means that they can keep pumping their spam out to you day after day.

I always give fake email addresses to sites like this as there is no reason for them to contact me again; hence I had to contact Our Deal again. They have only a form on their website to make contact – and apparently it takes seven days for a reply! Seven days for an online outlet in the 21st century – now you know why Australian online outlets are not attracting too many customers. But the company’s phone number is easily locatable on the web. After two phone calls and a bit of tough talk, I got the vouchers sent to an email address that exists. It took two hours in all.

The person at the shop where I went to redeem the vouchers had never heard of Our Deal. Score one for communications. It took a few phone calls up and down the line before I could redeem the voucher.

I also got an email from Our Deal, saying that their “detectives” were onto the job to investigate my complaint. Add childishness to incompetence, a rather potent combination. Good reasons to avoid Our Deal like poison from now on.

That’s why they fail to win popular support.

It’s difficult to understand why, if politicians are seeking public support, they cannot go out and interact with the source of their power. Unless, of course, they are bad communicators, are afraid of being embarrassed in public, or are simply ill at ease with crowds.

The Australian Opposition leader, Tony Abbott, is not the most intelligent person in politics in the country; he is not an attractive individual in many ways. But he is brave enough to go out in public and mix with people. Sometimes he comes off as a buffoon, at others, h strikes a chord with the crowd. But no matter what the outcome, he takes that risk.

That is why a man who is detested by the intelligentsia at large now looks very much like becoming the next prime minister when the country goes to the polls in 2013.

Undoubtedly, once Abbott comes to power, people will tire of him pretty soon as he is largely a policy-free zone. He is akin to the premier of the state of Victoria, Ted Baillieu, who was elected in 2010 and had no real plan for the state. Hence he does nothing. He has no ideas, no vision, no plans. He just wants to keep things on an even keel – and that is a difficult proposition during a time when global economic conditions are conspiring against Australia.

Using the media as a shield is not always a good idea. At times, one comes across a journalist and then the politician stands exposed. Hence politicians tend to favour those who will give them an easy ride – people whom one cannot call journalists, people who are more oriented to behave as PR professionals would.

There is a school of thought that manipulation of public sentiment can continue ad infinitum. This is a serious mistake. At some stage, the people do react and will not take it any longer. News Corporation, the biggest media organisation in the world, found this out in a different context when it hacked into the phone of a deal girl and gave the impression that she was still alive; the public reaction forced the prime minister of Britain to act and now the brown stuff has fallen all over the company.

But taking a risk is not part of a politician’s routine. He or she follows the dictates of spinmeisters until the day of being ejected from that seat arrives. Then comes a vow to do it better the next time around. A time which, sometimes, does not eventuate.

Sixty thousand Australians were killed in that war and nearly 16 million people died worldwide. It was no event over which to rejoice.

Anzac Day was initially used during the war to recruit people to fight on the other side of the world. In 1916 and 1917, Anzac Day became a means of supporting conscription.

After 1918, there was a long period when people were fed up with what they had exprienced during the war. Economic conditions were not good due to the numerous strikes caused by an increasingly militant workforce. During that time, Anzac Day was hardly celebrated.

Once the league for returned servicemen was formed, the government started supporting it and handed over control of Anzac Day to the league. During the great depression, the league grew in number as it offered unemployment relief.

Class tensions were rife at this time and Anzac Day marchers were told not to march according to rank. This created some kind of a covering of class differences and Anzac Day was promoted as a means of unifying the nation. But as the nation’s anti-war sentiment grew during the Vietnam War, so too did the popularity of Anzac Day.

Bob Hawke and Paul Keating began the current revival of Anzac Day as a nationalist celebration. Social spending was falling and Anzac Day was used as a poultice to project the spirit of nationalism and to hide class distinctions. Hawke brought back the pilgrimage to Gallipoli and Keating spoke long and loud about the sacrifice on the Kokoda Track.

John Howard took this to a new level, invoking Anzac Day and building up a spirit of militarism to justify Australia’s participation in wars in East Timor, Afghanistan and Iraq.

Anzac Day is meant to be a day that recognises the horrors of war. Instead, it has become a day that caters to militarism, imperialism and conservatism.

No soldier would want to glorify the events at Gallipoli. War is not a thing that those who fought in enjoyed. Sensible people should reject this celebration and boycott what happens because all it is doing is making a good and glorious event out of the misery of war.

But that isn’t the case. They have died for nothing. They have died because one man’s vanity led to him thinking that he could do better than the old Soviet Union, the British Empire and even the much reviled Genghis Khan.

That one man is George Dubya Bush.

When the US sent troops into Afghanistan after the terrorist attacks of September 2001 in order to wreak havoc on Osama bin Laden and his followers, it was a justified reaction. Had the US smashed the al-Qaeda network and exited the country in six months, all would have been well.

But that wasn’t the case. The US and its allies decided that they would stay and try to indulge in nation-building. The long-term motive was to obtain mining concessions in Afghanistan and to try and build a pipeline through Central Asia for an alternative supply of gas. (That, incidentally, hasn’t worked. All the concessions, bar one, went to China and India; Canda was granted one.)

There has been some curious muddle-headed thinking by many in the Western camp; people like David Kilcullen have concluded that if the Afghans were given all the Western accoutrements of development, they would suddenly fall in love with their Western invaders. Kilcullen has a ridiculous hypothesis that the Taliban, who were ruling Afghanistan when the West invaded, has to draw on ordinary citizens for support and that these citizens can be weaned away by improvements in local conditions. Exactly how he came to this conclusion is unknown.

Things haven’t worked out that way. Had Bush asked someone to read the history books and find out what had happened to nations that tried to subjugate the Afghans, he might have found out that it was a mission that would end in failure. (Bush himself cannot read.)

But nobody among all the Western nations, Australia included, bothered to read up on the history of Afgnanistan and note that no invader has ever managed to get the better of the Afghans.

Now Australia has moved up its date of departure. Late next year, the Australian Labor Party will have to face an election which it will find very difficult to win; the Afghan involvement should not be present as an election issue.

For the US, something similar exists; Barack Obama goes to an election later in 2012 and if Afghanistan is an issue, it will not be helpful to him. So the American pullout will continue apace.

In the end, the Taliban will come back to power within six months of the West pulling out. The same Taliban which was ruling when the US invaded.

In the interim, the US, other NATO countries and Australia will tell their citizens any number of lies to quell the queries from the media. But in the end, it all amounts to nothing.

Once the troops have left Afghanistan it will all be back to square one.

He has written a ground-breaking book, The China Wave – which has not, as far as I can make out, been translated into English – about China’s way of approaching development and one that is attracting great interest in his home country.

In an interview with the one news service that seems to have a knack for ferreting out the interesting and the newsworthy – Al Jazeera – Zhang made some very interesting observations.

In the West, whenever China is discussed, there are plenty of Western “experts” on call who offer opinion after opinion, many of which are, frankly, silly and borne of a lack of education. Western news services seem to fight shy of calling on the Chinese themselves to analyse their own country.

Zhang’s point of view, is, in this context, refreshing, simply because he turns the lens on aspects of China which nobody so far has even thought relevant.

For example, one of the West’s preoccupations is that in a few decades China could well become the most powerful country in the world; with that as background, Western countries are forever postulating how China should become a democracy.

But Zhang points to an aspect of this democracy debate that has never been highlighted – if China had had a one-man one-vote system, he says, the country would have had a peasant government given its population structure. Such a government would be very nationalistic – and would probably go to war with Taiwan. Or even with Japan.

Is that what the West wants? Certainly not, says Zhang, and that is a very good reason why China needs the kind of government it has at the current time.

Another argument that the West uses against China is the question of individual rights. Zhang points out given China’a past – when right from the 1800s the longest period of internal stability has been eight or nine years – the average Chinese values internal stability much more. For the last three decades, there have been no invasions or internal uprisings in China and from the Chinese point of view that is much more important than the freedom to protest.

The West often tries to pass off its system of government – where accountability comes at the ballot box every three or four years – as superior to that in China where a nine-man politbureau is the supreme decision-making body. But as Zhang points out, the basic criterion for any member of this body is that he or she should have been a successful governor of a province for at least two terms. And as he points out, these are provinces which often have four or five times the population of an European country.

Zhang even has a little dig at the US here, pointing out that under such a system as this, a man like George W. Bush would never have been chosen as a leader.

As to Western fears of Chinese expansionism, Zhang is quick to point out that Beijing built a great wall to keep others out; in other words, its main preoccupation is internal social stability, not taking over and running the affairs of others.

He emphasises the value that China places on its past, the fact that people always look to history to understand the present and the future. Despite the fact that Mandarin has been in use for nearly 3500 years, he points out that the teachings of Confucius can still be read and understood by the average educated school child. This is in stark contrast to the fact that even a professor at an English university often cannot understand the works of Shakespeare as they were originally written.

Thus, China has a vast store of historic cultural wealth in its vaults that it can draw on and use while deciding about its future. This is not available to the West.

Zhang also points out that while the West is prone to laud its systems as superior, there has been no job creation in the US since 2008. By contrast in China, every year for the last three decades, there has been growth and job creation at every level, down to the smallest unit under governance. Why should China then adopt Western systems which have been shown to be inferior?

In short, Zhang shows that it is often more useful to look at the East through its own eyes, rather than consistently yielding to the big mistake of trying to measure Eastern achievements with a Western tape measure.