MORE than 2000 customers at Toormina and Sawtell were left without power after safety equipment detected a fault this afternoon.

Shockingly, thousands more people, revealed not to be customers, also lost access to electricity. These freeloaders, or "electron bludgers", even include a huge number of children stealing electricity from their own family members; a sign of how ingrained the something-for-nothing culture has become.

More outages are planned in order to flush these electricity cheats from their safe havens. Essential Energy regrets the inconvenience to their legitimate customers, but is confident that they will support the measures necessary to maintain the integrity of the utility cartel system, which has done so much to replace boring old public services with a bewildering array of plans and bundles. For more information, just wait for the next pair of Irish backpackers with laminated ID cards to turn up at your door.

There is nothing so futile as speaking truth to bureacracy, but here I go again:

Walk into any "Job Services" provider and look at the services they actually provide. There are posters on the wall telling young people to dress smartly; men to polish their shoes and women to go easy on the make-up. Does anybody seriously believe that persistent, widespread unemployment is to any significant degree caused by an epidemic of poor fashion sense?

The huge parasitic industry that has been peddling such fatuous advice since the abolition of the Commonwealth Employment Service is designed to police, punish, and brainwash the unemployed into destitution and subservience.

The federal government could eliminate all unemployment in a matter of months, if not weeks, were we to demand they do so. The government's 1945 White Paper on Full Employment declared that "governments should accept the responsibility for stimulating spending on goods and services to the extent necessary to sustain full employment. To prevent the waste of resources which results from employment is the first and greatest step to higher living standards." The policies proposed in that paper worked, at least until the monetarists used the opportunity of the OPEC oil crisis to take control of the public debate and ransack everything that had been achieved.

You cannot train away the unemployment and underemployment of about a fifth of the working age population. There is useful work to do and people to do it. Refusal to mobilise the resources to put people to work is nothing but class warfare.

The jewel in Coffs Harbour's cliche crown is still putting out the red light for any real estate agents in need of discreet, high-class services, after rejecting suggestions that a news story requires more than one source before it can be considered journalism.

The Advocate's advertorial editor-in-chief, Mr. Earnest Hardwicke-Goodge said he was disappointed by so many readers mystified as to why the unchanged ownership of prime CBD graffiti canvas was considered newsworthy.

"The continued presence of readers is a regrettable distraction from our core business of connecting advertisers with other sophisticated, consensual, like-minded advertisers," Mr. Hardwicke-Goodge said. "Unfortunately, despite filling any unsold advertorial space with the most unreadable tripe imaginable, we've been unable to shake them off."

Mr. Hardwicke-Goodge said that while an upcoming series of particularly nauseating stories of wholly uninspiring local people doing utterly unremarkable things had the potential to turn the situation around for the paper and it's key stakeholders, he urged any remaining would-be readers to remember one simple rule: "If you're not looking to scam or be scammed, just put the paper down and walk away; it's not for you."

I briefly considered doing a Cat Stevens act, but it's such a crowded market. And the turf wars are brutal. I mentioned I was thinking about it to Steve Moonshadow and he savagely lashed out, giving me the most horrendous swollen black eye, saying "Come anywhere near my patch, and I'll do the other one, then you won't have to look no more. Understand?".

Anyway, you really need to go niche to make an impact. I thought maybe James Taylor, Donovan, even Mary Hopkin (promising, but I just couldn't make the blonde wig work).

Finally, I hit on the perfect, under-exploited formula. You can catch "Turned Out Nice Again - A Moving Homage to George Formby" during my 2016 east coast tour, starting in Grafton and ending slightly north of Grafton. Check local pubs, community theatres, and scout halls for dates and times. Celebrate the life and work of a man who has united generations around the simple pleasures of flat caps, ukuleles, leaning on lampposts and appreciating the occasional little stick of Blackpool rock. Who knows - you might see what I can see, when I'm cleaning windows!