By day almost every street corner has a kneeling figure, hunched forward, hands in prayer mode and begging cup in front.

They are there every day.

They seem to be mostly young and middle aged men, though there is a sprinkling of women.

The ones who don’t have corners to occupy appeal to passers by on foot: “got a dollar?”.

This happens 10 times or more in the course of a day.

By night in many nooks, crannies, doorways and sometimes just shop front footpaths you will see small sheets of foam and a body sleeping under rugs or in thin sleeping bags.

I travel up to Sydney once a year at roughly this time and while there have always been beggars on the streets and people sleeping rough, this has been by far the worst year yet as far as the numbers of those in trouble.

The dribble down is not dribbling down and never has; the theory has always been just an attempt to justify the greed of those who do well in the “free” market jungle.

Life has always been to some extent a matter of luck.

Which particular womb you are born into has always made a huge difference to the sort of life you lead and the prosperity enjoyed.

But we now have the capacity to even things out more, to manage the factors and make sure everybody gets a more enjoyable three-score and 10.

That seemed to be the promise of nations that had survived the Nazi holocausts and Japanese atrocities after World War II.

But that was brought to a shuddering halt by the “me first” policies of Reagan and Thatcher who ushered in the “Greed is Good” era and began the sellout of the globe to multinational corporations.

Now it’s corporations who buy governments and tell them what to do.

The noisily touted “free” trade agreements, negotiated in secret, are nothing more than the latest step in tying governments and their national sovereignty to the will of boardrooms in an economic system that is rigged in favour of the corporations and against citizens in the lower echelons.

Australia is already heading in the wrong direction toward greater inequality.

A $50 billion tax cut to our corporate masters is profoundly the wrong way to go.

The benefit won’t dribble down to the streets as promised; the benefits, as usual, will end up in shareholder bank sheets with a goodly proportion of it flowing overseas.

Instead we need to collar some of the excessive wealth of the top and directly put more resources into public education; into public infrastructure; and into public health.

Above all, in the light of recent findings of corruption against the criminal elements in NSW right wing Labor, the rank stench surrounding Liberal Party funding and Premier Baird’s beginning to nobble NSW ICAC with staffing cuts, we need, more than ever, to put resources into a properly funded and staffed national anti-corruption body to properly supervise the ways we are governed and to work against gathering curtains of secrecy and political manipulation.

We need honest, open, decent, fair, far-sighted government for all and only transparency can ensure this.