Generation $

Here's one of the latest ads from Bankwest, where - as you can see - you can get a 10 per cent return on children's savings. In the TV version, a dad goes looking for his daughter in the backyard, but when she doesn't answer his calls, he ascends to her treehouse, where he finds... a flat screen TV, Bang & Olufsen stereo and reverse-cycle airconditioning. Then the elevator door opens and the daughter enters, carrying a panoply of shopping bags.

This obviously says more about the current generation's preoccupations than the next's, but you do wonder what impact it has on the little ones. There is that theory that your children will grow up in opposition what you try to teach them. Raise your kid to be an atheist and he'll run away and join the seminary, right? If that's the case, I guess we should expect a boom in socialist communes in 15 years or so. Perhaps we should invest now- oops, sorry, there I go again.

Appropriately, the Bankwest ads are plastered all over the bus station at Bondi Junction - a mecca of capitalism if ever I saw one. Right now it's going off too, as everyone gets in there, elbows first, to buy their Christmas presents. Well this year I'm over it. If all goes according to plan, we'll be spending Christmas Eve in the swimming pool.