Never mind the bulls and bears, it's the lemmings that continue to rule the market for many individual Australian investors – the mug punters taking themselves for a ride, buying high, selling low and then blaming "the market" for their mistakes.

And congratulations to Wayne, Joe and Tony for helping to talk down perceptions of the Australian economy and its outlook – a contributing factor in the lemmings' rush.

The juxtaposition of news articles yesterday told the story: more than half a million people have pulled out of the Australian share market over the past two years, presumably scared off by volatility and the steady diet of scary headlines about both local and global outlooks. Meanwhile, Australian share-funds averaged gains of 24 per cent over the past year. D'oh!

And then there's Westpac chief economist Bill Evans, interpreting the dive in the latest Westpac-Melbourne Institute consumer sentiment survey as reflecting a negative reaction to the federal budget. If he's correct in that guess, both sides of politics deserve to take a bow for convincing gullible members of the community there's an inherent crisis in not rushing back to surplus much faster than we usually do, that Australia's low level of net federal government debt is some sort of fundamental problem and that the Australian economy is doomed. (As previously explained, the forecast deficits this year and next were the best bits of last week's budget.)

Australia does have a demographic challenge to deal with – a large one – and we will need genuine tax reform and a more realistic set of expectations than have been encouraged by both sides of politics and the media over the past decade. There is a broad restructuring of the economy underway that will see some people lose jobs, but more new jobs continue to be created than old jobs lost. As usual, there are big headlines when one shop closes, but no one notices when another opens.