The promised land awaits, but we can't get there from here

The promised-land is close, but you can’t get there from here.

It is so close that you can almost see it breathe and yet while the vision may be clear it is, in fact, unreachable.

Victoria's Premier,
Denis Napthine.

The promised-land is exactly that, promised. You work, you save, you deal and you even make promises, but still the destination seems as distant as ever.

With your shoulder to the wheel, with your back bent and your mind tuned to the task, you draw a little closer to your goal, but then the illusion simply slips away.

The promised-land glistens on the horizon, it shines with the assurance of new day, a day so glorious that the sun never seems to set and if you listen to the corporate boosters, life just keep getting better.

Humanity is locked in something of an ideological arm wrestle with some, for whom life is getting better, declaring the promised land has arrived, while others are as equally convinced that the promise is not only hollow, rather a fallacy, an illusion manufactured by the rich minority for their benefit, paid for the majority.

The promised-land can be seen as an allegory of a gated community – you can see it, you know it is there, you see many coming and going, but the gates remain forever closed to those without the necessary social connections and, even more importantly, a handsome bank balance.

Events of the past week have blunted budding optimism with Tony Abbott declaring that, as Australia’s Prime Minister he would disband our Climate Commission, effectively sacking the head of the organization and former Australian of the Year, Tim Flannery.

The promised-land as seen by Abbott is really the stone-age for he would also repeal Australian’s only true effort to combat our carbon dioxide emissions, the misnamed “carbon tax”.

His Victorian Coalition Party compatriot and Premier, Denis Napthine, also stands with those who misunderstand world events; those seemingly unable to understand that tomorrow will be different in every sense from today and his government is spending millions researching a container port will be ultimately as useful as an umbrella in a tornado.

The promised-land must be somewhere else for many in the world are behaving in a manner unbecoming a child; they glare at each other, belligerently brandishing nuclear weapons and declaring their use will reveal a better world.

There must be parallel universes for this one, it seems, has been taken over by aliens, those who put profit and property ahead of people, and strangers who see the good life as amounting to little more than accumulation and subjugation of the other.

The promised-land awaits but that is what it will remain until those in “this land” understand access rests with inclusivity, fairness, collaboration and sharing.

Living the 'good life' demands a Steady State Economy

It is dramatic, but humanity stands nervously and with decided uncertainty in shadows cast by a pall of serious environmental degradation.

Herman Daly.

The world shudders as man, who equates success with growth and has long enjoyed a free ride, can hear the banker, nature, saying “enough is enough”.

Rather than reach for an economy that is always expanding, it is time we reset the economical thermostat and attuned ourselves to understanding and living with a Steady State Economy.

Growth for the sake of yet more growth, an author and professor of environmental studies and politics, David Orr, says is a bankrupt and eventually lethal idea.

Author and Canadian academic, science broadcaster and environmental activist, David Suzuki has said: "Somehow, we have come to think the whole purpose of the economy is to grow, yet growth is not a goal or purpose. The pursuit of endless growth is suicidal."

One of the founders of the field of ecological economics and a leading critic of neoclassical growth theory, Herman Daly, has defined a Steady State Economy.

He says it is: “An economy with constant stocks of people and artifacts, maintained at some desired, sufficient levels by low rates of maintenance ‘throughput’, that is, by the lowest feasible flows of matter and energy from the first stage of production to the last stage of consumption.”

A Steady State Economy, therefore, aims for stable or mildly fluctuating levels in population and consumption of energy and materials. Birth rates equal death rates, and production rates equal depreciation rates.

Complex? Probably, but no more than that which would confront us if we sat down now with a blank slate to design what exists; a process that has unleashed massive inequality and equally distressing environmental ruin around the world.

What we have works for a rich minority – less than one per cent of Americans control most of the country's total wealth, and although Australia is different, it is similar.

A Steady State Economy would inherently embrace a redistribution of wealth, arriving at a point at which rewards were not recognized in dollars, rather in happiness and contentment enabling an escape from the proven pointless rigour of the traditional measure of economic success, the Gross National Product (GNP).

The GNP is simply the flow of money, that in no way separates good from bad and so payment to skilled workers is measured just as is the cost of providing relief to communities damaged by recent tornado in north-east Victoria; repairing flood damaged Numurkah or Nathalia; restoring large swathes of Victoria drowned in flood waters or attending to the death and damage of Victoria’s Black Saturday fires.

A Steady State Economy makes the good life possible, uninhibited growth condemns it.