Sadly, we let the stupendous wealth from Australia’s mining boom slip through our fingers only to see it be snapped up by private interests.
The benefits of that boom should have been dispersed throughout society, including the Goulburn Valley, but no evidence of the boom is to be found here for we mistakenly believed the free marketeers and the idea of “trickle-down economics”.
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| "Work is the refuge of people who have nothing better to do" - Oscar Wilde. |
Profits from that boom left just a handful of people astonishingly rich and the rest of us wide-eyed and wondering what happened.
The promises were hollow, misleading and little more than lies. Trickle down became trickle up, or flood up.
However, we stand on the cusp of another boom, one that can bring massive benefits to all, but already the corporations are gathering, eyeing off the profits and strategising what they can do to ensure they will benefit most and wider society, that’s you and me, will continue to foot the bill.
Profit from this boom, some of which is happening here in the Goulburn Valley, will be, if we allow it, privatised and the costs socialised.
The arrival of renewable energy presents a wonderful opportunity - it’s new, it’s different and being here at the beginning we have the chance, and the responsibility to ensure the industry is structured in a way that it is effectively publicly owned and so benefits all, rather than a handful that circumstance has favoured.
Altruism, not profit should drive the process.
Our present energy industry morphed from a publicly owned and operated operation to a private, profit-driven process in which the customers, the users were the losers.
Writing in his new book, “The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future”, Andrew Yang said: “We have a 1960s-era government that has few solutions to the problems of 2018”, suggesting our government operates in a parallel universe.
True, Yang is writing about America, but much of what is happening in the U.S. is reflected in the ideologies of many influential people in Australia.
Australia is fantastically rich and convinced by a few rather tired rhetorical flourishes about safety and security we willingly hand over billions of dollars for military hardware and yet the idea of real and tangible personal security and safety that could be answered by a universal basic income (UBI) is declared beyond our financial capacity and so impractical.
It is neither, rather the UBI is totally doable and like the urgency needed in response to climate change, all it needs is the will and adherence to the idea that people are vastly more important than profit combined with the understanding that the accumulation of profit in private coffers adds nothing to broader wellbeing of the populace.
The renewable energy boom is a partial answer to the climate change dilemma and is also an integral tool in achieving a universal basic income. Now we just need the will.
In all this it is worth considering Oscar Wilde’s observation: “Work is the refuge of people who have nothing better to do.” Unfortunately, that may describe the vast majority of us”.
