Celebration as free-market juggernaut staggers

The free-market advocates should be celebrating.

Holden has worked the system perfectly in that the car manufacturer has privatized the profits and socialized the costs.

In the past decade, the Australian and State Governments, that is you and me, have given more than $2 billion to the company and now, to further enrich its takings, it has sacked 500 people – Holden has pocketed the profit and we pay the bill.

Simplified equations can always be interpreted in any way preferred, but this one is loaded with indiscretions that are not a public responsibility, rather the success, failure or otherwise of Holden should be contained within the free market it so idolizes.

The world in which Holden was founded, grew, boomed and profited massively was different from what exists today; different in that growth, as it is traditionally understood, equates with difficulties we can’t yet comprehend.

Rather than prop-up what is a struggling, if not dying industry, our governments, Local, State and Federal, should be using their resources to help us understand how we can flourish in a society that is not dependent on economic growth.

That is quite the opposite of the philosophy that saw us align ourselves with an industry that because of what it is and the appeal it has to our egoistic wants, holds humanity hostage as it plunders our fancies and earth’s finite resources.

It seems our governments believe they have a mandate, and maybe they do, to ensure the validity of these inappropriate businesses; inappropriate as they are entirely about only answering wants and pay little, or no role in ensuring human needs are attended to.

We face multiply difficulties, among them the fact that we live in a liberal democracy; a fundamental good that has within it a disabling difficulty enlivened by the inability of politicians, and us as the electors, to look beyond their present terms of office.

Humans have solidified their supremacy in the food chain through their unique ability to imagine, memorize and plan ahead, skills that have been absent as we have sacrificed altruism, decency, fairness and an ethical understanding of our responsibility to care for other species and the environment on which they, and we, depend to economic growth.

Rather than support a dying and monolithic industry, our energy, and cash, should be directed at reassessing the corporate world and replacing it with a more fine-grained society that emulates the belief of Chief Economic Advisor to the UK National Coal Board and author, the late E.F. Schumacher, who said “Small is beautiful”.

If we are to have anything significant in society that has access to the communal bank, our taxes, it should be something that carries the pre-fix “public”, such as a nation-wide transit system.

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.

Blind adherence is leading us toward the abyss

Our blind adherence to what exists stands between us and mitigating the effects of climate change.

It is not too difficult to see and
understand how our global
temperatures continue to rise.

A never-ending retinue of recipes aimed at resolving climate change or global warming, call it what you please, are paraded before us, but in nearly every instance those ideas are about maintaining life as it is, or at least as it is for the rich minority, and so ensuring the sustenance of ways of living that brought upon humanity the very troubles these schemes purport to resolve.

Emerging dilemmas have the potential to decimate humanity with climatologists illustrating, unquestionably, that the human-induced changes to earth’s atmosphere, and so the earth’s weather patterns, are so expansive and dramatic, that the near “goldilocks” conditions of the past 10,000 years of “not too hot, not too cold, but just right” are quickly ending.

Earth’s surface temperatures are nearly one degree above pre-industrial levels and carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have risen from about 280 parts per million (ppm) prior to the 18^th century to nearly 400 ppm today, breaking the nexus we have enjoyed for millennia between rather pleasant, predictable and understandable weather and something that is quite different and largely untenable for many species on earth, among them humans.

Circumstances arising from lifestyles rooted in a paradigm that depend upon endless growth and the continued combustion of fossil fuels, primarily coal and oil, threaten us all and will only get worse before they get better for carbon dioxide, a natural by-product of that process is a long-lived chemical compound and so what is produced today will be with us for centuries to come. The maxim, “This too shall pass” doesn’t apply.

At a less than one degree increase in global temperatures we are witnessing some unexpected changes to the world’s weather, changes to which humans and associated infrastructure are not adapted, and yet a two degree increase is not simply predicted, rather unavoidable; changes that will bring with them what we, humans and many other species, will find not only challenging, but rather difficult to survive.

The science of climate change is quite complex, but even a layperson can understand it to see that what lies ahead will be, by brute insistence, quite different from what has been.

Proposals to avert the difficulty (we can no longer avoid it for we are 30 years too late) include high-risk and unproven geo-engineering ideas, including carbon dioxide sequestration, and significant alternative energy intervention (unlikely as the fossil fuel industry has massive political and social clout), but never have we truly explored dramatic changes to our way of living, substantially reducing energy use, changing our egoistic consumptive wants and switching our near obsessive interest from building bank balances to building resourceful and resilient neighbourhoods.

Idea goes up in smoke, leader announced by smoke

The young boy fantasized about having his own club, somewhere he could gather with like-minded souls, talk about things he now knows are social justice, equality, fairness, peace and altruism, but the idea vanished like smoke.



Charles Mackay
discusses madness
and delusions. 

Even then, in his naïve and youthful way, he could see there was no place for such an alliance as the world, it seemed, was driven by division and littered by other clubs that proffered similar values, but rarely, if ever, practiced them.

The club, he imagined, would have its own quarters remote from the influence of what he saw was a troubled and divided society, and its supporters would be clearly recognizable because of a distinct garment they wore.

Its totem, his youthful mind had decided, would be tangible, something he could physically experience; something palpable from the existing world and not an imaginary thing whose force rested upon faith that defied reason and drew its strength from illusion.

His idea dissolved as maturity advanced and in listening with intent to the “responsible men”, he became, throughout his teenage years embedded in the status quo to march in lockstep with the very people whom he instinctively suspected, but who, at the time, appeared to have a clear view of the future.

As it turns out, no one, not even the responsible men, could see or imagine what was going to happen and so their efforts combined with the peculiar and eccentric behaviour of the bizarre “clubs” that proliferated like weeds, did little but distort life.

Strangely, one of those, which has more than 1.2 billion club members from all corners of the earth, meets in a club-house remote from society, wears distinctive and in today’s world inappropriate clothing, conveys its message through chants, sustains itself though addiction to a litany of myths, recently announced the arrival of a new leader by pumping white smoke from the club-house chimney.

The young boy understood the importance of his idea, but the fearing people would laugh at his immature utopianism, abandoned his dream only to be seduced by the magic promised by the responsible men.

Youth, they say, is wasted on the young, but once imbedded the ideals remain and although mislaid for a time and confused by modern life, those foundational values of justice, equality, fairness, peace and altruism have recovered.

The white smoke from the club-house chimney might have signalled a new leader, but it was also a timely reminder that the ideals of youth; ideals about tangible public goods, have more value than is to be realized through adherence to a myth.

Nineteenth century author, Charles Mackay, wrote about Extraordinary Delusions and the Madness of Crowds and watching that rising smoke confirmed, for me, the Scotsman’s views.

The future security of Tasmania's Tarkine Wilderness concerns us all

Why should the preservation of Tasmania’s Tarkine Wilderness area concern you or space be permitted in this Victorian newspaper to discuss its preservation?

The subtle, but important beauty
 of the Tarkine Wilderness.

That Tasmanian wilderness has, unquestionably, long-term importance for your well-being and generations to follow that far exceed the short-term intentions of the profiteers who are blinded to its beauty, and inherent value to humanity, by the potentially mineral-rich dirt beneath.

Visit the area and you will be stunned by the beautiful intrigue of the forest.

The 430 000ha wilderness in north western Tasmania is home to Australia’s largest tract of cool temperature rain forest; it has many Indigenous archaeological sites, contains several sites of international geo-conservation significance, and has several iconic threatened species, including the giant freshwater crayfish and the Tasmanian devil.

The Tarkine was the last great unprotected wilderness in southern Australia, but now following a decision by Federal Environment Minister Tony Burke, it is now, save a slither on the coast, exposed to an unremitting onslaught from the mining industry.

Minister Burke’s decision is effectively a crime against all Australians, not to mention in a broader sense the people of the world, and all should rebuke him for his insensitivity to this priceless piece of infrastructure inherited by all.

It took thousands, if not millions of years for the Tarkine forests to become what they are today and yet the urgency with which miners operate will see that timeless work undone in just a decade or so.

Nineteenth century American author, poet, philosopher, historian and development critic, Henry David Thoreau, said the preservation of the world was in our wilderness.

Burke has obviously never been a student of Thoreau, nor does he care about or understand that decisions he makes today create situations with which people will still be wrestling when he is long under the earth he has sacrificed to profit.

It seems he is attuned to the short-term needs of profit and stands with those who endorse what was described at Melbourne’s recent Sustainable Living Festival as the “dinosaur economy”.

Australian Conservation Foundation speaker, Chuck Berger, briefly explained the extinction of dinosaurs and argued the dynamics of the world’s present economics will have a different, but strikingly similar result for humans.

The Burke decision for Tasmania’s Tarkine Wilderness is remarkably out of step with what the world actually needs and is as “Jurassic” in shape and form as the dinosaurs.

Yes, we should be concerned about how “our” Tarkine Wilderness is treated for although we may never go there it still contributes intimately to our lives through a playing a role in the stabilization of our climate and is home to countless species we may not know about or ever see, but are a crucial part of the web of life.

Election year full of challenges - for us!

This election year is loaded with challenges.



Lincoln at
Gettysburg.

Simply enduring it will be the first as our senses will be endlessly assaulted by those eager to convince us they have the answer; second, will be the challenge of separating fact from fiction; third, are the protagonists truly altruistic or is it simply the rude pursuit of power?; and, fourth and within all that, do they really have any idea of what it is they are talking about?

Most politicians, from those of Local Government through to the dizzy heights of the federal stage, descend from their respective platforms loaded with personal baggage that clouds perspectives and their appeal to the populist view cloaks individual agendas

Having encountered politicians of all stripes, it seems they are “trained” in giving convincing and wordy answers that appear to relate to the question, but in reality, mostly have nothing to do with it.

Most electors accord our politicians the respect their position warrants and it seems that in response those same politicians should respect those who may or may not vote for them.

It appears, interestingly, that they do, but therein lies the strange disconnect between reality and democracy, or what President Abraham Lincoln described at Gettysburg in 1863 midway through the American civil war as the government of the people, by the people, for the people.

The rhetoric of that articulate president lives with many today, but few have the intellectual or leadership capacities to live up to that ideal.

Some people argue at length that the idea of government is contrary to the process that is to the broad betterment of the people, suggesting that government, loaded down by its bureaucratic processes, frustrate and frequently deny the ambitions of many.

That, it seems, is an extreme anarchical or libertarian view; doctrines that depend on the altruism of all, a personality trait missing from most, even many of our present political players.

Acknowledging the differences and intrigues of human nature it appears we do need a government, but not one many would argue that has a controlling impact over our daily affairs.

All that seems fine until something, whether man-made or natural, gets out of step and then there is an instant cry for help –“Why weren’t we told?” “Who’s responsible?” “When does the clean-up start?” “Who’s in charge?” “Where’s the discipline?”

All these matters, at their heart, are about community and altruism, and, no matter how loose, some form of administration, government by another name, is needed.

A recent meeting in Shepparton discussed the effectiveness of our present three layers of government - local, state and federal - and there appeared consensus about abolition of the states, leaving a Federal Government backed by regional bodies.