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.
