Chests thrown out, back-slapping, strutting and preening, 'Team Australia' arrives home

“Team Australia” arrived home recently, chests thrown out, amid much back-slapping, strutting and preening.

The Washington Consensus makes
 puppets of all it
touches, including whole nations.

The travelling party from the big end of town, the business boys (and they were mostly boys) who lock arms in a club that understands, and cares only about growth and profit, toured with Prime Minister Tony Abbott to Japan, Korea and China.

Surrounded by a phalanx of billionaires, Mr Abbott visited that trio of Asian countries to talk up Australia and point out it is “open for business”.

He went to sign-off on free trade agreements; deals he believes will benefit all Australians, but which history has shown will only enrich his already rich fellow travellers.

Free trade is integral part of globalization, which has done nothing but make the wealthy wealthier, worsening inequality and ripping the rug out from under small businesses.

The stance taken by Mr Abbott and his rich cohort reflects the Washington Consensus, a 10-point plan that the U.S. Government and international economic institutions have successfully used to rob resource-rich underdeveloped countries.

The oddities of Mr Abbott’s thinking are intriguing as usually it is the less developed countries that fall into economic traps set by wealthy and influential nations, but in this case Australia, under the PM’s insistence, has been a part of its own deception.

Third-world countries that fall under the spell of Washington Consensus-like programs are stripped of their resources, and natural trading advantages, bringing on bankruptcy from which they are allowed relief only by agreeing to punishing trade arrangements.

Forced into free-trade agreements that favour, invariably, the developed countries; and the small businesses in the target country are pillaged and forced to align with huge corporations and so are destroyed and vanish – they go broke.

Driven by what appears to be a hint of desperation to demonstrate his promise of Australia being “open for business”, our PM has played the country itself as his trump card and has laid us bare on the trading table.

The people who could make a meaningful social difference to Australia are being treated like criminals and secreted to the likes of Manus Island, while those whose only interest is in exploitation, profit and growth are ushered into our dining room with a flourish reserved for royalty.

Money, it seems, can easily cross international borders, no papers, no passport and no identity required, but should you be a struggling individual or family escaping a life of oppression and you bring no riches other than who they are, then Abbott’s Team Australia throws up the barricades.

Speaking during his Asian tour, Tony Abbott puffed out his chest and declared “Australia has had a very good day”, failing to acknowledge that it was really his rich friends who had a very good day.

Do what you can to ensure SPC Ardmona's future, momentarily at least

Yes, each of us needs to do what we can to ensure the survival of Shepparton’s SPC Ardmona processing plant, for the moment at least.

One need not look too far or too deep to see and understand good reasons why the factory and the infrastructure it depends upon play a critical role in the economic wellbeing of this community.

Visit The News to add you weight to campaign.

Broaden you view and quickly it become obvious that the much lauded level-playing field is, and always has favoured the few.

Yes, we need SPC Ardmona to stay about for a while, but just long enough for us to learn about, and understand what it is we need to do to build a Goulburn Valley-wide community sufficiently resilient enough to withstand the unfolding society-wide shocks of the next few decades.

Rather than allow our communities to become implicated in the narrow financial definitions of globalization and instead of pursuing ever expanding growth, we should be working for “just enough growth”.

Success of a business should not be measured by a particular percentage growth each year, rather through its contribution to the community from which it draws its workers and to how many people it provides regular employment.

Success should not be measured through the raw brutality of the bottom line, rather whether or not that company is an integral player in the richness of the community in which it operates and within that how it embraces and cares about everyone from initial suppliers to the final customer.

Without stumbling into the rhetoric of the doomsayer, let’s us acknowledge that the future, even the immediate future, is going to be different from what has been, and is.

So what do we do? First, and of critical importance is to support this newspaper’s campaign to press our politicians to support short term goals of SPC Ardmona.

We need as much time as we can leverage to ready ourselves for an energy-depleted future as we surrender a lifestyle that is enlivened, almost totally by oil and coal.

Technophobes promise all sorts of wondrous energy solutions, but the few existing and scalable ideas, beyond simply using less, are solar and wind.

Support solar and wind ideas; support projects that encourage people to initially use less energy; live closer to where you work; cycle and walk where possible and look to your community to source whatever it is you need, including your food.

Join and support groups which are doing what they can to help us understand how we live fulfilling lives in an energy depleted future; read, read and read, and listen, listen and listen to learn about the societal instability that is arising from the exponential growth of recent decades.

For the record: our Federal MPs have received my SPC Ardmona plea.