Malcolm Turnbull's appeal goes beyond politics

Malcolm Turnbull is of the wrong political stripe, but I would vote for him.

That, however, is unlikely for I live in Shepparton and he represents the central Sydney-based seat of Wentworth, and for now, as he has indicated his intent to retire.

Malcolm Turnbull

The 56-year-old former investment banker, and journalist, is a considered and articulate man who values reason more than emotion and has that mysterious panache that frequently attaches itself to leaders.
Turnbull became the leader of the national Liberal Party late in 2008 and just over a year later was defeated by Tony Abbott, who continues in that role – although unaware of the accompanying political intrigue, that change in Liberal leadership makes me wonder about what value the Liberals put on reason and intelligence?
A recent free public lecture given by Mr Turnbull at the University of Melbourne attracted about 250 people, many, no doubt, who would have been students of politics, social dynamics and, of course, those interested in the broader machinations of society.
The present Shadow Minister for Communications spoke for about 40 minutes and although the hour-long session was meant to end at 7:30pm, Mr Turnbull was still answering questions at nearly eight o’clock.
The recently retired head of the university’s Centre for Advanced Journalism, Michael Gwenda, closed the conversation and in thanking Mr Turnbull asked for a show of thanks, igniting applause louder than heard at most similar events.
It was Mr Turnbull’s belief in the seriousness of human induced climate change that led to the end of his Liberal Party leadership, despite the fact that many of fellow party members vouched their support.
Listening to Mr Turnbull speak affirmed, in reverse, the Socrates observation that "the unexamined life is not worth living" for he allows nothing by until he has considered and examined the detail.
Interestingly, I do not stand alone in my admiration of Mr Turnbull for beyond most of those who heard the recent lecture - “Politics, Journalism and the 24/7 News Cycle” – there was a visiting professor who had played a senior role in American public life and spoke a few weeks earlier said: “American politics needs someone like Malcolm Turnbull”.
Australians have had their chance to luxuriate in Mr Turnbull’s intelligence, but generally abused that opportunity and rather than have him lead the Liberal Party, and then, hopefully, the country, they have opted for a regression into what he calls “the game” of politics, rather than the examination of and substance of what it is that makes democracy work and the subsequent implications of benefits for all.
Democracy demands many things, among them good journalism, but beyond that it also critically needs thoughtful and visionary fellows such as Malcolm Turnbull.

"Thud" in my driveway; a thud that echoes around the world

A heavy monthly thud in my driveway is a reminder of the continuing dilemma of consumerism.

Thud! - "the (melbourne)
 magazine" is in my driveway.

The heavy thud alerts me that the Melbourne Age has arrived complete with its wonderful, but strangely contradictory, publication, “the (melbourne) magazine”.
The full colour, glossy magazine of nearly 100 pages obviously targets a market that is beyond my budget and although I thoroughly enjoy The Age, it unsettles me that my subscription to the paper allows the inclusion of a product clearly directed at the “big end of town”.
Confusingly, I really like the magazine in probably what is a reflection of an inability to truly understand, and personally deal with the differences between “want” and “need” – a dilemma that is ingrained and considered generally, an impasse that has seen world’s nations scurry to South Africa’s Durban for 12 days of climate talks.
I’m unaware of the magazine’s profitability, or otherwise, but its advertising content of frequent full-page or double-page spreads, suggest that those with something to sell see it as a worthwhile vehicle to promote their goods.

Fairfax chief executive
 and managing director,
 Greg Hywood.

The magazine features some worthwhile journalistic stories and alerts readers of many fascinating events happening in and around Victoria’s capital, but in an era in which blatant consumerism is directly linked to climate change, those one hundred or so glossy pages are inherently offensive.
Therein lies the quandary as while the magazine itself is wonderful, the products marketed within it appear wonderful and its intent appears, in a modern historical sense, without question, but it endorses and encourages a way of life our world can no longer support.
Publishers of the magazine, Fairfax Media Publications is, according to its chief executive and managing director, Greg Hywood, investing heavily in digital publication so in time the rather heavy consumptive material costs of the magazine may vanish.
However, what will not by implication go away will be society’s demand for goods that are poorly positioned to help us find out way to a society in which we live in a “five-minute world”; that meaning that most of our daily needs, from work to shopping and leisure and from various services to schooling are all within a five minute five minute bike ride or walk.
Public transport is integral to the five-minute world, but the idea of train, buses and trams seems somewhat remote from the idea behind the magazine, except for their novelty value.
The reality that is climate change floats in like a feather, with the changes to the ambience of our world being almost imperceptible, but if we live with the enthusiasm encouraged by “the (melbourne) magazine” the certain changes will arrive with a thud, a thud that will echo around the world.

The contradictions and clashes between beliefs and reality

Beliefs and reality are often estranged.
Most believe the world is a violent place, and of course they are correct, but if considered historically, they are simply perpetuating a myth.

Dr Rodney Tolley

Traders invariably believe that customers need parking close to their stores as the resultant success of their businesses is linked, inextricably to the convenience of arrival by car.
That is quite wrong as surveys throughout the world, including some by traders themselves, have illustrated that customers seek a host of things, among them safety and the ability to easily access the store on foot, but have parking near the bottom of their hierarchy of needs.
Those two matters, it should be noted, are just two of many discrepancies between beliefs and reality.
Steven Pinker explored the changing realities about violence in his latest book, “The Better Angels of Our Nature: The Decline of Violence in History and Its Causes”.
Pinker acknowledged that our world is a violent place with our sensitivities sharpened by the 24-hour news service that presently encircles the globe alerting us to every violent act, no matter how small, big or obscure.


Steven Pinker

However, comparatively few people today have to live looking behind, Pinker pointed out, in the fear that they will be murdered, assaulted, tortured, raped or abducted.
The belief is that people face all those dilemmas, but the reality is that we are in the midst of a peaceful epoch and violence in its absolute sense is something of a rarity.
Car parking is another troublesome myth, different obviously, but equally ill-founded.
Speaking recently in Melbourne the chair of the global movement, Walk 21, Dr Rodney Tolley, said traders unquestionable believed car parking was what had the biggest influence on their businesses, when quite clearly it was other things, among them their easy accessibility by pedestrians.
Dr Tolley was talking to a relatively benign audience of mostly planners and those interested in urban design and argued that most business owners didn’t truly understand what it was that customers really wanted.
He said that the walkability of towns and cities, and within that easy access to shops, was now “core business” and needed to be treated seriously by all in the community.
Dr Tolley was not simple theorizing as he was able to produce hard numbers illustrating how businesses had sharply improved once pedestrian access to them and the walkability of the general area had been enhanced.
Life, it seems, is not exactly what we believe; we live in haze of myths, of ill-informed fantasies and are surrounded by judgements that are demonstrably inaccurate and yet in the name of emotional comfort, arrogance, ignorance and pride we to persevere with beliefs that have humanity teetering on the edge of the chasm.

Epiphany-like experience seemed somewhat prophetic

Suddenly, I was saddened that this is all going to slip away.

Melbourne's Swanston St in
 the midst of its redevelopment.

The epiphany-like experience engulfed me as I crossed Swanston St walking toward the Wheeler Centre for Books, Writing and Ideas.
It was not a longing for any specific thing, rather the perceived erosion of the cacophonous life and the overwhelming and embracing sense of community that existed as thousands went about their disparate affairs in a wonderful public, shared space.
The Melbourne experience was little more than what I frequently feel in Shepparton - a microcosm of bubbling life in which individual intents are different, but from which intuition discerns co-operation and collaboration.
Melbourne’s spacious inner-city streets, which some claim were the outcome of a misinterpretation of street plan dimensions, a refreshing error, have always had a welcoming and wonderful human-scale about them.
Central Melbourne is emerging from an epoch in which the motor car had almost uninhibited dominion of the streets with the pedestrian pushed to the fringes.
That, however, is changing and Swanston Street is being redeveloped to make it essentially car free and people will again prevail, although Melbourne’s wonderful trams will still course up and down the street.

Roy Neel

As I write the sounds of what could be a dying dinosaur reach my Ashenden St home from the Springcar Nationals at the city’s showgrounds as people engage in an activity, which I can understand, but within a few decades be something people will equate with the final deathly moans of the petroleum era.
The epiphany-like Swanston St experience and the Springnats appear at first glance to be unrelated, but they are not for the purpose of my visit to Melbourne was to hear the Adjunct Professor of Political Science from a Tennessee University and Al Gore chief of staff and former U.S. assistant secretary of state, Roy Neel, talk at the University of Melbourne about a just and sustainable post carbon economy.
Prof Neel gave optimistic and pessimistic views of how the world will unfold between now and 2050 and in either scenario pedestrians will still be in Swanston St, trams will be doubtful and nor will I, anyone else for that matter, be assaulted by the noise of events such as the Springnats.
The unanswered question, of course, will be: “What will the mood of the people be like?” after decades of living in an energy-depleted world with a desolate landscape troubled by massive weather events or living and surviving in a world that is understandable, but substantially changed from what exists.
That sounds, rather apocalyptic, but Neel’s pessimistic scenario was just that and although his optimistic scenario was somewhat better, it demanded understanding that civilization’s survival rested with co-operation and the embrace of the “other”.

Shepparton's 'shed dwellers' showing the way

Shepparton’s “shed dwellers” are at the leading edge of how life will be in coming decades.

Shepparton's shed dwellers
 are another critical piece
 in the jigsaw in the picture
of life in the future.

Our shed dwellers, a metaphor for those who chose to live where they work, is more common than we might think.
Those who have chosen this approach have done so for a variety of reasons, from economic to convenience and from an interest in reducing their carbon footprint to just good sense.
Man’s voracious appetite for energy is eroding our finite fossil fuel resources so much that anything we can do to reduce the distance between where we live and our work will be critical.
Most of our shed dwellers leave home in the morning walk a few steps and start work.
Such beautiful convenience in our emerging energy starved world makes absolute sense, but is objected to by many who, despite repeated warnings about collapsing energy networks, are addicted to a way of life that only exists because of fossil fuels.
Beyond that, many say they simply don’t want to be so close to their work; they want a physical divide, they want their work and their homes to be in different geographical places.
The news about that, sad or otherwise depending on you stance, can just as easily be in your mind and so as expansive, or as distant you want it to be.
Drive around Shepparton and within minutes the opportunities for a “live where you work” life becomes apparent and just awaits the arrival of some creative and entrepreneurial person to exploit the opening.
For centuries humans have created living spaces in what at first glance seemed like most inopportune places, but which eventually evolved to become hugely comfortable, community building, personally satisfying and, importantly, a wise economic decision that greatly reduced energy consumption.
Home-based enterprises were once commonplace, but a few things changed that – humans learned how to access and exploit fossil fuels, bringing on the Industrial Revolution that saw the gestation of corporations, that profited from labour, which enjoyed the products made possible by those fossil fuels, leading to the motor car, that produced suburbia built around a detached home on a large block, often many kilometres from where the home owner worked.
These sumptuous neighbourhoods lacked intimacy and so the true sense of community that are mostly connected to intensively settled and developed places in which, in times gone, your neighbour could have been a blacksmith on one side and the other, a fellow who repaired and built, by hand, furniture.
Times, obviously, have changed, but the shed dweller next door might be an engineer, or a computer specialist, but whatever they might be, the intimacy of the living and working locally is a resource upon which our future will hinge.

We need thinking that will break ranks

Human imagination is faltering.

Albert Einstein became
famous for his curiousity.

Such an observation will undoubtedly draw criticism from many quarters, but in nearly every case that censure would come from those who are among the few, the measured minority, who enjoy the benefits of man’s imaginative innovations.
Many of the billions that tread the earth live each day on what most Australians consider small change and some live in countries of which they know not and nor do they have any idea what exists beyond a day’s walk.
Humankind has travelled on the back of imagination for millennia and sometimes that has been good and at other times, not so good. 
The 20^th century was alive with imaginative developments and that 100 years of innovative momentum has continued into the 21^st century with something new appearing on the human landscape nearly every other day.
What we have seen, though, has been somewhat linear, an almost expected, development of what already existed.
What we haven’t seen, a further example of the paucity of imagination, are ideas that have truly broken ranks; ideas that have sent humanity hurtling off on a refreshingly new journey.
Technologically the advances have been many, especially in the world of electronics, and while they have made much about life easier and more convenient, whether or not they have made life better is an open question and so any answer is subjective.
Danger lurks everywhere for even commonly used and understood terms such as “better” are subject to corruption and misunderstanding as one fellow’s better paradise is another’s hell.
Let’s agree that better is qualitative covering contentment and happiness rather than the quantitative measure of the accumulative life upon which success in the modern life is computed.
Abiding by that agreement we face our first challenge in stepping beyond contemporary understandings of success and launch ourselves into a whole new paradigm in which a better life is about kindness, sharing and collaboration; a way of living that, despite the protestations of our pedagogical politicians and corporations, is the antithesis of what exists.
Having freed ourselves from the straight jacket of existing thinking, we need to unleash our imaginations to consider iconoclastic utopias as opposed to their blueprint counterparts that are intimately, and generally, restrictive in every sense – they are totalitarianism by another name.
The stereotypical understanding is that most utopias are the foundation of tyranny or despotism, but we should note that none of the anger, violence and distrust the soak these ideologies are evident, in any way, in the qualities of genuine utopian thinking.
Nor will you find evidence of the manners that prevail in a civilized society in any form of government that has tyrannical traits and subsequently is devoid of kindliness, honesty and equality.

Barack Obama - likeable man, seriously distracted

I like Barack Obama.
He appears, and, to be a genuinely pleasant bloke with life-affirming values. I say “appears” as I have never met him and so depend on others to form my view.
That said, he is ensnared in an unsettling political structure deemed democracy, but which is really something quite different.
Should the fellow, described as “the most powerful man in the world”, be allowed to implement, unfettered, his ideas then America would unquestionably be a better place.
Sadly, the political intrigue in which he is entangled is worsened by irrational fanatical-like beliefs and divisive neo-liberal forces he confronts, his political survival is, at best, tenuous.
Whatever he may or may not be, the US president is heavily influenced, some say “controlled”, by the military/industrial complex that revolves around short-termism and gives precedence to corporate profit ahead of the broader welfare of people.
Australia has long supped at the US dinner table, or more correctly scrounged the scraps, and has sleeping with them, but now the electric blanket has been cranked up another notch.

US President, Barack Obama

A US military base will soon be a feature of the northern Australian landscape further implicating Australia in America’s hegemonic plans, something about which we should be remarkably cautious considering its successes, read failures, in the past century.
Americans generally, but not specifically, are arrogant about their lifestyle and resultantly so sensitive about them, that they undertake in other countries a style of social engineering that many see as simply a military invasion.
They are legendary for claiming their actions as self-defence and within that, helping build democracy.
Comforted by such self-congratulatory thoughts, they killed thousands in Vietnam, mostly children, women and peasant farmers, and despite some of the heaviest bombing the world has ever seen, the Americans, and us by implication, were chased out of the country by a rag-tag army – democracy, of a type, had won the day.
America has frequently steeped beyond its borders to “defend” itself and if other had acted similarly they would be guilty of war crimes and subsequently, we need to be cautious about aligning ourselves with such a questionable “friend”.
America should look to its own troubles before turning its attentions to the world’s dilemmas.
Considering the hierarchy of those matters on which a nation’s wellbeing is measured, America has much social engineering to do at home to help the legions of their own who are falling through the cracks in its societal structures.
American life may appear glamorous, but reality is different with millions struggling to maintain even the rudiments of life.
Obama is a nice bloke, but rather than accommodating America’s imperialistic ambitions, we should kindly suggest he invest his time, money and efforts at home.