Bringing WWI (or at least a Cash Mob) to Shepparton's Maude St Mall

Shepparton needs you!

Apologies for plagiarising a mythical British WW1 slogan and even though our circumstances maybe differ (thankfully), Shepparton, and whatever community you consider home, still needs you.

The slogan, apparently never actually used for recruitment during the war, become known about and mythologized later, had, at its heart, the idea of encouraging societal engagement.

The WW1 slogan.

And so there is nothing new under the sun. 

Communities everywhere pine for engagement from those among their number, but those offering to help, must first struggle from a psychological morass thickened by clash of values.

The predominant market system ensures the enrichment of just a few by encouraging individualism and celebrating a status that equates with consumerist behaviour.

Conversely a stronger a more successful community is one which adjusts its value hierarchy to ensure communitarianism supplants the modern ego-fired, and market system inspired idea of “doing your own thing”; a twist on narcissism.

An example of engagement and a positive response to the call from Shepparton for help came recently when about 30 people turned out for the city’s fourth “Cash mob”.

Led by Ronni Druit, this enthusiastic band of “city helpers” headed, on this occasion, for the Maude St store of Collins Booksellers, all with the intent of spending at least $20.

The Cash Mob descended on the store and within minutes the cash registers were pumping out receipts, the work of the “mob” was done.

What ended, so to speak, in Shepparton’s Collins Booksellers on Saturday began in 2011 in the American city of Buffalo, New York.

Oddly, it was a relative newcomer to Shepparton, and Australia, Ronni who initiated the Cash Mob in what has become, in just several years, her home town.

Ronni met her Shepparton husband-to-be while travelling and their first home as husband and wife was in New York, until a deteriorating US economy drove them to pack up and move.

Eager to do something to help her new hometown, and having always worked in Shepparton’s CBD, Ronni, encouraged by her husband, and inspired by an idea about Cash Mobs she saw on television that had been used to support businesses whose trade had been slowed by rail crossing works in Melbourne, brought the idea to Shepparton.

What she is doing epitomises how Shepparton can be helped, in a practical sense, but Ronni quickly, a freely, admits that her cash mobs will not save CBD businesses, but they bring people to the precinct and exposes them to what is available, encouraging them, hopefully, to return.

Shepparton's Maude St Mall.

Yes, Shepparton needs your help, Ronni is helping, as is her Cash Mob, and how the responsibility falls upon the rest of us.

A Tatura friend who has no reason to shop in Shepparton’s Maude St Mall, visited recently and bought a simple item and has the view that if everyone shopped, or visited the mall, just one extra time each year, it would become more viable, both economically and socially .

However, the Cash Mobs bring us to a strange philosophical and practical contradiction for they are about the maintenance of growth-based economy and true sustainability is about de-growth; a question of more complexity than those presently faced by the city generally.

The future is not where many people think it is

Ideas about a trial opening of Shepparton’s Maude St Mall to motor traffic are contrary to where the future lies.

The motor car is becoming increasingly irrelevant to a good life and that is not the view only of academics and environmentalists for even the executive chair of the Ford Motor Company, Bill Ford, says we’re heading for “global gridlock.

It's driverless vehicles such as this that should be the
only "cars" we see in Shepparton's Maude St Mall.

Personal mobility is an inherent good and people have resorted to many modes to fulfil that need, but the motor vehicle has stolen the march on them all.

Our towns and cities have evolved around the idea of the car, as has most everything else in modern life, and so here we are now hostage to a machine of our making and from which escape will need the dexterity of Houdini.

Technology, however, has handed us that agility and the world, and naturally Shepparton, stands on the cusp of society free from a life living as the motor car demands.

The demise of the traditional privately-owned fossil fuelled motor vehicle is upon us and within a decade or so, the on-demand electric vehicle will be scurrying around our roads.

Roads will not be roads as we understand them, rather small paths dedicated to electric vehicles, driverless, controlled by satellite navigation and responding to smart phone-like requests to ferry people, and goods, around the city. 

Shepparton will not be isolated from this paradigm shift and rather than bow to ideas rooted in the 20th Century,  councillors need to illustrate courage, avoid the intrusion of short-termism of those wanting cars back in the city’s mall and map out a plan allowing Shepparton to embrace 21st Century transportation.

Most people have an innate resistance to change, but this, unlike a different shade of colour on your living room wall, this is tectonic, and as such disruptive.

Rather than trialling the idea of putting conventional cars back in our mall, council should be using our money, and the city’s resources, to trial an on-demand, driverless electric vehicle, just as they are doing in other cities around the world. 

Just a few days ago a report from Stanford University economist Tony Seba, entitled “Rethinking Transportation 2020-2030”, went viral in green circles and caused spasms of anxiety in the established industries.

Seba’s report said people would stop driving altogether,  switching en masse to autonomous electric vehicles (EVs) that are ten times cheaper to run than fossil-based cars, with a near-zero marginal cost of fuel and an expected lifespan of 1 million miles.

He predicted petrol or diesel cars, buses, or trucks would not be sold anywhere in the world within eight years, with the shift, according to Seba, being driven by technology, not climate policies.

Climate policies will, of course, benefit but so will Shepparton generally, especially if the council can opt for the city becoming a place to trial the autonomous vehicle and take us beyond the anachronism of putting cars back in the mall.

A technologically thorny future for workers in the Goulburn Valley, well, everywhere really

Those presently with work in the Goulburn Valley may well have a rather thorny future.

Some estimates forecast that technological change in the next 10 to 15 years will make nearly 40 per cent of jobs in Australia redundant, including many highly skilled roles.

Comments about the end of work as we know and understand it were made recently in an article by the University of Melbourne’s Dr Gwilym Croucher.

Prof Melbourne Centre for the
 Study of Higher Education from
 the University of Melbourne,
 Prof Gwilym Croucher.

He said: “Technology has long been predicted to disrupt working lives but as inequality grows and many lose out, its wide-reaching affects become all too clear for whole communities”.

Considering that, what do we do? Rejection of the technology will not work as it was tried in the 19th Century by a group of English textiles workers and weavers who destroyed the new weaving machinery as a form of protest.

The “Luddites”, as they became known, were protesting about the use of machinery in a fraudulent and deceitful manner too avoid standard labour practices. 

History illustrates that their efforts were for naught as technology leapfrogged them, continued its inexorably march and is now poised to pounce upon work never imagined to be victim of technology.

Interestingly, technology is of itself neither good nor bad for it is neutral and so it how we use it and for what purpose that colours its value.

Economics has been the primary driver of technology and its growth can easily be traced and linked to what it will do to financially enrich  individuals, companies and corporations.

Of course, countless examples can be identified in which technology was good for people, irrespective of their station in life, but again that technology was only developed because it brought profit to someone, somewhere.

If finding work in the future is going to be thorny, working through the issue of about whether or not we care more for profit than people is going to be prickly in the extreme.

As with most everything the understanding of something depends entirely upon from where you stand and whether or not the prism through which you view life is that of an idealist or a pragmatist.

Up front, idealism has my favour  for if we are not doing what we are doing to makes things better for people, then what are we doing, and why?

The Luddites - they were unhappy about
 the advance of technology.

Immediately the conversation gets particularly prickly for better is subjective and what is “better” for one in measurably worse for another.

And so here we stand in the Goulburn Valley, a place inextricably intertwined with the market orientated capitalist system, something we unknowingly signed up to on the day we first drew breath.

The capitalist economic system has given us many wonderful things, but within that has been the God-like technology that has sprung what many see as a trap in taking away our work.

It’s not a trap, rather an opportunity for us to reconsider our behaviour and decide, at least here in the Goulburn Valley, whether we prefer people or profit.

Let's play our part in ridding Shepparton of plastic bags

Pay five cents for the convenience of using a single use plastic bag! Yes, and that is exactly what they do in the United Kingdom.

And again, yes, that could and should happen here in Shepparton. 

Professor Wouter Pooretinga
from Cadiff University.

Of course, the first question is why? 

Put simply the plastic bags we use, almost casually and then throw away, are resource intensive and cause huge damage to our environment; an environment you and I, not to mention myriad other species depend upon to survive.

Plastic bags and petroleum are intrinsically linked. Nearly ten percent of our oil supply goes to making plastic. It is estimated that some 12 million barrels of oil a year are used in making the plastic bags used in America alone.

Our behaviour reflects that of Americans who throw away about 10 bags a week and just like our U.S. counterparts, we do pretty much the same. That’s a lot of bags. 

Most of the plastic ever produced by humanity still exists, somewhere. 

The success of the UK plastic bag charging program, the disruption it has had on habit and resultant “spillover” effects was recently discussed by a professor of Environmental Psychology from Cardiff University at a University of Melbourne lecture.

Professor Wouter Poortinga was openly excited about the success of the UK program pointing the “spillover effects” that drew people into talking about the reasons for the plastic bag charge, subsequently making them more conscious of environmental matters.

The program to charge for single use plastic bags, introduced late in 2015, has had, he explained, overwhelming support and was now been accepted by most people (95 per cent), who had switched to taking their own reusable bags when going shopping.

The reasons to rid the community of plastic bags, he explained are clearly understood by environmentalists, but even those less conscious of those urgencies, seemed to embrace the idea.

Questioned about why people took up the idea so quickly and enthusiastically, Professor Poortinga said the the money raised from the charge went to charities named by shopkeepers.

He said that it was clear to people that beyond doing the right thing by the environment, they were also helping out, even in a small way, various community charities.

It would be a wonderful project for the Shepparton Chamber of Commerce and Industry to play a part in initiating a plastic bag charging system throughout the city - it’s a classic “win win” situation.

The experience of Prof Poortinga illustrates that it is something welcomed by both retailers and the shoppers. Oh, and of course the environment!

Should we in Shepparton follow the lead suggested by Prof Poortinga, not only would we rid ourselves of the accursed plastic bag, but we could help groups such as the Shepparton-based, The Community Fund.

A wild ride into our workless future

Hold on readers, this could a wild ride!

The Goulburn Valley of today is the product of work, damn hard, concentrated, committed and thoughtful work.

Tim Dunlop's revelatory
book about work.

Let’s put that in context a little – that was, however, another and different world; a world in which much of what happened was only possible because of human effort, mostly physical and then increasingly intellectual.

With the closing of 20^th Century and now being well into the second decade of the 21^st Century, those roles are quickly being reversed – we stand on the cusp of a technological era in which work, as we now understand it, will be something fewer of us will do and unemployment will be the norm.

Is that a bad thing? Not necessarily so, particularly if we are prepared to embrace the technology our large brains have afforded and at the same time let go of trenchant ideas of jobs and growth, the mantra Australians voted for at the last federal election.

Today’s technology has the capacity to easily, effectively and economically replace people through automation with research illustrating that we are edging toward being able to use artificial intelligence for nearly half of the jobs now held by humans.

Yes, the Goulburn Valley has been built on hard work; work that has brought many practical and social benefits, but work driven by an obsession with wants rather than needs, therefore has become so distorted that many of our fundamental human characteristics have been sacrificed on the economic altar.

Much of what is good about being human has been purloined by the jobs and growth paradigm with our inventiveness, sociality, and our inherent need to thrive almost surreptitiously directed at enhancing the wealth of just a comparative few.

A workless future in which computer controlled machines do most of the work -  a computer loaded with the appropriate algorithms have been shown to be consistently more reliable than medical doctors - we must begin with the restructuring of our existing, and predominately market and profit-based economic system.

Any suggestion that we divest ourselves of capitalism, which in its modern iteration is neo-liberalism, is an anathema to those who draw sustenance from what exists.

However, Tim Dunlop wrote this year in his book, “Why The Future is Workless” about a universal basic income (UBI) for all and said: “A world that no longer revolves around paid employment, one unpinned by a universal basic income, opens up the possibility of a life of, for instance, more civic, social and community engagement.

“Of using our skills for personal satisfaction and free exchange rather than channelling into the need to earn income or profit,” Dunlop wrote.

Later he says: “Equally it follows that if technology causes rising and sustained unemployment and we don’t introduce a UBI, then we are dooming ourselves to massive social dysfunction where a small band of elites will prosper and most everyone else will live hand-to-mouth in the most obscene version of what is called trickle down economics.”

Having people with their shoulder-to-the-wheel and locked into an economic system that favours only a few, makes them more governable and so the elite will immediately argue such an idea is impossible.

However, remember what Nelson Mandella said: “It seems impossible until it’s done.”

Charles sits silently with me as I muse about life

Charles Mackay’s timeless book, “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and The Madness of Crowds” sits at the end of my desk as I muse about life.

Although silent in every sense, thoughts ignited by Mackay’s marvellous 19^th Century book repeat in my mind sometimes engineering doubt about those things I have spent more than a decade understanding.

That momentary doubt is just that, momentary; for as quick as that doubt arises, the unequivocal evidence of the damage we have caused extinguishes those mental interrogations.

However, I cannot escape the fear that I too might be caught up in a delusion such as that alluded to by Mackay except for the madness he refers to was just that, a madness driven by emotion and superstition, broadly and socially accepted at the time; they were cruel mental confusions, devoid of fact and reason.

Personal concerns about climate change have me frequently on the end of much finger wagging followed by the accusation of “You, environmentalists!” as if I am personally responsible for the ills of both Earth and humanity.

Being described as an “environmentalist” is not wrong, but decidedly unsettling.

Sometimes I correct people saying, “My unease, my first concern, is for the people of this planet and our fellow species and so the natural by-product of that is caring for and about the environment, and within that allowing people and all other life forms to thrive”.

My journey to becoming what might be termed a “climate activist” began, unknowingly when, as a teenager, I worked for the dark side. Yes, I spent about two years travelling the coasts of Australia and in New Guinea’s Gulf of Papua working with an oil survey company, setting off explosions, killing fish of all sizes and recording data that allowed geologists to determine the presence of what I now know is a destructive fossil fuel.

My sojourn from reporting ended when I returned to Echuca’s Riverine Herald, then the North Central News in St Arnaud and then, in the early eighties, I finally settled at this newspaper.

Life took a telling turn late nineties when a severe road accident forced me into early retirement and then after several years of recovery (it’s a salvage and repair job that never ends) the essence of reporting, curiosity, surfaced again the pursuit of answers took me, by chance to a free public lecture at the University of Melbourne.

Seeking social answers, the first free lecture I attended mentioned betterment of the community, but it was really about building resilience in communities wrestling with the impact of climate change.

That ignited my interest and so for more than a decade now the university’s free lectures have been something of a haunt for me as they provide a rare opportunity to hear from people from all parts of the world with the sharpest of minds; minds that have been applied to exploring and understanding what it is we have done, and are doing, to the slither of life giving gases that surround our planet.

The delusions Mackay alludes to can be found among those unable to suppress their superstitions and a longing for what was causing the suppression of reason and good sense killing off the revelatory thinking needed to respond to a rapidly unfolding new world.

An endless trail of rubbish around the city's streets

A common sight outside a local opportunity
 store and although that is distressing enough,
what is of real concern is the seemingly endless
 trail of rubbish left around the city's streets.

Radio National accompanies me on early morning walks around the environs of Shepparton.

At that time of the day, the ABC station transmits primarily news and information and the stories it tells can be uplifting, damn depressing, or simply interesting.

What is on the radio at that time matches pretty well the tenor of what I see and experience when walking around the inner-city and surrounding neighbourhoods.

Occasionally a motorist will stop at an intersection and wave me across while they wait, or a passing fellow walker will offer a cheerful “good morning” as they go by.

Those small, and seeming inconsequential moments, reaffirm your faith in humanity, but then just as quick as your spirit soars, it can come crashing down.

Rubbish is probably the most significant marker of human presence.

Blatant dumping of household rubbish and sometimes industrial waste is reported by this newspaper and other forms of media, but what rarely rates a mention is the likes of the trail of litter throughout the city’s streets and shared pathways.

That rubbish is incidental – a bottle here, a can there, a shoe, a cardboard box, junk mail blowing down the street, scraps falling our passing utes and trucks, clothing, plastic bags (they too are rubbish, but handy for carrying all the other detritus), used nappies, and on one occasion of used woman’s health product, which I had swooped on before realizing what it was.

Probably the most frustrating is the packaging from around something bought at a nearby store. That packaging is often torn open and simply thrown on the ground, often ignoring a nearby rubbish bin.

While that might be frustrating, it is the behaviour of those who seek a secluded spot for a quiet drink that is the most intriguing – many of course throw their cans and bottles carelessly away, but some go to great lengths to hide their empties or pack them neatly back in the box or bag in which they carried them.

Why, I wonder if they care so much to pack their empties back in the box or bag, or make an effort at hiding them and not take it to a rubbish bin?

And what does the sometimes apocalyptic-like news have to do with the litany of rubbish that fouls our city’s streets?

Well, that discarded piece of seemingly harmless rubbish is sort of “ground zero” in caring for your home, caring for your community, caring for your environment and caring for your fellows.

Walking the streets of Shepparton cleaning up after others, the thoughts of reporter John Vidal often crowd my thinking – he recently wrote: “We weep at the disappearance of endangered species but avert our eyes to the causes of Earth’s destruction”.

That said, and this being early 2017, let’s personally enact a New Year’s resolution; first, not to litter and second, pick up and properly dispose of any rubbish we see; making our hometown just a little cleaner and somewhat tidier.