Despite all our problems—all our terrible forebodings—it seems we remain wedded, yet, to a form of life that is, simply, unsustainable, and to a form of human organisation that is ethically bankrupt.
On Australia’s present trajectory, the rich will be massively enriched, the well-off will be better off, and the costs of the pandemic will fall on the rest of the population. But the scope for radical change has rarely been greater.
The pandemic very likely is the result of development pressing into once wild places and disturbing achieved balances between nature and human settlement, development that has been fuelling worldwide consumption and a disconnection from nature at an ever-accelerating pace.
...it may be that the current atmosphere in Canberra represents a perverse form of unity. In arguing more and more about less and less, politicians are sending a message to the electorate that Real Disagreements are being had, when in fact it is clear that the two major parties are different cheeks on the same rear end.
Beyond the fact that the burden will disproportionately be borne by young people, a society built on an edifice in which debt is widely accepted and forced upon people is not only potentially unstable both financially and socially, it’s also ethically problematic.
Economics students should be exposed to big-picture issues. Why so much brutality in the growth of material ‘prosperity’, and was/is it inevitable? Why do economic systems vary across ‘capitalist’ countries? Whence came the welfare state and why the decades of attacks on it?
The reality is that none of our cherished futures are possible if the burning of coal, oil and gas remains business as usual; the fond horizon will be a bitter mirage for as long as the Fossil Fuel Order stands.
What’s really sucking the life out of things is this traditionalist drive to be borne ceaselessly backwards, a program that diminishes the dozens of equally transcendent recording artists who’ve roamed the fallout zone since punk detonated the Beatles-led classic-rock hegemony circa 1976.
Whole sections of departments in our universities are now staffed by temporary workers. The casualisation of the workforce by university managers means that the lives of these women and men are held in suspension…
