Fool’s Paradise

Dick’s
Toolbox cont.
.. argument that global warming is not just happening, (surprise), but is happening
at a rate far greater than expected. We have an expanding population, (yes Virginia,
there are far too many people), opting for the cheapest (coal fired) solutions
to energy generation. Couple with virtually no power conservation, garnish generously
with no observable will on the part of the largest consuming nations and polluters,
and you have a problem of some significance.
I’m afraid that Al Gore’s admonition that we can do something about
it, that it is not too late, seems comparable to pigs flying. I wish I could
share his conviction that it is not too late to make a difference. However,
I believe that there is no other moral choice but to act as if we did.
Much closer to home, “Two Men in a Tinnie” has John Doyle and Flannery
navigating down the Darling and Murray rivers, a journey whose main feature
is either the lack of water or any conservation of the native fish in the river
or the flora on the banks. The major east coast river systems are being lost
through greed, the triumph of parochial interests and a beggar thy neighbour
approach to irrigation and water rights. There is cotton irrigation on the tributaries
of the Darling, and rice farming on the Murray near Renmark. You can only agree
with John Doyle that they seem absurd pursuits on the world’s driest continent.

This is a solvable, soluble problem if you excuse the damp pun. The damage can
be undone. It was identified long before I arrived on these desiccated shores
30 years ago, but has only become worse over that period of time. Everybody
knows the solution, but nobody will make the hard decisions even now when it
is so obviously critical.
We have known about global warming for almost the same amount of time, with
the same result writ large. From family photographs and my own travels, I have
seen the retreat of the glaciers in New Zealand tens of kilometres back toward
the mountains. With global climate change we have the self-interested pretend
that there is no problem, and cloud the argument with doubt in much the same
way the tobacco industry did with smoking. Perhaps we should expect little better
when the US Secretary of State has a 130,000-ton oil tanker named after her.
We are going to hell in an ecological-disaster-powered handcart, we know it,
and nobody, apparently, is going to do anything about it. And I am beginning
to believe that we deserve it. I would just like to apologise to all the flora
and fauna that we are wiping out on a daily basis, and to all the children who
will never see the wonders of the world and will wonder why they are either
being cooked, starved or drowned.
The next three paragraphs are an intemperate outburst that may offend some people.
It contains strong language and highly biased personal opinions.
John Howard is not directly responsible, but what he represents is. He may be
more responsible than anyone within a 3,000-kilometre radius. To me he is the
triumph of towering mediocrity and mendacity, generously coupled with a pusillanimous,
mealy-mouthed, self-righteous stupidity. He possesses an astounding blindness
to anything further out than either the next election or the next five minutes,
depending on the photo opportunity. Mister Less Than Average, a man capable
of destroying the future for the sake of his moment on camera: selectively read,
generally uncultured and a person who has chosen to ingratiate himself to someone
even more vain-glorious and misdirected than he is in the President of the United
States.
Significantly in terms of his actions one of his three heroes is Margaret Thatcher,
who famously said that there is no such thing as society, only individuals.

Whilst history is the ultimate judge, I trust that he will seen as possibly
the worst Prime Minister this country has had, because of his inability to have
any wider context for his actions or responsibilities other than his own narrow
preconceptions. It would appear that his ideas formed out of cold war biases
of fifty years ago and not altered significantly since. Regrettably he has chosen
poor company to reinforce his opinions: an inept Treasurer, an Attorney General
unfamiliar with the concepts of Justice or the Law, a Minister for Health who
believes in virgin birth, and a Foreign Minister who is alien to the concept
of diplomacy. These are the primus inter pares, the first amongst equals, of
a cabinet whose collective mediocrity make parasitic amoeba seem like ideal
dinner companions. These are people not for fit for this or any time.
Not that the Federal Labor party is a significant improvement or viable alternative.
Consider if you will Kim “Bomber’ Beazley, a deflated soufflé
of bombast, irrelevance and self importance. His fellow travellers seem ill-suited
to wresting government back or developing the policies that might distinguish
them in these times, with the exception of Kevin Rudd. And not just because
of his name.
Regrettably I believe that the archetype for the society that they all aspire
to is a 1950’s combination of colonial rectitude, safari suits and cold
war paranoia that I hoped that we might have left behind. That was a world dominated
by religious conservatism, where women and foreigners knew their place, and
where education and the arts were for a small coterie of irrelevant left wing
elitists. Hence the efforts to rewrite history back into an anachronistic mould,
changing the past to justify the present.
The excuse is often made that John is “a good politician”, just
another opportunist for political advantage. Forgetting the oxymoron, we take
this to mean a person who would sell his mother for power or a vote. I think
that in doing so we underrate his ability to move the country and its media
to his particular political agenda. Quite honestly I may be the one out of step
here, as we see the most of the world move ever to the right politically and
religiously.
To get to this invidious state we have seen our language traduced, stripped
of coherence and meaning to achieve a near Orwellian equivalence of the 1984
slogan ‘War Is Peace’. Under new anti-terrorist legislation Room
101 is almost a legally sanctioned reality. Now in Australia you can be ‘disappeared’,
so that no-one will know where you are, or if you will ever come back. Most
people seem unconcerned; but shouldn’t we stand on a moral high ground
to differentiate ourselves from those whom we regard as endangering what we
believe in? If we espouse higher values, should we not exemplify them in our
conduct?
Earlier I intimated that all was not financially well in our seemingly bucolic
world of plasma TVs, BMWs and property tax havens. Economically we have borrowed
heavily against the future. Let me quote Tim Colebatch of The Age “Today
we owe about $500 billion, or more than 50 per cent of our GDP – with most of
that borrowed in the past seven years………….We have to
borrow because we do not earn enough money to pay for our imports.…….
key factors in most countries with high current account deficits, such as Australia,
include tax breaks that allow investors in effect to share their interest bills
with the government, shifting part of their costs to other taxpayers, a long-term
dismantling of industry policy, low taxes on consumer spending and low interest
rates……..We need to earn money from the world, not rely on endless
borrowing.”
In July of this year outstanding credit card debt continued to rise, reaching
a record $36.7 billion the Reserve Bank of Australia reported. This is about
$1,835 for every man woman and child owed to the banks, along with a conservative
$2.8 billion of interest payments. The banks have largely borrowed from overseas
lenders to give us this line of credit along with other commercial paper such
as mortgages and other loans. Overseas banks lend Australian banks this money
because local interest rates are high compared with most other countries.
Simply put economic growth over the past decade has been financed by foreign
debt, which has been used to finance a real estate and share price bubble. It
has not been used to develop new export and import replacement industries that
could repay the debt. We have not spent the money on education or Research and
Development. We were a quarry and we remain a quarry. The ground and the economy
have both been hollowed out.
Rather than rabbit on, allow me to quote Dickens’ Micawber in David Copperfield

“Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six,
result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds
ought and six, result misery.”
In summary little of what we see around us is sustainable either ecologically
or economically. We are spending more than we earn in both environmental and
economic capital. We live in a Fool’s Paradise. Happy Days.