Painting Fakes

Back when I worked in Brisbane City Council I worked with a very clever man called Frank.  Frank was the Manager of City Assets, responsible for overseeing management of Council's  vast portfolio of land, buildings, infrastructure, equipment and so forth.  I was responsible for housing and homelessness initiatives and Frank organised for Council to donate some fabulous parcels of land for the Brisbane Housing Company , a new affordable housing company we were kicking off alongside the State Government.  He also handed over a small stock of spare houses to homelessness organisations to use for short-term housing until they were needed for their original purpose. I really appreciated his support, but the thing he did that impressed me most had nothing to do with me.  It was about cars.  For most of my time in Council, cars were a source of frustration.  Each of Council's hundreds of small teams had its own allocated vehicles, with their numbers vary...

I promised to write some more about degrowth after kicking off with Jason Hickel and Kohei Saito .  Now it's the holidays and I have time, so here we go! It's easy for degrowth to seem like a fantasy, something a few idealists can write or talk about but that will never happen because politics.  Both Hickel and Saito made a good case for why degrowth is essential, but gave few pointers as to how we might get there.  I'm not sure how we can get there either, but over the course of a 'yet to be specified' number of posts I'm going to share a few ideas about how we could build a bridge between idea and reality. We are continually told by politicians and economists that economic growth is essential for our continued and improved wellbeing.  It's not immediately obvious why this should be so - if we already have all we need to live a good life, why do we need to keep getting richer?  The first clue to answering this question is to ask what our politicians and eco...