Painting Fakes

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...

It's the first anniversary of the Voice referendum , and I've been reading Shireen Morris's Broken Heart: A True History of the Voice Referendum.  Morris is not an Aboriginal person but she is a constitutional lawyer and from 2013 onwards she worked for the Cape York Institute (CYI) under the leadership and guidance of Noel Pearson, first as an employee and later as an academic continuing their close collaboration.  No-one was closer than her to the events that led up to the Referendum, and I learned a lot reading her story. The story begins in 2012.  The then Labor Government had appointed an Expert Panel to advise on options for constitutional recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.  Its key recommendation was to add a racial non-discrimination clause to the Constitution as a way of fleshing out the race power added in 1967.  This proposal was quickly and roundly trashed by conservative lawyers, with Greg Craven, one of our leading right-...

 In my last post I reviewed Mark Considine's assessment of the results of neoliberal policy reform in Australia's social services.  In each case, the results have been bad for service users and governments, who get poorer quality, more expensive services.  However, they have been very good for the entrepreneurs who get into this market, who have been able to get rich on government money. This is pretty much the story of the whole neoliberal project.  Ordinary punters are promised that if we reduce workers rights, the rights of indigenous people and pesky environmental regulations and provide government 'incentives' to business, this will turbo-charge economic growth and everyone will benefit.  Turns out that this isn't true.  Rich people keep on getting richer, while the rest of us stay about the same or even get poorer.  Meanwhile, we are crossing various ecological boundaries, threatening our futures in the name of 'economic growth' now. One answer ...

Over the past four decades the world's wealthy nations, including Australia, have been undertaking a vast social and economic experiment.  Whether you think this experiment has been a success, or a colossal failure, depends on how rich you are. This experiment is generally called 'neoliberalism' by progressive people like me.  More conservative people are more likely to call it 'free market economics' or the more fuzzy 'economic reform'.  The core idea that drives this experiment is that markets are the most potent and efficient way of organising production and consumption of both good and services. This has several implications for the way governments should act. They shouldn't compete with private sector entities, and should sell any government entities that do so.  Hence the wave of privatisations around the globe. They should keep their regulation of market activity to a minimum, as this interferes with the 'free' operation of markets. They s...

Following reading and writing for my series of posts on the long-running war on Palestine, I followed up on a recommendation from a friend* to have a look at Israeli historian Ilan Pappe and read his book, The Biggest Prison on Earth: A History of the Occupied Territories, published in 2017. Ilan Pappe was born in Haifa, Israel in 1954, and studied and taught history at the University of Haifa.  However, his writings led to personal attacks in the media and threats to him and his family, so he left Israel and now teaches at the University of Exeter in the UK.  To say he's not a fan of Zionism is an understatement.  He is on record as supporting a unitary state in Palestine in which Jews and Palestinians have equal citizenship, and the right of return for the descendants of Palestinian refugees of the Nakba. The Biggest Prison on Earth  examines the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza since the 1967 Arab-Israeli War.  But first of all he provides a quic...

In the home group I'm part of we're currently reading and discussing Palmer J Palmer's Let Your Life Speak, a connected series of essays on the subject of vocation.  Palmer's central idea is that discovering our vocation is not a matter of receiving a message from God, nor about becoming somebody or something, but about recovering our true selves.  He says that we are born as unique, intact selves, but that as we grow the forces of our families, our schools, our churches and our societies lead us to lose sight of our true selves and take on identities which we perceive that others value.  Discovering our true vocation is the process of digging through those adopted selves to rediscover and own the true self we are born to be.   Reading and discussing this book led me back, once again, to my favourite Ursula LeGuin novel, City of Illusions.  This book has featured in this blog before, but like all favourite books it continues to speak, and there is more...