Painting Fakes

A couple of times in this series on degrowth I've talked about billionaires - about how economic growth is actually fueling increases in rich people's yacht money , not the basic needs of ordinary people, and about how our social fragmentation and the control of our media by similarly rich people means we are largely unaware of this fact and frightened to challenge the status quo for fear of losing our precarious security.  In this post I'd like to talk in a bit more detail about our billionaire problem. I consider myself wealthy.  After over four decades of professional careers and now in our 60s, Lois and I are debt free, own the house we live in and have a healthy superannuation balance.  We can look forward to a secure, comfortable retirement.  We are better off than 80% of the world's population. Now, we have simple tastes, we don't need a vast amount of money to live on.  I understand that some people have more expensive hobbies than we do - they want to ...

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...

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...