The government, the economy and the world
Little attention was paid to the WWF report the other day that underlined a somewhat significant aspect to our ordinary daily lives. James Leape who is the international director of WWF put it this way
“Most of us are propping up our current lifestyles, and our economic growth, by drawing - and increasingly overdrawing - on the ecological capital of other parts of the world - if our demands on the planet continue to increase at the same rate, by the mid-2030s we would need the equivalent of two planets to maintain our lifestyles.”
On the same day as the rather conservative WWF was pointing out the bleeding obvious, good ole Kev was addressing the Business Council of Australia. Dinner speeches these day are all about the economy, the REAL economy and Kev was up to it, delivering an apocalyptic message gilded with some confidence that the Oz economy will survive the twin traumas of excessive blood loss and declining usefulness. No doubt Kev would not be pleased by the Age’s headline story about a sudden collapse in big building projects in Melbourne’s CBD, but it does illustrate how quickly the crisis in capitalism is impacting the so-called real world.
Yet some people might start connecting some dots here. The WWF report is one of those dull boring bits of scientific analysis that academic people do to pass the day, it measures things and puts numbers into a computer and generates some models. All very dry, but frankly you can reason it out for yourself, the world is finite, we can only dig so much iron and oil out of the ground and there is only so much arable land in the world even if we do chop ever tree down. On the other hand somehow economies, which in the real world rely on things like food and steel and transport, are expected to just keep growing. By magic!
I doubt Mr K Rudd is stupid. He went to uni, he speaks more than one language and he ties his own shoelaces. So what’s going on when he tells the Business Council of Australia that the government’s actions to maintain the confidence in the banks are intended to avert consequences that might have “affected investment and consumption and ultimately our growth and employment.” No doubt he is aware of the WWF report, he employs people to watch the news and presumably they talk to him every now and then.
It might seem like a good thing to keep up confidences in these trying times, however there is a problem that such confidences are build on faulty assumptions. Assumptions like unlimited natural resources with which we can continue our wasteful consumption and economic growth. You could say that Kev was really just affirming his governments commitment to the notion that it is government’s job to make sure people keep economy afloat by continuing to consume. All this talk of carbon trading is just for show and as for the broader issue of ecological credit, well that’s not even on the agenda.
Ultimately the government of the day is not an agent of the people despite the claim to contrary. At best they are our self appointed managers who are supposed to ensure that business conditions remain as favourable for the wealthy as is humanly possible. This means gobbling up the world’s resources and pretending it isn’t a problem, because in truth it isn’t a problem for the likes of the Business Council of Australia.