Comment on a debate
The ongoing population debate is an important one, which I'm glad the paper is allowing to happen so fully. Many important ideas are leaping from it — like when Athena (goddess of wisdom) sprang directly from the mind of Zeus, so we can expect great consensual wisdom to eventually arrive.
I still say you can't lump the rich and the poor together in one tied bundle and say "You'll have to reduce consumption." There's a different scale to consumption involved. A poor person cannot waste as much as a rich one can because they can hardly buy the amounts of excess things necessary to create waste.
The distinction is necessarily the same for wealth and poverty, as for high and low consumption. There is always that scale of disadvantage which must be brought into an argument such as this and applied justly to attract support and credence as being in the right perspective.
Allen Myers asks over and over again what is a sustainable Australian population? Evans says: everyone consumes. These are cross-purposed questions/answers.
I survive on 110-130 bucks a week. Is that over consumptive? Rent $25. Food $52-$70, tobacco $21, petrol into town and back $15 per week, and the occasional second-hand or discount CD, tape or book. Electric bill every three months around $52, telephone bill $44 plus calls.
So do I qualify? Am I inaffluent enough to qualify? Christ only knows — but I specifically decided on doing that to become humbler, and thereby use less of earthly resources. I even chucked a job in to become overall less consumeristic.
However, something else: Why are the AESP castigating Australians in particular? I had felt there was something seriously wrong with their generalised argument, but couldn't quite put my finger on it until I read Gerry Harant's letter. Then I understood: the amount of resources going out of the country and not used by Australians at all.
So then, where or how, really, does Australian consumption stand? Who is consuming more — Australians, or the whole world? What is the right scale of measurement of Australian resource consumption per capita when it doesn't numerically qualify the extent that's exported?
So therefore: an Australian ESP means reducing consumption and affluence on a global scale, doesn't it? As a nation of 18 million we consume less overall, compared to the multi-number of millions that consume Australian products internationally, which might be billions, in the wide variety of different exports.
I appreciate Evans' suggestion of Australia showing the way — it would be good — but let it be also in human rights, and international ones.
So, practical again: to abandon affluence Australians would have to stop aping the US acme compulsion consumer society, which is the worst example we have on the whole planet to follow.
Stop buying, watching and sucking up to US films and stars and pop stars for a start. 95 per cent of films shown at the cinema and in the video shops in Australia are Yank ones. They teach us how to sheep-like follow and buy their insensible crap. Their consumeristic, highly wasteful attitude, not to mention their aggro, rubs off on us.
Next, don't buy into their wars — by refusal and protest. And only buy their books if they've got some intelligence. Resistance as I see it — which translates as reduction anyway — begins in renouncing economic imperialism — which comes to us care of your friendly American sanctions unlimited.
Therefore defy, boycott the gifted salesmanship of the profit engineers. Profit creates debt somewhere else. So reduction of debt begins in reduction of expenditure; and reduction is the big word that concerns us all anyway: green, working-class, left, AESP — all denizens of earth.
I'm pleased to see an emergence of red-green or green-red striped whatever politics. Because only in this way might it be possible to counter the orange-white atomic blast furnace of profit-fuelled crazy capitalism.
Lastly, this paper really gets me. It's the only paper I've ever come across that makes me feel at home; a true feeling of forum to it. The sole one that actually debates issues — betwixt journalists and people, with fair admissions in letters and articles from both. Could you always, where possible, write the organisation addresses? That is a terrific innovation.
Jack Lance
Kippenduff NSW