But the development of which we can all be extremely proud is community broadcasting. We lead the world in terms of number, diversity and quality of licensed community-controlled broadcasting stations. Australia is in the healthy situation of having more licensed community radio stations (358) than the number of commercial (274), ABC (65) and SBS (4) stations put together. Melbourne is the heartland for Australian community radio with nine (the most of any Australian city) well developed and supported stations. On the smell of the proverbial, community radio gives access to the airwaves to people who are otherwise denied it—young people, old people, Indigenous people, ethnic people and those interested in alternative views and non-mainstream music.

Community radio (and television) stations are licensed by the federal government when communities express a need for them. They can be geographic (70 per cent of community stations are in regional areas) or communities of interest. Some fine examples are: SYN-FM in Melbourne, constitutionally restricted to young people under twenty-six, which in one corker of a year trained 4000 young people in how to broadcast; JOY-FM, the only radio station in the world operated by and for the local gay and lesbian community; and Goolarri Media in Broome, active in media and music production and in providing training and employment opportunities for Aboriginal people in their community. In Melbourne, also think RRR, MBS, PBS and CR; think KND, ZZZ and RPH—all treasures.

Community stations are generally operated by volunteers; 23,000 people are currently actively involved in operating the 300 plus stations across the country. There are stations on Christmas Island (growing audience) in the west, Palm Island in the east, Thursday Island up north and Kangaroo Island down south—just about the four corners of the country—and everywhere in between. Most importantly, community broadcasting allows all those people to be part of decision making and ownership of stations—but maybe not for much longer. Community broadcasting is hot national infrastructure with a racy past but a doubtful future.

A Short History
A look at the history of community broadcasting in Australia highlights its purpose and value. Community broadcasting, catering to expressed needs of sections of the Australian population, has developed as a complement to the other two significant broadcasting sectors in the country. What is unique about Australian broadcasting is that all three major sectors—commercial, government-funded (ABC, SBS) and community—are large, well-developed and well-supported. The United Kingdom has only recently started licensing community stations, so has only two mature broadcasting sectors.

Broadcasting in Australia developed rapidly from 1923, when the first four radio stations were licensed. It developed into a hybrid of models in the United Kingdom, where all broadcasting was government-owned (commercial radio did not start in there until the 1970s) and the United States, where there are no government-funded radio stations.

Government funded radio started in Australia when it became apparent that the private sector would not service regional areas as there was no ‘business case’ for doing so. In 1927, a Royal Commission into broadcasting directed the Post Master General (PMG) to take control of a number of radio stations, with a brief from government to extend radio into country areas. The PMG contracted the Australian Broadcasting Company to make programs for the service. In 1932 the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC) was established, funded by licence fees. Forty years later another development in Australian electronic media occurred when established services again failed to meet the needs of a section—or rather, many sections of the Australian community.

The origins of community broadcasting—or ‘public’ broadcasting as it was known until the ABC appropriated that term in the 1990s—is not traceable to any one single movement. During the 1960s and 1970s four distinct and unrelated threads of political, cultural and social movement, and then two more, came together to weave the fabric of community broadcasting in Australia. Educators, protestors, migrants and, oddly, classical music enthusiasts made strange bedfellows, stranger studio mates. Not long after the start of community broadcasting, Indigenous communities and people who could not use print media also wanted access to the airwaves.

The first identifiable group seeking access to broadcasting was classical music enthusiasts. Peaceful, relaxed and pensive, you might think—hardly the types to storm the barricades of the broadcasting regulators. But not so. In 1961, when the government closed down experimental FM stations, allocating the spectrum to television, disappointed classical music fans formed the Listener’s Society of NSW and the Music Broadcasting Society of Victoria. Their objective was to establish FM radio stations to play fine music.

Educators made up the second group, with some universities lobbying for licences to broadcast educational material on air. They had witnessed the Open Universities in the United Kingdom and the educational stations in the United States. In 1961, the University of NSW was given a licence to broadcast lectures over a non-broadcast frequency.

The third prong of the movement came from ethnic communities. In the wake of post-war migration, the media lagged far behind in meeting the needs of Australians whose first language was not English. As a result of migration, the country’s population had almost doubled in twenty years.

Al Grassby, later a Minister in the Whitlam Government, worked in agriculture in southern NSW in the 1950s. Up to 60 per cent of local people had a first language other than English. Grassby started broadcasting European music on 2RG in Griffith, interspersed with segments in Italian for local farmers on topics like ‘How to spray your earth mites’. By the 1970s, Grassby was Minister for Immigration and started a fledgling SBS through small stations in Sydney and Melbourne. The burgeoning political power of migrants ensured that ethnic broadcasting burst out around the country. Brisbane hosted the first full-time ethnic community radio station, 4EB, in the late 1970s. There are now hundreds of languages spoken on community stations around the country, many catering to recent arrivals such as those from the Horn of Africa and the Middle East.

The fourth group seeking access to the media was the politically active ‘Vietnam generation’. The desire for a more open media was exemplified by the draft resistors and their supporters in Melbourne and Sydney who ran pirate broadcasts. In Brisbane Springbok rugby tour demonstrations in 1971 and their coverage by the mainstream media led students to form their own radio station (ultimately 4ZZZ). As the wave of anti-Vietnam War moratorium marches spread throughout the country, in 1971 students at two Melbourne universities were considering their response to the government’s crackdown on civil liberties and the right to protest. The answer was two pirate radio stations. But these were a token gesture with limited transmission range. Monash University hosted 3PR People’s Radio and Melbourne University had 3DR, Draft Resistor’s radio. Several people involved with the Melbourne stations, particularly those with technical expertise, joined forces to start the Community Radio Federation (CRF) in 1974.

Each of these four groups had one thing in common. They challenged how broadcasting operated in Australia. They wanted control of the airwaves and they lobbied for it, leading to the establishment of the third tier of broadcasting in Australia.

The history of community broadcasting in Australia parallels the changing face of the country’s social, political and cultural environment, changes which began in the sixties and achieved a critical momentum over the next two decades.

Historically, Indigenous communities were badly served by and portrayed in the media. Indigenous aspirations were not part of the agenda of mainstream media. The importance of maintaining Indigenous languages and cultures only emerged as a policy objective in the 1980s.

In 1980, Australia’s first Aboriginal owned and controlled radio station, the Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association’s (CAAMA’s) 8KIN, started broadcasting, producing videos and making music clips. Not long after, some Indigenous communities in remote Australia started to adapt low-cost video, videoconferencing and radio services to suit their needs, and some, such as those at Yuendumu and Ernabella, started pirate community television stations.

With a Labor Government, elected in 1983, talking self-determination in Aboriginal policy making, and with bureaucrats like Charles Perkins and Eric Willmot driving the process, Indigenous communities were to officially gain control of media at a local level through the Broadcasting for Remote Aboriginal Communities Scheme (BRACS). With the launch of Australia’s first domestic satellite in 1985, remote Indigenous communities had access to telecommunications, broadcast television and radio for the first time. The launch was seen as both a potential advance for Indigenous communications and a threat to the maintenance of an already diminished language and culture.

When the BRACS project was first funded in 1987, as a Bicentennial gift to Indigenous communities, these communities had the potential to use media to sustain their culture for the first time. BRACS gave communities the ability to produce their own video and radio programs and re-broadcast or ‘embed’ this material in mainstream programming by turning off main signals and transmitting their own programs locally.

Then came the blindfellas. Radio that meets the information needs of people with a print disability dates back almost as far as community radio itself. From 1975 a community group in Melbourne presented a regular weekly news and information program on 3CR. Members were aware of the radio reading services then developing in the United States. In 1978, at Bathurst’s community radio 2MCE, station manager John Martin felt that reading the local newspaper on the radio would provide a service to people who could not access print media—not just vision impaired people, but others with literacy problems and those who could not physically handle books and newspapers. One of a young Andrew Denton’s first media experiences was reading out local newspapers on-air at 2MCE. ‘Andrew’s description of the frocks (from the social pages) was magnificent’, Martin has said.

Overtures were made to the minister for post and telecommunications for access to the broadcasting spectrum for the provision of reading services —to become known as Radio for the Print Handicapped. In July 1978 the minister permitted ‘The establishment of a special radio communications service for the blind and other people with reading difficulties’.

During the 1960s and 1970s changes in political, social and cultural horizons led to changes in the media landscape. The six very different groups who pressured government for access to and control over the airwaves were joined by others and twelve initial stations multiplied as a response to communities expressing a need for and a capability to operate their own radio and television stations.

The ABC
When community needs have become apparent, as they did in the early seventies, Labor governments have tended to expand government services. 2JJ started when young people demanded a different approach to music than the American Top 40. When classical music enthusiasts became strident about hearing Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert on radio, the government responded with ABC Classic FM. When ethnic communities demanded more than English language programs, the government initiated what has become SBS.

Despite the degree to which our national broadcasters are cherished by people who value independent media, they are not enough. Despite the degree to which they are resourced, they cannot cover the diverse interests that have developed in this old and new country. And despite the high quality of service, they are undeniably national broadcasters; government broadcasters: no matter how much they try to dress themselves up as ‘local’ or ‘community’ radio, they are not of the community.

Recently, the ABC received a massive injection of funding to provide what they described as ‘town square’ services—community hubs where people can contribute content. But Australians generally won’t fall for that. Despite the ABC calling itself ‘local radio’, people in Cairns know when the overnight program on ‘their’ local radio is coming from Melbourne. Without ten times the funding, the ABC just cannot be local enough.

The ABC is a wonderful service, but despite its intentions, it cannot cover all media bases in this country. It should stop acting like it can and stop trying to shut out other media from public events. National broadcasters and commercial radio can’t serve the needs of remote Aboriginal communities. It can’t serve specialist music lovers. Will the ABC provide a service as basic as reading newspapers? How many people interested in working in the media do the ABC or commercial radio train each year? The number is a lot closer to zero than the hundreds trained by community broadcasting.

The Achievements
Today a significant proportion of the Australia population listen to community radio. McNair Ingenuity Research figures found in 2008 that 57 per cent of Australians over fifteen—9.5 million people—listen to community radio every month, an increase of 10 per cent since 2006. Qualitative research showed that people like community broadcasting for local news, for offering the ability to connect or create communities and for more accurately representing our social and cultural diversity than other media.

The achievements of community broadcasting are many. Community broadcasters pioneered FM technology when no one else wanted to touch it. They have pioneered new programming formats supporting local musicians, alternative news, current affairs and information, programs in languages other than English and positive stories about Indigenous culture. Community radio, more than the ABC, provides strong support for Australian music. Musicians like Paul Kelly, John Butler, The Saints, Boys Next Door, to name a few, received their first airplay on stations like RTR in Perth, DDD in Adelaide, Edge FM in Hobart, ZZZ in Brisbane and SER in Sydney. Almost 100 Remote Indigenous Broadcasting Stations (the old BRACS) are operating in small communities in outback Australia. These are communities where Aboriginal people want to sustain their culture, language and sense of community.

The Challenges
For all the young people trained by SYN-FM, for all the Indigenous issues covered by the twenty-six full-time Aboriginal radio stations across the country, for all the thousands of hours of non-English programming broadcast every week in over one hundred stations across Australia and for the hundreds of local musicians supported by their local community radio stations, the sector is at a crossroads.

The immediate challenge for community broadcasting is the proliferation of platforms on which people can express themselves. The days are gone when licences issued to community stations were beacons around which people rallied in a heavily regulated media landscape. The internet can deliver New York and New Delhi for your listening pleasure. How do community broadcasters sustain engagement with their communities in the face of this deluge? If massive media empires like Fairfax and News Limited can’t work out how to maintain readership of their daily newspapers, what hope have community radio stations?

Community broadcasting has developed strategies to address these challenges. By returning to its origins, the days when a microphone, turntable and transmitter and a bit of training could turn enthusiasts into media players, community broadcasting can offer people who believe in independent media, social justice and serving their own communities, pathways to digital literacy and digital economies. The community sector has developed a vision that re-invigorates the community broadcasting role in local communities by enabling them to leverage the rollout of digital technology. Community stations can provide the facilities, training and infrastructure for people who support their ideals to connect with digital media. A level of initial funding support is needed to establish this vision.

All politicians in the upcoming election campaign will be asked to support infrastructure development at community stations around the country to enable local communities to better develop new and engaging local programming. This will be achieved through the provision of digital production facilities and digital media training for thousands of volunteers. The outcome will be a 25 per cent increase in volunteer participation, a doubling to 2000 of the number of jobs in the sector, and a huge increase in local program making.

This technology-based community connecting will echo the innovation and energy that characterised the early days of community broadcasting. As the sector has matured, so has its aspirations and there’s little doubt community broadcasters are at their best when being creative, innovative and providing real alternatives to mainstream media.

The other challenge is the digital platform—costly beyond any community station’s budget and with too few listeners to generate any income. The government legislated for community stations to be hosted by commercial radio on the new digital transmissions infrastructure in 2007. The federal government also hamstrung community radio’s future on the new digital radio platform by reducing its relative broadcast power.

Community broadcasting has lost parity of spectrum—for the first time in its history. That is, community stations are no longer being offered the same licence conditions as commercial or government-funded stations. Whereas on the analogue spectrum (AM and FM) community stations have the same conditions as commercials and government-funded stations—the same allowable transmission power and the same transmission areas—the government is only allowing community stations a quarter of the spectrum offered the other sectors on the new digital transmission platform.

Digital radio transmission has enough challenges for all players—commercial stations are yet to establish a business case and the internet is flooding listeners with stations from across the planet—without the government putting community broadcasters a mile behind the starting line by reducing its access to spectrum. Community broadcasters are least equipped to handle the steep rise in costs associated with generating new program streams on new technology.

Just as community radio stations in the capital cities of the mainland states take the giant and unknown leap into digital transmission, they are effectively being chopped off at the knees. This federal government and its predecessor have taken active measures to diminish and erode more than forty years of development of Australian community broadcasting by over 100,000 volunteers.

Why would governments want to destroy community broadcasting? Is it by simple neglect and lack of knowledge of the many benefits brought by the sector to the millions of Australians who listen to it? Or is it by design, and what could that be? Either case is unfathomable. For community broadcasting, the next couple of years will determine whether or not the decades of development are going to be squandered.

Author Bio
David Melzer was living in the Otways in western Victoria when he became enthusiastic about what was then called public broadcasting. He first volunteered at 3YYR in Geelong in 1988; later he was employed as part-time manager. He went on to manage 3ZZZ in Melbourne—surviving the politics of a station that broadcasts in sixty-five languages. He and his family then schlepped to Fitzroy Crossing in Western Australia’s Kimberley region, where the ABC employed him to work with the local Aboriginal board to establish an independent station. He spent ten years back in Melbourne managing 3MBS, with a stint once again in the Kimberley, managing the ABC station in Broome. He has spent many satisfying hours volunteering at community stations, including 3CR, 3RRR, 3PBS and 3YYR. He is presently Acting CBOnline Manager, Community Broadcasting Association of Australia.

Relevant websites and sources

Australian Communication Media Authority

McNair Ingenuity Research

Michael Meadows, Susan Forde, Jacqui Ewart and Kerrie Foxwell, Community Media Matters: An Audience Study of the Australian Community Broadcasting Sector (Griffith University, Brisbane, 2007), available for free download

Craig Liddell, History of Community Broadcasting, CBOnline

Bridget Griffen-Foley, Changing Stations: The Story of Australian Commercial Radio / UNSW Press, Sydney, 2009.

RPH Australia

Community Broadcasting Association of Australia

In the last section of the book, entitled ‘Climate Change: The Urgent Challenge’, essays by Ian Lowe and Guy Pearse do begin to address growth, limits to growth or the particular modes of consumption and production of energy resources that lead to atmospheric and climate degradation. Yet even there, the particular sources of today’s unprecedented reconstitution of production together with its vast expansion of globalising processes are not directly related to climate change. The way of living that produces climate change is still taken to be another variant of the capitalist process. The possibility that this way of living may only be one aspect of a far more deep-seated transformation is not entertained.

Is the absence of a sufficiently developed theoretical framework that can begin to address the actual sources of the new found conjunction of the more abstracted technosciences with capital a source of this failure?

Is the challenge this presents to what we take to be the foundations of our being the actual source of the denial and passivity of our response to the prospect of environmental disaster?

The actual response to changing circumstances among the remaining contributors to this volume is a slewing away from any line of enquiry which considers more basic issues. Instead they offer a focus on the global financial crisis and the way in which the discrediting of ‘market fundamentalism’ and the excessive greed and individualism integral with the neo-liberal ideology opens the way for a return to a social democratic polity. Even given that redirection to the active regulation of capital, there is an astonishing absence of any explicit discussion of just how more favourable conditions for tackling climate change might prevail within a social democratic order. Perhaps one should assume that Manne, McKnight, Rudd or Quiggin simply take this for granted. As if in backhanded confirmation of his own ethical assumptions, Robert Manne deplores ‘the destructive role played by neo-liberalism in inhibiting an effective response to climate change’.

While the new post-capitalist conjunctionof capitalism with the technosciencesmay be seen as radically deepening a climate crisis, there is little reason to believe that a simple renewal of social democratic concern for the common good can provide an effective answer. This is by no means to dismiss the genuine significance of that concern. Rather it is to suggest that a social democratic polity is not, by itself, a likely source of the necessary level of resolve.

One main reason for that conclusion is that the history of the ethical resolve to democratically regulate capitalism ‘from within’ is one of failure. As a system it both out-produced and made its own limited ideological contribution to the self-destruction of the revolutionary socialist alternative. Social democracy, at least in its beginnings, was the parliamentary path to much the same concern for the common good as revolutionaries pursued: that of ending capitalism. Following the Great Depression of the 1930s, social democracy retained its name but changed its objective. The Keynesian answer to the capitalist cycle of growth and collapse was not to reject capitalism but to regulate it. Finally, the neo-liberal period of unprecedented growth produced the certitude that no further crisis could eventuate  open-ended growth and the prescriptions of supply-side economics were held to provide a final solution. Nevertheless the crash occurred and any effective answer must surely move beyond ‘more of the same’: a return to social democracy.

A democratic answer now may be slow in the making, but first and foremost it must generate a practical response that begins to move beyond the far too limited response of regulating capital. That practical engagement depends first of all upon renewed movement among those same intellectually related groupings who have been drawn into a conjunction with capital. Would anyone deny that their engagement and support has been a necessary condition for the surge of productivity and the individualist enchantments that have defined the recent period of neo-liberal ascendancy?

The practical movement to which I am referring is grounded in a relatively basic, as if spontaneously given, form of social interchange. It expresses a sensibility which begins to become more explicit in many contexts: in politics most readily seen in the Green movement. It is practical first of all in the sense that seemingly spontaneous acts are often experienced as if they do not have conscious intent. They appear to be grounded in a taken-for-granted sense of the relative permanence of our being in its relation to the natural world. That sense of permanence can readily feed into a rejection of changes that undermine our basic sense of being. It can begin to prompt an alternative to the mainstream impetus to half-blindly enter a process of transformation that introduces a break in the continuity of the human condition.

Given its intellectually related formation, the challenge to continuity presented by the technosciences can more readily ground a reflective awareness among those who more actively enter the practice of reconstitution: those same intellectually related groupings which, for the present, are in thrall to capitalist ‘growth’. Among them some begin to articulate a response that recognises that the significance of growth, of progress as well, if pursued blindly in the name of individualised freedom, begins to pass beyond the limits of what most people still take to be the relative permanence of the human condition. Set now within the conjunction of a capitalism and a relation to reality which breaks with these still prevailing assumptions of relative permanence, a reconstitutive practice can work towards a different order of being.

That particular sense of the natural order of being has been ‘contained’, as it were, even for millennia. Throughout the history of class societies the more abstracted powers of the intellectually related practices have elaborated interpretations of ultimate meanings which often legitimated domination by those whose privileges depend upon the labour of others.

Interpretation has been the primary activity of intellectuals; that is, until the intellectually related practices also began to play a major role in the reconstruction of labour as such. First, that is, in its rationalised mechanisation under industrial capitalism and then in the actuality of the transformational break mediated by the reconstitutive practices of the technosciences.

* * *

There is no space in this short comment to cover ground already traversed in earlier articles in Arena Magazine concerning the distinctive form of life of the intellectually related grouping. However, it is of some interest to note that, in some implicit register, the project of social democratic renewal may itself be displaying hints of a break from the limitations of its own commitment to capitalist continuity.

In their introduction to this volume, editors Manne and McKnight join Rudd and several other contributors in their over-endorsement of the role of ideas, of political ideologies especially, in the formation of social realities. The reconstitutive transformation we are facing now cuts deeper than ‘ideas’ alone can encompass. At least at the level of apprehension, Rudd himself suggests a certain discomfort with the strictures of the continuity which his own ideology imposes. Listen to the portentous ring of his opening passage as reprinted here, following its first publication in the recently declared social democratic organ The Monthly!

From time to time in human history there occur events of truly seismic significance, events that mark a turning point between one epoch and the next, when one orthodoxy is overthrown and another takes its place.

This is the language of discontinuity, not that of regulating yet one more convulsion within capitalism, or even one more reversion to well-intentioned attempts to reform or regulate it in the name of the common good.

So, by way of an endnote, are we actually saying Goodbye to All That?
The history of this title hardly encourages optimism.

Only a few among the present generation would recognise that these words previously served as the title chosen by the English poet Robert Graves as he worked towards personal regeneration following the immersion of his own generation in the slaughterhouse of World War I. At least in an historical sense it was a distinctly temporary departure. It was no more than an au revoir to All That. Maynard Keynes recognised that the Treaty of Versailles, which marked the end of the war, also sowed the seeds for the renewal of conflict in the conflagration which commenced in 1939.

That war ended in 1945 at Hiroshima in an event which, as mediated by intellectual practices, reconstituted war making. It replaced the mechanised conflict of armed men by deploying the product of a physics laboratory. Was it also of truly seismic significance—a ‘turning point between one epoch and the next’, of far more general significance than even this particular event of nuclear war could encompass? Was it a portent of a shift towards the possibility of a reconstituted reality? That is, a reality in which nuclear power is only conceivable as integral with that more abstracted mode of engagement typifying the intellectually practices.

The front cover of Goodbye to All That? symbolises the great financial crash of neo-liberal capitalism by depicting a jet aircraft standing on its nose while displaying only the slightest denting. It certainly looks as if it could fly again!

At least in the immediate sense nothing said about the limitations of this collection of essays should deflect recognition of the reality that no sudden break from post-capitalism is possible. The post-capitalist process has now so worked its way through every institution that even the institutions of intellectual formation have lost much of their once quasi-independent status. Drawn into the role of direct support to the powers, their instrumentally rational expression in the technosciences becomes the main source of a post-human trajectory. Within that trajectory climate change may be seen again as only one among its potential consequences for the human condition.

If ‘some rough beast now slouches towards Bethlehem’ its present course can be redirected. In a major degree that prospect depends on an enhanced understanding among the intellectually related groupings. Their distinctive and more abstracted mode of engagement with reality co-exists with their openness to that same spontaneous sense of erosion of their own basic humanity that affects their peers. For them, most radically, it also allows a critical reflection upon the present dominant trajectory. That power of reflection above all requires them to form a new and far more active constituency within a ‘social democracy’ which helps to draw its now shortsighted forerunner into the practice of actually constituting a more viable way of living. In their distinctiveness they must stand up more vigorously than ever before; in the name of an enlarged sense of the common good, they must break the bonds of dedicated service to the existing powers.

The House Standing Committee on Family, Community, Housing and Youth’s Inquiry into Homelessness Legislation reported in November that a 17 per cent increase in family homelessness and a 10 per cent increase in adult homelessness between the 2001 and 2006 censuses reflect issues associated with a decline in affordable housing and the private rental market. The definition of homelessness in the Supported Accommodation Assistance Act includes people who are at risk of eviction because their house or flat is too expensive. With 22.5 per cent of Australian households in housing stress (spending more than 30 per cent of their household income on housing and household debt) in 2005–06, and household debt increasing from $795 billion in June 2006 (RBA) to around $1.1 trillion in September 2008 (ABS), it seems that a growing number of people may fall under this definition. The number of Australians at risk of homelessness may number in the millions rather than the official figure of 105,000.

Now the homelessness sector is failing significantly to meet the increasing demand placed on it. The Salvation Army’s Crisis Housing Service says that it is seeing increasing numbers of middle class people who need crisis accommodation. Wesley Homelessness Services says that the Transitional Housing system is so clogged that people must stay in crisis accommodation in motels for months before they can move to transitional housing and there is simply nowhere for many people to go except back to the streets or horrendous boarding houses.

Figures only give us a partial picture. When people fall into homelessness they can approach a homelessness service. If they are a family and the service has funds, they may be placed in a motel. Anyone who saw the confronting Four Corners program ‘Last Chance Motel’ will understand the nightmare this presents for families: living in one room together, unable to cook, to have privacy, nowhere for the kids to play. So to be faced with the prospect of living this way for months at a time is a recipe for despair. This is now the reality for the homeless who are lucky enough to get placed. Wesley Homelessness Services sees 350–400 clients per month, placing twelve in transitional housing in 2009. There is a real problem.

Under the NRAS, the Commonwealth Government has pledged funds to support the development of 3000 dwellings in Victoria. The NRAS offers an annual National Rental Incentive of $6000 per dwelling per year refundable tax offset or payment and the State or Territory Government Incentive of $2000 per dwelling per year in direct or in kind financial support for a period of ten years. Participants include private land developers, real estate agents, non-profit organisations and local government, who will receive these payments in return for supplying dwellings to be rented at least 20 per cent below the market rate to eligible low and moderate income households.

Tenants who are eligible for the Scheme are those who qualify for rent assistance because they receive income support payments or Family Tax Benefit Part A, regardless of their housing affordability situation. The maximum incomes of those eligible range from $39,000 for a single age pensioner to $80,000 for a working family with three children under twelve. The dwellings will be managed by a Tenancy Manager, which would include private landlords and real estate agents. They will be subject to reporting requirements in relation to tenancy selection and management and continuing compliance.

Unfortunately according to the Victorian government Office of Housing these funds would need to be provided for ten consecutive years to clear the public housing waiting list. In Victoria the waiting list grows ever longer, increasing from 34,500 families in 2006 to more 39,000 and somewhere around 200,000 Australia-wide. The inadequacy of the scheme is hidden behind rhetoric which draws on the nation-building of the past—home ownership, the Australian Dream—but the times have changed. Today governments are too much in league with business to ever be able to provide housing as a social need rather than a commodity.

In a speech last year RBA Governor Glenn Stevens explained the way that speculation sets the price of housing rather than need. He argued that rents were rising at a rate higher than the CPI because there was strong demand for rental accommodation, and rents as a yield to the supplier had been unusually low. Earlier in the decade, Stevens explained, housing prices were increasing fast and capital gains returns were good, thus rents remained low. As housing price increases slowed, however, so did capital gains, so investors needed to increase returns. They did this by raising rents quickly. (Just prior to this, the Real Estate Institute and the Property Council of Australia conducted a media campaign ‘predicting’ large rent rises.)

We have a housing system where either rents need to be high or prices need to be increasing for stakeholders (that is developers, real estate agents and investors) to be satisfied, resulting, not surprisingly, in unaffordable housing. By its own logic this system will never deliver sufficient affordable housing for everyone.

Stevens went on to argue that higher interest rates will eventually slow demand, and in due course it will get more difficult to raise prices. This does not seem to have been born out over the last twelve to eighteen months. In the June 2009 quarter, house prices rose 4.2 per cent and, in the September quarter, the housing affordability index dropped 3.3 per cent. The sting in the tail is that higher interest rates mean greater housing stress and increases in homelessness.

The Rudd government’s feted stimulus package with its raft of housing grants for first home buyers and tax concessions has kept housing prices high, according to Professor Julian Disney. Real Estate Institute of Australia president David Airey announced that prices are rising because the number of first home buyers has increased from 15 per cent of all new home loans to 27 per cent, which has led to competition with investors for properties. Speculators, of course, like a bit of healthy competition. It keeps the market ‘buoyant’.

If the purpose of the NRAS is to bring down the price of housing, this will undermine the housing market which is based on attracting investors and developers into the market to make a short-term profit. These stakeholders have an interest in ensuring housing prices remain as high as possible. The paradox is that to attract private investment to build more houses to maintain supply, we need high house prices and high rents. This pushes everyone on a normal income out of the market, and creates more homelessness and housing stress. The only way that housing can be made more affordable is if the government, that is the taxpayer, foots the bill for the profits of developers, real estate agents and investors.

Other criticisms are made of the NRAS which further illustrate the problem of the public–private approach of Rudd’s housing policies. For one, ACOSS has grave concerns that the proposed system of valuations raises the potential for manipulation or inconsistency. There is a high likelihood that real estate agents and speculators will increase their rents on NRAS properties to accommodate the subsidies, thus undermining the purpose of the scheme. ACOSS suggests that market rents should be set by reference to area median rents. But if rents are already inflated and rising as a result of market mechanisms—read speculation—this will do very little. The purpose of the housing market is profit and speculation, not the provision of social services.

Further, the NRAS subsidy will increase annually in line with the rent component of the CPI. Given the expectation of continued rent increases, predicted in January this year as between 5 and 7 per cent by Australian Property Monitors, the level of assistance to developers provided by government increases continuously. The quantity of government money being gobbled up by voracious developers will mushroom out of control.

Another problem with the NRAS is that it will probably not assist as many people out of housing stress as is being claimed. Dr Rachel Ong and Professor Gavin Wood from the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI) have analysed the potential impact of the NRAS. They found that 11,512 households of 50,000 randomly selected eligible households were above the 30 per cent benchmark (30 per cent of household income being spent on housing and household debt). Of these, only 4,614 (40 per cent) would be brought below the 30 per cent benchmark after their rent was reduced by 20 per cent.

This situation worsens when looking at the poorest 20 per cent of households, where rates of housing stress are extremely high at 54 per cent of household income. The NRAS lowers average net housing costs to 34 per cent of income for these households. Barely one in four of the poorest households would be actually lifted out of housing stress. The NRAS is less effective in reducing rates of housing stress because the net housing costs of the poorest 20 per cent of NRAS eligible tenants are more likely to be markedly above the 30 per cent affordability threshold. AHURI has recommended that targeting the NRAS to lower-income households, rather than a random allocation to rent assistance-eligible households, would improve the Scheme’s capacity to alleviate the housing affordability circumstances of a larger number of households. As we have seen with public housing waiting lists, restricting access ends up in a blow-out in demand. As the market fails more people, increasing numbers of people are forced to seek access to the Scheme.

Conveniently, the NRAS could also be a means of cutting government expenditure. AHURI points out that one of the ‘rarely mentioned’ potential policy benefits of the NRAS is that it could create savings in rent assistance expenditure. Rent assistance payment rules could see some reductions in the amount paid to NRAS tenants. AHURI’s modelling estimates that rent assistance payments could be reduced by $21 million or 5 per cent. Unfortunately for the government, these ‘savings are somewhat smaller than might have been anticipated’ because 37 per cent of rent assistance recipients eligible for the NRAS continue to receive the same amount of rent assistance after the rent discount. ACOSS points out that if some tenants are ineligible for rent assistance or receive reduced payments they may be worse off under the NRAS. Again, this suggests that such public–private arrangements really do very little for creating affordable housing for people on low incomes.

Security of tenure remains an issue under the scheme. According to ACOSS, the NRAS does not provide tenants with longer leases or additional rights beyond those required by relevant landlord and tenant legislation. Dwellings occupied by very disadvantaged or high-needs households are more likely to need support to sustain their tenancies. Without that support, even if low-income and high needs households are given priority access to housing, they may be unable to sustain tenancies for extended periods. ACOSS raises doubts about the capacity of real estate agents to operate this type of housing. There is a real danger of these properties becoming hot spots for social problems and for the same people to continue to circulate through the homelessness system. Additionally, there is a genuine risk that, after ten years, private developers will simply sell off the stock and collect the capital gains, returning the housing stock to the open market and making a healthy profit.

A system where profit and speculation fix the supply and value of housing and where the government attempts to regulate this through indirect macroeconomic measures has resulted in housing that fewer and fewer people can afford to buy and rents that leave a large section of the population in housing stress and in danger of homelessness. People treat the housing market as a strange unpredictable beast, struggling to understand or calculate its next move. With increasing interest rates, many are now in danger of getting their heads bitten off. The government’s NRAS will do little to influence this monstrosity. In fact, I suspect, as with most PPPs, the government will simply end up paying out twice as much to private interests and the same people will continue to find themselves circulating through the merry-go-round of the housing system.

There are two basic ways of framing a resolution of relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. I will call them the ‘sacramental’ and the ‘pietistic’. In religious talk, sacramental paths to spiritual grace require a collective and ceremonial act. Pietistic ones are those of the individual in quiet communion with the divine.
Pietists stress a one-to-one relationship with the deity, unmediated by priestcraft or the collective witnessing of a symbolic sacrifice. Pietism is in some ways much more at home in an age of individualism than in ages of greater corporatism and communalism. The sacramental-sacrificial approach represents the reverse. It also goes back deep into Old World prehistory, to a time when animals and humans, not symbols, were sacrificed in human rituals.

That is about it, except for a few passing comments that do not add to this basic description. For Sutton, ‘sacramental’ is really a code for government-sponsored public programs paid for out of tax dollars, endless reports and posturing by politicians, all of which have failed dismally. In the second quotation above he has deviously added ‘sacrificial’, which is another category altogether and largely left alone. By contrast, ‘pietism’ acts as a catchword for private and personal ways of working in the world, outside the programs that seem to have failed. Why choose the terms sacramental and pietistic when collective and individual would have done perfectly well? Are they merely camouflage for criticisms of social democratic approaches and a championing of liberalism? Why do his criticisms of collective, government-sponsored projects sound like commentary by Miranda Devine or Andrew Bolt? Is not the ideology of the individual one of the worse aspects of colonialism itself? And what is the role of theology in debates over reconciliation?

In what follows I will try to answer these questions, although in the end I argue that Sutton has confused matters. What really is at issue is at best obscures by these terms: agency. Sacramentalism acts as a cover for one-directional agency, coming from the non-Indigenous and directed towards Indigenous people. By contrast, pietism conceals a pattern of mutual agency, consultation and joint decision-making. Yet Sutton has unwittingly raised another issue: the implicitly theological nature of many of the key ideas used in debates over reconciliation. Before I get to those matters, a few words on sacramentalism and pietism are in order.

Sacramentalism
First, the evil term: sacramentalism, which is a deeply Roman Catholic term. As one might expect in theology, fine distinctions bedevil any simple overview. But some patience is needed, since Sutton uses the term loosely, so much so that he badly misrepresents theology and confuses his own analysis (and his readers). Sutton claims that sacramentalism is collective and ceremonial, sacrificial and pre-historic.

He is mostly mistaken, for the word actually has two senses, neither of which suits his purpose. First, the word may refer to a ‘sacrament’, such as baptism or communion. The problem is that—strange as it may sound—the church has nothing to do with the effectiveness of a sacrament. Technically, a sacrament works through the act itself (ex opera operato). God transfers grace through the act and does not rely on any person, institution, state of mind or whatever. The act is sufficient; it is an objective act on God’s part. It is a little like the story of the Danish physicist, Niels Bohr, and the horseshoe. Bohr lay ill out on his farm; a friend called and noticed the horseshoe above the door to his room. ‘I thought you didn’t believe horseshoes made you well’, said the friend. Bohr replied, ‘I’m told it works even if you don’t believe in it’. Clearly Sutton does not mean this sense of sacramentalism, since that would mean the objective, disinterested act of, say, adequate healthcare, an apology or a treaty, would be enough. Out of the four ways Sutton describes sacramentalism—ceremonial, collective, sacrificial and pre-historical. Is the sacrament ceremonial? Yes. Is it collective, sacrificial and pre-historic? No.

Perhaps Sutton means the ‘sacramentals’ (to be distinguished from the ‘sacrament’). These are acts that convey God’s grace only through the intercession of the church (ex opere operantis ecclesiae). What kind of acts? Grace at meals, a blessing, a ring at marriage, a simply act of kindness and so on. There is no definitive list, for a sacramental is the process through which human activities are made holy, mediated by the church. Now we have a collective dimension, since a sacramental relies on the church. But it is not necessarily ceremonial (it may be, but is not necessarily so), sacrificial or pre-historic.

So the theological terms don’t actually fit Sutton’s definition of ‘sacramentalism’. Or rather, they have a partial fit, depending upon what element one chooses. What is really going on with Sutton’s use of the term? I would suggest that sacramentalism for Sutton is quite bad camouflage for social-democratic, hand-wringing, lefty approaches to Indigenous and non-Indigenous reconciliation. But then he includes in this collective mix state-sponsored programs, reports and legislation. All of which comes under the umbrella of a theological term that is less than useful.

Two final observations: Sutton plays into an old Protestant polemic with his use of sacramentalism, for the word is usually connected with Roman Catholic theology. A strange move this, since it harks back to the major issue of religious conflict in Australia back in the 1950s and earlier, namely the Protestant–Roman Catholic divide. Riots, debates, political allegiances, mutual suspicions, bans on marrying across the divide—these were part of the social and religious scenery at the time. It is hardly useful to resort to those differences once again.

Further, a pernicious subtext also appears with Sutton’s description of sacramentalism as sacrificial and pre-historic. He hints that it is pre-Christian, but there is a dangerous slippage to an image of Indigenous life before Europeans arrived. Does he want to suggest that before the arrival of Christianity and its theological terms, Indigenous people too were prehistoric, given to animal and human sacrifice? On the surface, of course not, but beneath the text the hint is there.

Pietism
The favoured term is pietism, which Sutton describes as a one-to-one relation with God, one undertaken by an individual in quiet communion, more suited to an age of individualism (our own?). No mediators here, no priests or church or state, just individuals doing the best they can. For Sutton this is the way forward for reconciliation, although he does need to replace God with another human being. All that is needed is a ‘personal moral adjustment’ (p. 203) to interpersonal and collaborative reconciliation between two persons. Sutton uses the examples of individual acts of private reconciliation, in which people get on in their day-to-day lives, and in which the non-Indigenous person becomes a vocal critic of racist state policies: Lancelot Threlkeld and Biraban in the 1820s–1840s, Ursula McConnel and Billy Mammus in the 1920–1930s, and Lloyd Warner and Mahkarolla in the 1920s.

Is pietism up to task? At one level it is. Pietism has a distinct history with complex threads, but it is clearly a very Germanic, Protestant (especially Lutheran) and relatively recent development dating from the late 17th century. Its central concern was a life of deep religious commitment, rooted in inner experience and manifested in outward acts or the ‘practice of piety’.

So far, so good, at least for Sutton’s purposes. The catch is that pietism was ultimately a collective movement with strong political overtones. It sought to revive the church from within rather than break away from it. Indeed, the main stream of pietism was warmly welcomed by pastors and theologians in the German Lutheran Church in the 18th and 19th centuries and quickly became seen as a way to renew religious life. It soon spread to other parts of the world whether Lutheran Protestantism was strong, especially Scandinavia, Greenland and North America.

For Sutton’s argument pietism is useful in some senses but not in others. Inner experience, the place of God in one’s heart, lives lived in quiet faithfulness, and the impetus for individual philanthropic activity—all these elements work quite well for Sutton’s purposes. But he ignores the other elements of pietism, such as the collective and institutional nature of mainstream pietism, its desire for reform within the institution and its tendency towards conservatism.

Once again, I suggest that Sutton’s dip into theology is less useful than he might think. Pietism doesn’t simply mean individual relations, for it is also a deeply collective theological practice. In this respect, the word becomes in Sutton’s hands a cover for the sort of liberalism championed by Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman, or their lesser followers in Australia like Andrew Bolt or Miranda Devine. Individual enterprise is the key, not collective approaches (which become totalitarian) or state intervention (the evil of ‘big government’).

Agency and Theology
Sutton’s use of the opposition between sacramentalism and pietism is in the end a caricature. By picking certain features and making them definitions of the whole, he has distorted both traditions, using them as poor camouflage for state-sponsored and individual solutions. However, I suggest that what lies behind Sutton’s argument is really the issue of agency. With sacramentalism he seems to mean agency from one quarter and moving in one direction: from non-Indigenous governments to Indigenous people. The former decides what is appropriate, depending more on the vagaries of electoral cycles, ideological positions, the power of lobby groups, and individual political careers. And then it acts, assuming it can fix all the problems with the latest program—the NT Intervention is the obvious recent example of this one-sided approach.

However, by pietism Sutton is pointing towards mutual agency, one that involves two or more people (I would add groups) who realise their own needs, shortcomings and limits, but above all the need to come to an understanding of one another and the need to act on that understanding. It takes little imagination to determine which approach is more desirable. The catch is that Sutton seems to think that this process is primarily an individual one, an argument that is ideological (in the bad sense) and hardly progressive.

My final question picks up another issue: the theological tenor of the reconciliation debate as a whole. Of course, a good of discussion has taken place on these matters within the progressive wings of the Christian churches, where debates and resolutions concerning reconciliation have been cast in explicitly theological senses. However Sutton, as a leading anthropologist, has done what the churches have not been able to do, since they so often remain closed circles: somewhat unwittingly, he has brought out and made public the underlying theological nature of the debate by invoking explicitly theological terms, even if he misses the mark in the specific terms he has chosen. In short, I would suggest that much of the terminology and mindset of reconciliation uses what may be called secularised theological ideas. Emptied of their theological content and refilled with political and social content, they still trail many theological assumptions behind them. For example, reconciliation itself is one such term (between God and human beings), as is the idea of guilt (collective or individual—an issue in the Howard years), and even covenant or treaty.

However, before we rush in to claim theological ideas for resolving the relations of Indigenous and non-Indigenous people, we need to investigate those terms carefully, especially since Christian theology came with European invasion, embodied in the person of Samuel Marsden who filled the role in the early colony of both clergyman and judge. The problem is that all of these key terms assume an unequal relationship, God on the one side and human beings on the other. Guilt is what one feels towards God for having disobeyed and sinned; reconciliation is for human beings alone, since we need to be reconciled to God; a covenant is made between unequal partners, one more powerful and the other less so. This imbalance often carries through to the secular uses of such terms.

So I would suggest that in the current debates we would do well to investigate the implicit theological assumptions of the key terms. Who is the more powerful one in the process of negotiating a treaty? Who is the guilty party? The NT Intervention shifts the guilt squarely onto Indigenous people, who then need to be ‘punished’ for their ‘sins’. But then those who oppose the intervention argue for the guilt of the colonisers, who then need to make amends. And is it possible to produce a process of reconciliation that either recognises the thereby seeks to negate the imbalance of power, or is it possible to come up with a reconciliation that removes such imbalance?

Apart from taking voyages by ship and cycling as far and as often as he can, Roland Boer is a writer and a critic based at the University of Newcastle. His intellectual background is in theology, political philosophy and Marxism and he is finishing a five volume series called The Criticism of Heaven and Earth (Brill and Haymarket).

Over the past year, I’ve been visiting communities in the Pacific islands, to ask people about their concerns on climate change and to find out what they’re doing to respond to the adverse effects of global warming.  From renewable energy initiatives and community-based vulnerability training to advocacy at international meetings, islanders are actively engaged in responding to the climate emergency.  But the enormity of the environmental impacts already locked into the ecosystem means that some people are debating whether they’ll need to leave their homelands.

You can’t help but focus on the human impacts when visiting low-lying islands in the Pacific.  The potential hazards are obvious on atolls like South Tarawa in Kiribati, a narrow strip of land 40 kilometres long but only 50–100 metres wide.With land areas just metres above sea-level, there is no retreat to higher ground from the ravages of storm surges and more intense cyclones.  Facing salt water inundation of agricultural land and fresh water supplies, these threats to coastal villages tend to concentrate the mind about the powers of the elements.  For low-lying atoll nations in Polynesia and Micronesia, the potential failure of the Copenhagen negotiations and delays in the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions will lead to forced displacement.  However, the current intergovernmental Pacific Islands Framework for Action on Climate Change (PIFACC), developed by the Forum member countries, makes no mention of displacement or migration.

In spite of this, some Pacific island governments like Kiribati, Tokelau and Niue are openly discussing issues of relocation and resettlement due to climate change.  In July 2007, a joint statement from Pacific environment ministers to the Forum Economic Ministers Meeting (FEMM) noted: ‘The potential for some Pacific islands to become uninhabitable due to climate change is a very real one.  Consequently some in our region have raised the issue of their citizens becoming environment refugees … Potential evacuation of island populations raises grave concerns over sovereign rights as well as the unthinkable possibility of entire cultures being damaged or obliterated’.

In August 2009, the outgoing chair of the Pacific Islands Forum, Premier of Niue Toke Talagi, says it may be time for the regional organisation to formally consider the issue of resettlement of people affected by climate change.  Speaking at the official opening of the 2009 Forum leaders meeting in Cairns, Talagi stated, ‘While all of us are affected,the situation for small island states is quite worrisome.  For them, choices such as resettlement must be considered seriously and I wonder whether the Forum is ready to commence formal discussion on the matter’.  Across the Pacific, there are a number of examples where people from low lying islands are considering relocation after being affected by extreme weather events, tectonic land shifts or climactic change that damages food security and water supply.

The case of the Carteret Islands in Bougainville is well known, where Ursula Rakova and the local NGO Tulele Peisa are assisting families to resettle on church-donated land on the main island of Buka.  There are similar problems looming in other outlying atoll communities, such as the Duke of York atolls (a number of small low-lying islands in St.George’s Channel near Rabaul in Papua New Guinea) or the Mortlock Islands in Chuuk State, Federated States of Micronesia.  In the Solomon Islands, tectonic plate movement and sea-level rise may lead to the displacement of people in outlying atolls like Ongtong Java (Lord Howe) or artificial islands like Walande in Malaita Province.

But what will resettlement involve? To hear about the experience of people who’ve already been forced from their homes, I visited the islands of Western Province in the Solomon Islands, which were hit by a tsunami in April 2007.  More than two years after the tsunami, many people on the main island of Gizo are reluctant to return coastal villages, and are still living in improvised housing up in the hills and mountain ridges.  At Titiana, one of the coastal villages on Gizo that bore the brunt of the tsunami, you can see the damage to community infrastructure.  Villager Orau Mote shows us where the school, church and pastor’s house were swept away—all that remains is a pile of concrete and steel rods.  Children in Titiana have been using large tents as their school rooms, provided by UNICEF and the Ministry of Education.  Titiana’s United Church pastor Motu Tarakabu told me that many residents are still traumatised by the disaster.  ‘Only about 20 per cent of residents have come back to the village after the destruction of the tsunami.  Many others have decided to stay away and remain up in the hills—they have fear in their heart.  People are still strong that they won’t come back to the village.’

Driving up the mountain ridges, you meet people from the coast who are refusing to resettle in their former homes and are building new houses to replace the tents and tarpaulins supplied after the disaster.  Some villagers are rebuilding on land provided by clan relatives, but many are squatting on government land alongside roads and logging tracks.  Orau Mote explains that a number of people of Micronesian heritage were relocated from the Gilbert  Islands to the British Solomon Islands Protectorate during the era of British colonial rule.  For these migrant communities, displaced again by the tsunami, there are new problems—people of Melanesian heritage often have clan and community links that can assist with resettlement.  For non-Indigenous communities, even those who have lived in the Solomon Islands for decades, it is harder to find access to land and resources.

The villagers have sought support from Oxfam and the Solomon Islands Red Cross for provision of water tanks, corrugated iron for water catchment and housing, and other support services.  But conditions remain difficult for the displaced communities, in spite of their resilience.  Sale Sam, who lives in Tiroduke camp up on the ridges above Gizo town, said, ‘Until Oxfam provided water tanks, we had to cart water for miles.  The hill tops are very exposed—the wind blows from all directions, unlike the village which was sheltered’.  Children from lower grades are attending classes up in the hills, but for senior grades the children need to trek down to the coastal villages each day, travelling kilometres to school.  On the coast, women used to go out on the reef at low tide to collect crabs, shellfish and other seafood—an important source of protein to add to food grown in village gardens.  But now it’s harder to easily access this vital food supply.  ‘Our diet is changing now that we live on the higher ground’, said one camp resident.  ‘The men still go down to the coast to go fishing, but we don’t go out so much on the reef.’

Although in his sixties, Sale Sam still works to support his daughter Jocelyn, who relies on a wheelchair for mobility as they make a new home.  For me, the resilience of this young woman, living in a wheel chair on a mountainside in the Solomon Islands, symbolises the larger challenge—what will displacement mean for the many thousands of people who face relocation in coming decades because of climate change?

Refugee or migrant?

In recent years, there is a growing academic literature on climate change, forced migration and conflict, but a mixed response to the concept of ‘climate refugees.’  The United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) argues that the term ‘environmental refugee’ is not appropriate, as the definition of refugee under the 1951 Refugee Convention and international humanitarian law has particular limits, covering people who are seeking protection because of a well-founded belief of persecution related to their religion, ethnicity, political beliefs etc.  Signatories to the 1951 Convention have specific legal responsibilities to people who reach their territory and claim asylum and protection, and refugee advocates are reluctant to see these state obligations watered down.

As noted in an October 2008 UNHCR briefing paper Climate change, natural disasters and human displacement: UNHCR has serious reservations with respect to the terminology and notion of  ‘environmental refugees’ or ‘climate refugees’.  These terms have no basis in international refugee law.  Furthermore, the majority of those who are commonly described as environmental refugees have not crossed an international border. Use of the terminology could potentially undermine the international legal regime for the protection of refugees and create confusion regarding the link between climate change, environmental degradation and migration.

Part of the problem is that key UN agencies responsible for displaced people have no formal mandate to address the climate issue.  UNHCR does not cover people who are displaced internally or seek refuge overseas because of environmental causes.  However, because of its practical experience in dealing with large scale forced movement of people, UNHCR staff and resources have increasingly been allocated to support operations in the aftermath of major natural disasters (such as the 2004 Asian tsunami, 2005 South Asian earthquake, 2006 floods in Somalia and 2008 floods in Burma, amongst others).

UNHCR is worried that its existing responsibility for refugees, asylum seekers and internally displaced people will be overwhelmed by the tens of millions of people potentially displaced by climate change.  However the numbers of people who meet the definition of ‘environmental refugee’ are also contested.  Studies have cited global figures ranging from 200 million (researcher Norman Myers) to over 1 billion potential refugees (a 2007 Christian Aid report).  But migration specialists have questioned these numbers, arguing that people affected by environmental impacts will not necessarily cross international borders to seek refuge.

An important 2008 study on forced migration and climate change from the Norwegian Refugee Council, Future floods of refugees, raises crucial qualifications on the term refugees:  There seems to be some fear in the developed countries that they, if not flooded literally, will most certainly be flooded by ‘climate refugees’.  From a forced migration perspective, the term is flawed for several reasons.  The term ‘climate refugees’ implies a mono-causality that one rarely finds in human reality.  No one factor, event or process, inevitably results in forced migration or conflict.  It is very likely that climate change impacts will contribute to an increase in forced migration.  Because one cannot completely isolate climate change as a cause however, it is difficult, if not impossible, to stipulate any numbers.  Importantly, the impacts depend not only on natural exposure, but also on the vulnerability and resilience of the areas and people, including capacities to adapt.  At best, we have ‘guesstimates’ about the possible form and scope of forced migration related to climate change.

Agency and choice

When they look at international rather than domestic impacts, climate advocacy groups in Australia and New Zealand have highlighted the issue of ‘Pacific climate refugees’ in their campaigning.  Many have argued that Australia and New Zealand, as the largest members of the Pacific Islands Forum, have particular responsibilities to their island neighbours.  But do people debating the issue ever ask those most affected what they really want? It may seem trite to see people in developing countries as actors rather than victims in this global emergency, yet much of the climate literature presents the Pacific’s only contribution to the climate debate as a loud ‘glug, glug, glug’ as the islands sink beneath the waves.

The issue of displacement raises a number of practical, emotional and political responses.  In interviews with people around the Pacific, different opinions came from the elderly compared to younger people who have more flexible skills for migration.  As one old man in the Solomon Islands told me, ‘They talk about us moving.  But we are tied to this land.  Will we take our cemeteries with us?  For we are nothing without our land and our ancestors’.  Community activist Annie Homasi from Tuvalu says the slow pace of action by large industrialised countries has the potential to cause uncertainty and even division in the local community, for people who are fearful they may have to relocate from their homes.

‘There’s quite a debate at home, maybe even a division, between the older generation and the young people.  Because they go overseas for school, the young ones say, “Yeah, we have to move”.  But the older ones say, “This is me, my identity and my heritage—I don’t want to go”.’

There are also complex cultural responses in the Pacific, with many religious people stating that God will not forsake them.  Some old people deny any long term threat from floods and rain, citing Biblical injunctions like God’s promise to Noah after the Flood: ‘neither will I ever again smite everything living as I have done’ (Genesis 8:21).

Most Pacific governments are still reluctant to focus resources on displacement issues, because they feel this will acknowledge defeat and undermine negotiating positions at the international level, as they press for stronger targets in the Copenhagen negotiations.

Government leaders from Kiribati and Tuvalu continue to stress that increased mitigation efforts by industrialised nations should be the focus of activity.  Speaking to the UN General Assembly in September 2008, Tuvalu Prime Minister Apisai Ielemia stated: We strongly believe that it is the political and moral responsibility of the world, particularly those who caused the problem, to save small islands and countries like Tuvalu from climate change, and ensure that we continue to live in our home islands with long-term security, cultural identity and fundamental human dignity.  Forcing us to leave our islands due to the inaction of those responsible is immoral, and cannot be used as quick fix solutions to the problem.

Open borders

Most of the discussion of climate displacement in Australia focuses on the need for Pacific Rim countries to change their migration policies.  But the language of the debate revives past fears about being ‘swamped’ by immigrants or asylum seekers.  Concerned activist groups stress Australia’s moral obligations to open its doors while conservatives respond with refrains that echo John Howard’s infamous dog whistle, ‘We will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come’.

Environmental groups have argued that Australia’s existing humanitarian immigration quotas should not be allocated to climate- related refugees and that an additional category is required.  The Migration (Climate Refugees) Amendment Bill 2007 advanced by the Australian Greens proposed the creation of a new visa class to formally recognise climate refugees, but lapsed without support from the major parties.  Other options could involve an expanded system of free migration as already exists between Australia and New Zealand, which enjoy shared migration rights of free access and permanent residence.  New Zealand’s Pacific Access Category, which provides migration quotas for citizens from Tuvalu, Kiribati, Fiji and Tonga, provides a de facto window for migration from climate affected countries, even though the New Zealand government has not explicitly recognised this as an option dedicated to people affected by environmental impacts.

In contrast, some Pacific leaders have suggested that it may be more appropriate to call for Australian and New Zealand financial support for the resettlement of people to other Pacific islands, to provide agricultural land and a suitable cultural context for displaced rural communities.  A key feature of environmental displacement in the Pacific is that much of the movement is internal, rather than across international boundaries, which places extra burdens on national government budgets as well as host communities who accept people from other areas.

But money is not enough.  A worrying feature of the debate about ‘climate refugees’ is that the bald predictions of forced relocation give little agency or choice to the affected communities.  Compared to a rapid natural disaster like an earthquake or tsunami, the ravages of climate change will mount over time, so people can be engaged in discussing the options.  We must  learn from the failure of past resettlement projects in developing countries, which comes not just from inadequate inputs of resources but from the inherent complexity of this as a social process involving human beings with hopes, dreams, aspirations and especially memories.  Relocation and resettlement is not simply a material infrastructure process—it is also a social process and there are a number of issues of co-operation, voice and justice that need to be addressed.  How do you promote resettlement with respect for equality and equity?

Moving to a new location within a country or across international borders is just the first step, and there are a host of political as well as technical dilemmas for communities on the move:

• Do displaced people have a say in the design and construction of new communities (for example, site selection that can provide water, arable land and other resources; culturally appropriate housing in terms of size, design, spacing and materials; settlement design to allow social and cultural interaction)?

• Are people being compensated for need or loss (that is what they need for survival or for what they feel they’ve lost)?

• Can you be compensated for intangibles, such as the grief of losing a home, or loss of political and cultural identity?

• Will the wealthy leave early, and leavebehind those with fewer resources?

• Will displaced people be better serviced by donors than existing members of the new host community, causing inter-communal tensions?

• Should old power relations and systems of chiefly rule be recreated, or are they tied to past relationships with the lost land?

This raises the core question of whether funding for adaptation and relocation will be allocated without the engagement and consent of affected communities.  Is planning for relocation being done with people or for people?  The potential for displacement because of climate change needs extensive community participation and debate, as noted by Betarim Rimon of the Kiribati Ministry of Environment: ‘In Kiribati, we are talking about relocation over time rather than forced displacement.  We think about relocation as a long, thought out, planned process.’  Kiribati President Anote Tong stressed this in his address to the opening session of the 2008 UN General Assembly: The relocation of 100,00o people of Kiribati, for example, cannot be done overnight.  It requires long term foward planning and the sooner we act, the less stressful and less painful it will be for all concerned.  This is why my Government has developed a long-term merit-based relocation strategy as an option for our people.  As leaders, it is out duty to the people we serve to prepare them for the worst-case scenario.

Australia refuses to plan ahead

In ‘Engaging our Pacific Neighbours on Climate Change’ – Australia’s latest climate policy statement issued in August 2009 – the Rudd government notes: ‘The potential for climate change to displace people is increasingly gaining international attention.  Australians are aware of and concerned about this issue.’  But we need more than awareness and concern.  Successive Australian governments have failed to engage in foward planning involving communities and governments around the region, to address the issues of displacement from a rights-based approach.

For many years, Pacific Rim governments have been reluctant to publicly address this issue.  In October 2006,the then Immigration Minister Amanda Vanstone stated that her Department had not made any plans to deal with people displaced by environmental or climate change, arguing, ‘There’s no such thing as a climate refugee’.  In November 2006, Secretary of the Department of Immigration Andrew Metcalfe told a Senate estimates hearing that the Australian Government had done no planning on how people movement caused by climate change in the Asia-Pacific region might affect Australia.  Since then, however, the debate has been flourishing amongst security analysts and strategic think tanks, which have focused on border protection and the potential for conflict overland and resources.  In 2007, the then Australian Federal Police Commissioner Mick Keelty sparked a political debate when he argued that climate change will turn border security in Australia’s biggest policing issue this century.  He stated that climate change could increase displacement and migration in our region.  ’In their millions, people could begin to look for new land and they will cross oceans and borders to do it.  Existing cultural tensions may be exacerbated as large numbers of people undertake forced migration.  The potential security issues are enormous and should not be understated.’

The securitisation of the debate has also been highlighted in Force 2030 – the May 2009 Defence White Paper issued by the Rudd government.  This is the first the climate issue has been discussed in a Defence White Paper, but it does not really reflect a shift in focus from ‘national security’ to ‘human security’.  In the paper, action on climate changed in reframed through the prism of border security:  The main effort against such developments will of coarse need to be undertaken through co-ordinated international climate change mitigation and economic assistance strategies…should these and other strategies fail to mitigate the strains relating to climate change and they exacerbate existing precursors for conflict, the Goverment would probably have to use the ADF as an instrument to deal with any threats inimical to our interests.

Will people displaced by global warming be redefined as ‘threats inimical to our interests’?  Social justice activists need to reframe the debate, to highlight the right to development for affected communities wherever they are, rather than just focussing on the need for mitigation rights.

]]> http://www.arena.org.au/2009/11/losing-paradise/feed/ 0 http://www.arena.org.au/2009/11/mondragon-worker-co-operation%e2%80%94-light-in-the-darkness-of-the-global-economic-crisis/ http://www.arena.org.au/2009/11/mondragon-worker-co-operation%e2%80%94-light-in-the-darkness-of-the-global-economic-crisis/#comments Sun, 01 Nov 2009 21:04:04 +0000 zoehatten http://www.arena.org.au/?p=807 The current economic crisis will not have been in vain if the world is reminded that grassroots initiative can triumph even over seemingly overwhelming adversity. In the aftermath of the devastation of the Basque region of Spain in the Spanish Civil War, a young priest, Don Jose Maria Arizmendiarrieta, himself only recently released from concentration camp confinement and narrowly spared imminent execution, was sent by his bishop in 1941 to the small steel industry town of Mondragon. It was here over the subsequent decade and a half that he, through painstaking pastoral care, grassroots organisation, community development, consciousness-raising and technical education, laid secure foundations for the great complex of some 260 worker-owned industrial, retail, agricultural, construction, service and support co-operatives and associated entities that the world now knows as the Mondragon Co-operative Corporation.

From a standing start in 1956, the MCC has grown to the point where by mid-2008 it was the seventh largest business group in Spain. Annual sales increased between 2006 and 2007 by 12.4 per cent to some $US20 billion, and overall employment by 24 per cent, from 83,601 to 103,731. Exports accounted for 56.9 per cent of industrial co-operative sales, and were up in value by 8.6 per cent. Mondragon co-operatives now own or joint venture some 114 local and overseas subsidiaries.

Like other businesses, the co-operatives now find themselves hard hit by the economic meltdown; their members are tightening their belts in a further exercise of the solidarity that has enabled them to weather previous major downturns and achieve new heights. For example, in 2008 worker-owners at the Fagor appliance co-operative elected to forego the additional four-weeks pay normally due to them over the Christmas period, and have subsequently cut their pay by 8 per cent. As the MCC’s Human Resources Director, Mikel Zabala, points out, ‘We are private companies that work in the same market as everybody else. We are exposed to the same conditions as our competitors’. What then are the attributes to which Mondragon owes its remarkable success?

Industrial Co-operatives

The basic building blocks of the MCC have been its industrial co-operatives. The industrial co-operatives are owned and operated by their workers. The workers share equally in the profits — and, on occasion, losses — of the co-operatives, and have an equal say in their governance. That they are able to do so is due to the unique structures and systems of governance and financial management which the Mondragon co-operatives have developed. In the case of governance, the workers in a co-operative have their say in the first instance through its General Assembly, where the performance of the co-operative is discussed and its policies determined. The workers also elect a Governing Council, which conducts the affairs of the co-operative between Assembly meetings, and an Audit Committee — referred to by some as the ‘Watchdog Committee’ — which monitors the co-operative’s financial operations and its compliance with its formally established policies and procedures. Only members of the co-operative, all of them workers, are eligible to stand and voting is on a ‘one member, one vote’ basis.

Successful candidates hold office for a four-year term, but continue to be paid their normal salaries and receive no compensation for their Council responsibilities. Council meetings are normally held before the working day begins, and members then resume their normal workplace duties. The Council appoints a Manager for the co-operative on a four-year contract, which may be renewed subject to a mandatory review of his performance by the Council. The Manager may attend Council meetings in an advisory capacity, but is not a member and has no vote. There is a separate Management Council where the top executives and officers of the co-operative liase with one another on a monthly basis. The separation of the Management Council from the Governing Council reflects the clear distinction which the co-operatives draw between the governance function which is properly the prerogative of their members and the carrying on of operations for which management is responsible.

A final body, the Social Council, is elected annually, by and from shop-floor groups of from twenty to thirty workers. Members of the Social Council hold office for a two-year terms, and may offer themselves for re-election. The Council is a unique structure, with a highly distinctive contribution to the well-being of the co-operative. Whereas the Governing Council represents the members of a co-operative primarily in their capacity as its co-owners, the Social Council represents them primarily as workers. The Council’s character in this respect reflects in part the fact that the co-operatives were established during a period when trade unions had been outlawed by the Franco government. Franco’s negation of workers’ rights was unacceptable to Arizmendiarrieta and his associates. In effect, the Social Council has had built into it the union function of enabling members to monitor, question and, if necessary, oppose the policies of the Governing Council and management. The Social Council is required to give advice to the Governing Council on industrial and personnel issues — for example, working hours, the evaluation and classification of jobs, and occupational health and safety — which the Governing Council must consider before its decisions on them are finalised. In recent years, some co-operatives have mandated their Social Councils to bargain formally for members with their Governing Councils.

The earnings of a Mondragon co-operative are the property of its members. In place of wages, members are paid monthly advances, referred to as anticipos, against the income their co-operative expects to receive. Two further advances required by Spanish custom are made available at Christmas and for the summer holiday period. The co-operatives observe a ‘principle of external solidarity’, under which no advance should exceed by more than a narrow margin the wages paid for comparable work by nearby private sector businesses. The level of each member’s advance is determined in the first instance by a labour value rating which the Social Council of the co-operative assigns to the job. Overall, incomes are kept as equal as possible. The highest advances a co-operative pays its members cannot exceed the lowest by more than eight to one. By 1990, members had had an estimated increase in their purchasing power since 1956 of around 250 per cent.

A further share of the co-operative’s earnings is credited to the members as capital. The capital structure has been designed to produce the greatest possible consciousness on the part of each member who is a stakeholder in the co-operative. The identification is achieved initially by requiring as a condition of entry to the co-operative that each member should make a direct personal contribution to its capital. There is an entry fee which currently stands at about $US12,500. Payment can be made on the basis of a 25 per cent initial contribution, followed by monthly instalments. The co-operative then establishes an individual capital account for the member, to which 70 per cent of their initial contribution is credited. The capital accounts earn interest at an agreed rate, and are credited each year with, say, 40 per cent of the co-operative’s surplus, apportioned among members on the basis of their salary grades and the hours worked. Members may draw on the interest accumulated in their accounts, or use the accounts as collateral for personal loans, but the principal cannot normally be touched until they resign or retire. Payouts from the capital accounts of members currently retiring in Mondragon — over and above their superannuation entitlements — are in some instances in excess of $US100,000. A further 50 percent of the co-operative’s surplus goes to its permanent reserves, while Spanish law requires 10 per cent to be set aside for social and educational purposes. A co-operative which incurs a loss may require its members to re-invest the extra Christmas or summer holiday advances which they would otherwise have taken in cash. Alternatively, they can forego the interest which would otherwise have been paid on their capital accounts. In extreme cases, the value of capital accounts can be written down or even written off.

Worker/Consumer Co-operatives

Mondragon’s initial focus on industrial co-operatives was expanded by the creation in 1968 of its Eroski worker/consumer co-operative. Reflecting the overall Mondragon approach, Eroski, unlike traditional consumer co-operatives, is not limited to consumer members. Instead, its membership falls into two categories, namely, the workers who operate its outlets and the consumers who shop at them. The Governing Council has equal numbers of worker and consumer members, with the position of chairman always being held by a consumer. A further difference is that Eroski does not pay the traditional consumer co-operative dividend, but instead concentrates on low prices, healthy and environmentally-friendly products and consumer education and advocacy.

Eroski is today the most rapidly expanding component of the MCC, with some 2441 retail outlets, ranging in size from petrol stations and small franchise stores to hyper-markets and shopping malls, in locations that now extend beyond Spain to France and Andorra. It is a key participant in the Spanish Confederation of Consumer Co-operatives, speaks for the Confederation in its dealings with government and the media and is also active in the affairs of the Consumer Advisory Council in Brussels.

Mondragon Mark I

The industrial, worker/consumer and service co-operatives at Mondragon have benefited from a unique system of second-order or support co-operatives and groups. Just as the primary co-operatives were formed in response to a pressing need on the part of workers for jobs, and of the Basque region more generally for economic development, so the secondary co-operatives have been a response to the need of the primary co-operatives to co-ordinate their activities and access capital and support services such as social insurance, education and training and research and development. The co-ordination and support structures and procedures, as distinct from the primary or frontline co-operatives, have undergone major changes. A broad familiarity with the arrangements in their original form — with what was in effect Mondragon Mark I — is needed in order to properly understand the nature and purpose of the Mondragon Mark II which in key respects has replaced them.

The Caja Laboral Credit Union

The core and nerve centre of what is now the MCC was originally the Caja. Arizmendiarrieta realised at a very early stage in the life of the group that expanding the existing co-operatives and creating new ones would require reliable access to capital on affordable terms. ‘A co-operative’, he wrote, ‘must not condemn itself to the sole alternative of self-financing’. As has been seen, his insight resulted in 1959 in the establishment of the Caja in order to mobilise capital for the co-operatives from the local and regional communities. The slogan used by the Caja in the early stages of its development was ‘savings or suitcases’, indicating that local savings were necessary in order for there to be local jobs. The Caja also provided a means for the co-operatives to manage the capital held in their permanent reserves and individual capital accounts, so enabling them to retain within the group all of their surpluses other than the 10% allocated by law to community projects. The effect overall was to free the co-operatives from the capital constraints which otherwise would so drastically have curtailed their development. The Caja enabled the co-operatives to borrow at interest rates which were 3 per cent to 4 per cent below those of conventional financial intermediaries.

From functioning purely as a source of capital for the co-operatives, the Caja then moved on to become the mechanism through which their association with one another was formalised and their activities integrated. The individual co-operatives were linked to the Caja through a Contract of Association which set out in detail their respective obligations and entitlements. For example, it was a requirement of the Contract of Association that an affiliated co-operative should adhere to an agreed system of wage levels and ratios. Returns to members on their capital contributions should be at a fixed rate of interest. The co-operative should invest in the Caja and the surplus cash and liquid assets of the co-operative should be held for it on deposit by the Caja. The co-operative’s deposits with the Caja should also include all holdings on behalf of its members, such as pension funds, social security funds, and workers’ share capital. The co-operative should adopt a five year budget and report on it to the Caja at monthly intervals. The financial affairs of the co-operative should be subject to audit by the Caja at intervals of no more than four years.

The Caja lastly had a key role in developing new co-operatives, advising and otherwise helping out co-operatives which were experiencing difficulties and, more generally, providing an integrated mix of services for co-operatives in all stages of their development. These functions of the Caja were performed by its Empresarial Division. The Division consisted of seven departments — Advice and Consultation; Studies; Agricultural and Food Promotion; Industrial Promotion; Intervention; Auditing and Information; and Urban Planning and Building — with around 120 worker-members.

Where new co-operatives were concerned, a group of workers who were interested in establishing a new venture had first to find a product or service for which they believed there was a market, along with a manager. They were then in a position where an approach could be made to the Empresarial Division. If the Division believed that the proposal was sound, it assigned an adviser — sometimes known as the ‘godfather’ — to the group. The group in turn registered as a co-operative and accepted a loan to cover a salary for the manager while pre-feasibility and feasibility studies were conducted. The studies usually lasted between eighteen months and two years. In the course of that period, the group’s preferred product might be discarded in favour of an alternative drawn from the ideas bank which the Division maintained from its own market research. Attention then focused on factors such as factory design, production processes, marketing strategies and export opportunities. The completed study was presented to the Operations Committee of the Banking Division of the Caja, which determined whether the venture should be approved. Where a co-operative proceeded, the Empresarial Division godfather usually went on working with its manager until the break-even point was reached. The co-operative and the Division then remained in touch through the monthly return of operating and financial information the co-operative agreed to provide as a condition of its Contract of Association. The information was stored in a computerised data bank, so enabling the Division to at any time call up a comprehensive account of the status of the co-operative and the trends currently being experienced.

Where an established co-operative experienced difficulties, the Empresarial Division had the capacity to help out through the professional services of its Intervention Department. The data base compiled from the monthly returns of the affiliated co-operatives enabled the Department to have emerging problems brought to its attention, in some cases earlier even than the managers of the co-operative directly involved. An intervenor was then appointed, who assessed the situation of the co-operative in terms of three categories of risk. A summary of the categories by two American scholars reads in part:

1. High Risk. The life of the co-operative is threatened. The intervenor reviews every aspect of operations and in effect takes over management on a full-time basis until a reorganisation plan is approved or the co-operative must be closed. Interest payments on outstanding loans are suspended until the plan is in place.

2. Medium Risk. Bankrupcy is not imminent but could occur in the near future. In such cases the intervenor spends at least one day each week at the co-operative during the reorganisation but does not take over the management of the firm. Interest on loans is reduced temporarily by — say — half, but returns to the full rate as the reorganisation progresses.

3. Warning or alert level. Here the threat of failure is not imminent but current trends are negative, suggesting a need for remedial action that may be beyond the capacity of the co-operative. No interest rate concessions are offered, as it is anticipated that the intervention will make the interest burden manageable.

Once the seriousness of the situation has been determined, the intervenor has the task of working out with the co-operative a new business and re-organisation plan.

The plan might require changes in the marketing strategies, manufacturing methods or product mix of the co-operative. Other changes might involve the organisational structure of the co-operative or the appointees currently occupying its key management positions. Members might be required to accept reductions in their anticipos or contribute additional capital. Where in extreme cases a reduction in the workforce was necessary, it fell to the Social Council to identify in conjunction with management those members who were to be retained in their current positions, those who were to move to new positions and those who were required to leave, normally by transferring to another co-operative whose business was expanding. Once agreement on the plan had been reached, the co-operative was responsible for securing approval of it from the Financial Division of the Caja. The Financial Division was required to determine whether interest on the co-operative’s loans should be suspended or reduced or in what other ways, if any, the co-operative should be assisted.

The mutuality of interest between the Caja and the primary co-operatives which are linked with it through their Contracts of Association — together with the credit union’s functions in regard to the co-operatives of capital mobilisation and management, integration and support — were entrenched in its structure and governance. Forty-two percent of the delegates to the General Assembly of the Caja are from its workers and 58 per cent from the affilated co-operatives. Seven seats on the Board are for the affiliated co-operatives, four for workers in the Caja and one for a representative of wider sectorial groupings of co-operatives. Rather than the Caja’s workers having allocated to them a 40 per cent share of its annual surplus, as is the case in the affiliated co-operatives, their capital accounts are credited with the average of the amounts credited to members of the affiliated co-operative. The Caja has succeeded so spectacularly as to have now become effectively the tenth largest bank in Spain. Its assets are now so large that loans to the co-operatives now account for no more than 25 per cent of its overall lending, or 10 per cent of its capital, with the balance available for regional economic development and other investment projects, often in partnership with the Basque government. Its example triumphantly vindicates Arizmendiarrieta’s faith in the capacity of working people to provide for themselves through co-operation and economic solidarity the jobs for which they can no longer rely on others.

Lagun-Aro Social Insurance Co-operative

A second support co-operative, the Lagun-Aro social insurance co-operative, began as a division of the Caja. Being co-owners of the businesses where they work instead of employees meant at the time that members of the Mondragon co-operatives were ineligible for health and retirement benefits under the Spanish social security system. What was originally the social insurance division of the Caja was established to remedy the deficiency, by providing a fund to which the co-operatives could subscribe through pay-roll deductions and from which benefits for their members could be drawn. In 1967, the division became independent of the Caja as Lagun-Aro, with a Governing Council which included representatives of the co-operatives affiliated with it. The functions and service-mix of the co-operative have varied over time, reflecting changing needs and government policies. The health care clinic Lagun-Aro conducted at Mondragon for many years was taken over by the Basque government in 1987, as a model for other towns in the province. Rather than administering pensions as previously on an in-house basis, Lagun-aro now contracts out the function to a fund, Mutualidad de Autonomos, conducted by the state. At the same time, a general insurance subsidiary (Seguros Lagun Aro) and a life insurance subsidiary (Seguros Lagun Aro Vida) have been established, as have subsidiaries for leasing and consumer finance (Aroleasing and Arofinance) and a subsidiary for the development of shopping malls (Lagun-Aro Intercoop) in conjunction with the Eroski worker/consumer co-operatives.

Hezibide Elkartea Education and Training Co-operative

A third support group, the Hezibide Elkartea, stemmed from the establishment by Arizmendiarrieta of the training school for apprentices in Mondragon in 1943 and of the League of Education and Culture, a body to promote and co-ordinate education on all levels for all children and adults, in 1948. The apprentice school and the League played a key part in the consciousness-raising through which the establishment of the first of the industrial co-operatives, Ulgor, was instigated. The Hezibide Elkartea has come to cater for programs ranging from day-care to advanced technical and management skilling to adult education. The apprentice school is now a university-level polytechnical college, the Eskola Politeknikoa Jose Maria Arizmendiarrietra. Over and above its mainstream teaching programs, the Hezibide Elkartea brings together specialist bodies such as the Saiolan centre for new business activities education, training and development; the Goeir centre for the co-ordination and promotion of overseas postgraduate engineering and technical studies; the Eteo school of business management; the Iraunkor centre for continuing education and in-company training; the Ahizke-CIM centre for language studies; and the Otalora Centre for co-operative research, education and management training.

Students at the Eskola Politeknikoa have a co-operative of their own, Actividad Laboral Erscolar Cooperativa (or Alecoop for short), that enables them to support themselves financially during their courses, while at the same time obtaining a hands-on experience of how co-operatives work. A further network of educational co-operatives offers a bi-lingual education in the Basque and Spanish languages at the pre-school, primary and lower secondary levels. Funds for the schools are drawn in part for the social allocations of the Caja and its affiliated industrial co-operatives. Their General Assemblies include staff, parent, student and affiliate members. Faced in 1993 with demands by the Basque government that schools receiving government funds should join the government system, 80 per cent of the schooling co-operatives voted for rejecting the government’s money and retaining their independence.

Ikerlan Research and Development Co-operative

A fourth support co-operative, the Ikerlan research and development co-operative, reflects the high priority which the Mondragon co-operatives have attached to keeping abreast of modern technology. This pattern, like so much else about Mondragon, was shaped by Arizmendiarrieta, through his initial choice of technical education as the means of bringing the community together and instigating change, and his insistence throughout that by mastering technology it would be possible to bring about higher forms of human and social development. ‘Our people’, he argued, ‘require of our men the development of the means to scale the heights of scientific knowledge, which are the bases of progress’. Arizmendiarrieta’s advice caused research and development to be pursued vigorously from the start by individual co-operatives and the Mondragon polytechnical college, but this allowed insufficient scope for inter-disciplinary problem-solving and cross-fertilisation within the overall scientific and technical workforce. Ikerlan was hived-off from the college in 1977 as a separate support co-operative, in order to overcome these shortcomings, and further strengthen the competitiveness of the industrial co-operatives in the export markets where their future was seen to lie. As in other support co-operatives, the General Assembly consists of the worker/members of the co-operative and representatives of the affiliated primary co-operatives.

An extensive staff of highly qualified engineers and technicians enables Ikerlan to provide contract research and development services for co-operatives affiliated with the MCC, private sector businesses other than those in direct competition with the co-operatives and agencies of the Basque government. Ikerlan is also an active member of the European Association of Contracted Research Organisations, and offers competitive research fellowships for visiting scientists and engineers under industry re-vitalisation programs funded by the Basque government. A further support co-operative, Ideko, specialises in machine tools research and development.

Co-operative Groups

Over and above its unique support co-operatives, Mondragon was reinforced by a structure of groups or divisions which linked individual co-operatives together, both geographically on the basis of their proximity to one another, and by similarity of the sectoral activities in which they engage. Geographically, there were twelve regional groups of co-operatives. The structure stemmed from the rapid growth of the original household appliances co-operative, Ulgor, in the early 1960s. Faced with a co-operative which was outstripping by far the limits within which the advantages of growth could be achieved without succumbing to the bureaucratic rigidities, Arizmendiarrieta and his associates developed a policy of spinning-off those sections where a level of efficiency was achieved such as would enable them to function successfully as independent entities.

In this model, the components manufactured by the new co-operatives had an assured market in Ulgor but could also be sold to other buyers. In order to balance the interests of the new co-operative with those remaining behind in the parent body — and to avoid loading the new co-operative with costs such as the establishment of marketing and other specialist divisions of its own — a co-operative group, ULARCO, was formed from Ulgor itself, the Arrasate co-operative which supplied machine tools for Ulgor and the Copreci co-operative which supplied Ulgor with parts for its gas stoves and heaters. A fourth member, Ederlan, resulted from a private sector foundry being taken over and combined with the foundry at Ulgor. Fagor Electrotechnica became the fifth member when it was spun-off by the three foundation co-operatives, as an independent co-operative manufacturing electronic components and equipment.

ULARCO adopted a structure similar to that of the individual co-operatives. Its General Assembly comprised the members of the governing councils, management councils and audit committees of the affiliated co-operatives, and was responsible for determining the policies of the group, making decisions about admissions to — and exclusions from — the group, and approving all accounts and budgets. There was also a Governing Council, made up of one member from each of the affiliated co-operatives, a General Management Committee chosen by the Governing Council and a Central Social Council comprising one representative from each of the Social Councils of the affiliates. Similar structures were adopted by the other regional groups.

The groups enabled key planning and co-ordinating functions to be undertaken in the interests of their affiliates. From 30 per cent to 100 per cent of the surpluses earned, or losses incurred, by individual co-operatives were pooled through their regional groups, so providing further protection for the co-operatives against the problems to which short-term market fluctuations might otherwise expose them. The groups facilitated the exchange of members between co-operatives whose markets were expanding and those experiencing contractions. Dialogue between the Governing Councils and Central Social Councils of the groups, reflecting in part discussion within and between the affiliated co-operatives, in some instances played a major part in enabling the co-operatives to implement the re-positioning and re-structuring forced on them by Spain’s entry into the European Community and the economic stringencies of the 1980s and the 1990s.

Mondragon Mark II

What has been effectively the replacement of Mondragon Mark I by Mondragon Mark II between 1987 and 1991 reflects the capacity of the co-operatives to re-invent themselves in the light of new challenges and changing circumstances. A series of congresses of the co-operatives since 1987 — drawing in part on recommendations from the Caja adopted by a pre-constituente congress in 1984 — has radically altered the original structure, so that the co-operatives now relate to one another in new ways. The governing philosophy of the co-operatives was codified by the 1987 Congress in an explicit ten-point declaration known as ‘The Basic Principles of the Mondragon Experience’. The ten points are respectively open admission, democratic organisation, sovereignty of labour, the instrumental and subordinate character of capital, participatory management, payment solidarity, interco-operation, social transformation, universality and education. The declaration reads in part that admission to a Mondragon co-operative is available without discrimination on religious, political or ethical grounds or due to gender, subject only to applicants agreeing to be be bound by the principles and proving that they are professionally capable of carrying out such jobs as may be available. Members participate in the governance of the co-operative on a ‘one member, one vote’ basis, irrespective of their positions, seniority, hours worked or capital contributions. The co-operative recognises the primacy of labour in its organisation and the distribution of the wealth created; rejects the contracting of workers who are not admitted to membership; and seeks to provide work for all who are in need of it.

Capital is seen as being an instrument, subordinate to labour and subject to a maximum rate of return. The democratic character of the co-operative implies a progressive extension of opportunities for involvement by its members in business management, through mechanisms and channels for participation, freedom of information, consultation, implementation of social and professional training plans for members and the establishment of internal promotion as the basic means of filling positions of higher professional responsibility. Solidarity should be observed externally, so that rates for equal work are roughly the same within the co-operative as in the wider community. There should be co-operation by co-operatives, both within and between sectoral groups, and by the MCC with the Basque and international co-operative movements. The MCC should contribute to economic and social reconstruction and to the creation of a Basque society which is more free, just and expressive of solidarity; act in solidarity with all those working for economic democracy in the sphere of the social economy and championing the objectives of peace, justice and development which are essential features of international co-operativism; and provide education and training in co-operation for its members, management bodies and in particular the younger generation of members on whom its future depends. The Basic Principles broadly reflect, and in key aspects improve upon, those of the International Co-operative Alliance.

The 1987 Congress also established a special fund, the Interco-operative Solidarity Fund (Fiso), to help out co-operatives in economic difficulties with resources over and above those available from the Caja, and so avoid job losses. A further fund, the Fund for Education and Inter-co-operative Development (FEPI), was established by the 1989 Congress, to assist participation by smaller co-operatives in larger and longer-range projects, with funds drawn from the social contributions of those which are larger or better off. The 1991 Congress endorsed recommendations from the Governing Council in 1989 for the move to the sectoral groups and the establishment of the MCC. The Caja has surrendered its central co-ordinating functions, and is now a conventional co-operative financial intermediary, lending largely to private sector businesses. Co-ordination and strategic planning are now the responsibility of the MCC. The MCC is a tripartite structure, made up at its base of three sectoral groups – the Financial Group, the Industrial Group and the Distribution Goods Group. The Industrial Group in turn has a further eight sub-groups, namely Capital Goods I, Capital Goods II, Automotive Components, Domestic Appliance Components, Industrial Components and Services, Construction, and Household Goods.

The General Assembly of each co-operative affiliated with a group sends a delegate to a Group Assembly. The Group also has a General Council made up of the chairperson of each co-operative together a further member from each co-operative’s Board, and a Management Committee consisting of the managers of the co-operatives. The General Council selects a member of the Management Council as the Group CEO. The aim is to have a common business strategy for each sector, including the adoption of common identifiers such as brand names, trademarks and logos. The groups have also had devolved to them the intervention function which was previously performed by the Empresarial Division of the Caja. Other function of the Empresarial Division have been assumed by the Lankide Suztaketa I and Lankide Sustaketa II management and engineering consultancy co-operatives, the Saiolan business activities development co-operative and an MCC Services Co-operative within the corporate headquarters of the MCC.

The groups are responsible for the management of workers whose co-operatives cease to have positions for them. Workers so affected are normally relocated – and where necessary re-trained – for positions in co-operatives whose businesses are expanding. While the objective of protecting employment has largely been achieved, the groups have not necessarily in all cases been thanked for their efforts. Transfers are seen to have generated frustration, rejection and ill-will among these affected by them. ‘The transferee’, in the view of a major study, ‘feels himself/herself to have been ‘managed’ rather than consulted; feels less a co-operative member than the rest, as if he/she were a second-class citizen’.

Members of the co-operatives affiliated with the MCC elect delegates to a Mondragon Co-operative Congress. The Congress meets at intervals of not more than two years, to consider the philosophy, policies and operation of the MCC. Two further bodies, the Standing Committee and General Council of the Congress, look after the affairs of the Congress between its meetings. The Standing Committee consists of the president, vice-president and secretary of the Congress, together with representatives from each of co-operative groups and secondary support co-operatives. The members of the Council are the heads of the co-operative groups and support co-operatives. Congress decisions ‘in general will have the character of recommendations to the co-operatives represented in the Congress’. In order for a decision to be binding on the co-operatives, ‘it must be proposed by the Governing Council, be presented by the Standing Committee and be approved by the full Congress by an absolute majority’.

Conclusion

In the face of the world’s economic vicissitudes, Mondragon has been steadfast in its adherence to the fundamental principles with which its founders endowed it, and continues to enlarge the scope of their application. Eroski is currently adopting new measures to enfranchise the 35,000 of its 50,000 workers who are not currently worker members. The co-operatives have entered into a solemn commitment to extend worker ownership measures to their local and overseas subsidiaries on a case by case basis, consistent with their differing cultural, legal and financial circumstances.

In a passage written a few days before his death in 1976. Arizmendiarrieta wrote in part:

Hand in hand, of one mind, renewed, united in work, through work, in our small land we shall create a more human environment for everyone and we shall improve this land. We shall include villages and towns in our new equality; the people and everything else: ‘Ever forward’. Nobody shall be slave or master to anyone, everyone shall simply work for the benefit of everyone else, and we shall have to behave differently in the way we work. This shall be our human and progressive union — a union which can be created by the people.

It is not necessary for us to suppose that the Mondragon model can be transplanted in its entirety to other countries. What is required of us is rather that we should take from Arizmendiarrieta the message of hope his words hold out to us, study such aspects of the Mondragon experience as are relevant to our needs and circumstances and open our minds to what it can teach. Arizmendiarrieta summarised the Mondragon approach as ‘We build the road as we travel’. The question in these straitened times is whether we will make for ourselves the future of our choice — whether we will take back control over our lives and destinies by the co-operative means whose availability Mondragon so plainly demonstrates — or by default allow others to choose the future for us.

Pearson’s support — even given his reservations about the military intervention into Indigenous ways of living — was of crucial importance for John Howard’s last throw: the Intervention as a final desperate effort to gain yet another term in office. In that context Pearson repeated the ‘little children are sacred’ theme in the manner of a mantra. On that quite basic moral issue he was so clearly on protected ground that few were prepared to argue that concentrating on the wellbeing of children too exclusively was diverting attention from the overall situation.

In fact a major policy shift was underway. Any attempt to link back the way it was presented to the previous election when ‘they were throwing children overboard’ tended to fall upon deaf ears. Most people accepted that ‘something had to be done’ and, if a military type of intervention was ‘over-the-top’, any opposition to such extreme measures faced difficulties in proposing alternatives.

Justifiably and profoundly disturbed as they were by the evidence of violence and alcohol abuse in many communities, most people were in no position to pursue the issue of why evidence, which had so long been available, had been persistently brushed aside by the Coalition. They were in no position to demand answers as to why other forms of intervention into these disastrous circumstances had been so long deferred. The shock effect of military intervention and the focus on the wellbeing of children effectively diverted attention from the Coalition’s accompanying agenda of forcing Indigenous people towards ‘real jobs’ (as defined by the mainstream labour market), the winding down of outstations and linking of welfare payments to meeting particular standards of child care and education.

Even if the Coalition’s account of the sources of the breakdown should turn out to be both shallow and excessively concerned with the limitations of an approach that Peter Sutton, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Adelaide, has stereotyped ‘the liberal consensus’, a marked change in policy is already being set in place. A turn towards a new wave of assimilation advocacy is underway and support from Indigenous and academic figures will ensure that it makes a significant impact; it will surely take in a re-evaluation of recent policies and some of their assumptions. Some people are certain to conclude that the ‘good intentions’ of the liberal consensus have led to a vast overestimate of the capacity of Indigenous people to use welfare support in maintaining any integrity for their own cultures. From a distinctly different standpoint, others may suggest that Noel Pearson, perhaps understandably, and Peter Sutton, far less justifiably, demonstrate an almost total failure to inquire into whether other policies might have better contributed to Indigenous continuity. Beyond that, their failure to probe the issue of whether ‘real jobs’ within the mainstream of Australian life can actually offer better long-term prospects for Indigenous people is a striking omission. It leads one to ask whether the neo-assimilationist answer may not also be affected by major blind spots.

The mainstream politics of most settler-colonial nations are affected now by deep-seated divisions as to the policies which could steer a way into the future for Indigenous peoples. Peter Sutton acknowledges ‘that the kind of deep cultural changes that may assist a real move out of profound disadvantage are not well understood’. Good point, and scholars themselves may have a special responsibility to stand apart for a spell, and to look before they leap. Within the mainstream, the issue of climate change as a consequence of ‘the way we live now’ presses home the relatively short-term prospect of fundamental change. Surely that prospect alone calls for searching consideration of just what assimilation has to offer as an answer to ‘disadvantage’.

Unintended Consequences

Before returning to such questions I should first acknowledge — as a long standing, even if relatively passive, mainstream supporter of the liberal consensus — that Noel Pearson, and especially Peter Sutton, do present undeniable evidence of a downward spiral in the conditions of Indigenous life in a number of locations. Those who might have been inclined to deny the need for far-reaching policy change in the past are scarcely in a position to do so now.

Given insufficient attention at times as to how policy changes might have led to different outcomes, what conclusions do Pearson and Sutton draw from that? Few indeed, it would seem, which might contribute to a measure of continuity for Indigenous ways of living. Neither Pearson nor Sutton considers the conditions for continuity of Indigenous social forms. While Pearson does have hopes for the continuity of Indigenous values, Sutton has hopes for the prospects of soft and individually personalised assimilation, achieved by way of one-to-one contact, ‘atomically, not en masse’ and, one might add, entailing the further dissolution of Indigenous institutions. Nothing is said in Sutton’s book about the prospects for the actual economic and social arrangements of the mainstream. The hopes and the values of the hyper-individualised mode of life are at the forefront and nothing emerges concerning the modes of social interchange which might sustain some continuity for Indigenous ways. Can one still detect the footprint in Sutton’s approach of that same ‘liberal consensus’, as it adapts once again to changing circumstances?

Assimilation: An Unintended Consequence?

‘Where goes the money there goes the man’ (Pearson, Up from the Mission)

For Noel Pearson the military intervention created a brilliant context for the publication of his book Up from the Mission (Black Inc, 2009). It is a forceful and eloquent record of his changing hopes in response to changing circumstances. The book is marked by two main features in the way it frames the author’s unrelenting struggle to further the interests of his people. The first is the thesis that the reciprocal norms of Indigenous culture actually contribute to a spiral of communal degeneration. The welfare incomes, Pearson argues, that became available after the granting of citizenship, both installed the dispiriting effects of dependency and provided the means for the purchase of alcohol. Three key conditions — the cultural obligations of sharing, the dispiriting effects of dependency and the availability of alcohol — combined to feed a cycle of social breakdown.

Noel Pearson had first set out this thesis in 1986. For ten years, until the defeat of the Keating government, it remained in the shadow of his commitments to what Peter Sutton, in his just released book The Politics of Suffering, now disparages as the liberal consensus.

With the election of the Coalition, Pearson sought other means to advance the wellbeing of those with whom he passionately identifies. Gradually the radical centre, as the second feature of the way he frames his endeavours, emerged. He took it to provide new possibilities for advancing Indigenous interests within the existing democratic structure, and outlining its emergence is the major theoretical undertaking of his book.

Pearson presents it in a long essay entitled ‘White Guilt, Victimhood and the Quest for a Radical Centre’. In more everyday terms, the author is speaking of wedge politics, and along with that the need to intervene to restore a proper sense of an order in many Indigenous settings. One particular theme — ‘little children are sacred’ — provided a strikingly fertile point of entry into the field of political wedging.

Wedging occurs when any political party cuts into what had been taken to be the more or less solid constituency of its opposition, by urging action upon and appealing to values that its opponent cannot oppose. The appeal to ‘the battlers’ of the Labor constituency as a Coalition ‘wedge’ is one familiar example. Border protection supplemented by child protection also springs to mind. There, two wedges contributing to the same campaign operate: the child protection issue widened the split opened by border crossing in the case of the Tampa issue in 2001.

Noel Pearson’s search for a ‘radical centre’ had probably first been stirred in the early 1990s by Ron Castan (leading counsel in the Mabo case). As the Coalition moved into government Pearson felt forced to the conclusion ‘that Indigenous people couldn’t rely on one side of politics alone’. He actively sought out circumstances where, for instance as in land claims, the interests of different parties might be reconciled sufficiently to achieve a working agreement. In the new circumstances of Coalition government, especially after the winding back of access to native title following the Coalition’s passage of the Native Title Amendment Act, Pearson’s political orientation turned away from the Left, and indeed from the whole liberal consensus. Citizenship, native title: these rights had been achieved and for Noel Pearson the abiding concerns associated with that fatal cluster — alcohol, dependency and reciprocal obligations — again came to the fore. In the blazing statement ‘Our Right to take Responsibility’, he reasserted in 2000 his denunciation of ‘welfare poison’ as the source of dependency and sought the answer in ‘real jobs’ in the real economy of the mainstream. A passionate sense of loyalty to his people remained as a constant but, seemingly unaware of the hazards of his new course, the earlier meaning of ‘the radical centre’ had apparently drained away. It now entailed accommodations with the mining corporations. If these were a bridge it was no longer one of drawing on the common ground shared by the mainstream parties but upon the prospect of ‘real jobs’ for Indigenous people by seeking common ground with the big miners.

Sutton and Pearson: Unquestioned Assumptions

Indigenous culture, any culture, if it is to maintain a measure of continuity must hold firm to certain conditions of viability. The basic flaw in Pearson’s argument is that in seeking an accommodation now with the big miners he does not ask whether ‘real jobs’, in the mining industry especially, can provide the continuity that he has so ardently pursued. Within a far wider perspective than Noel Pearson presents in Up From the Mission, Peter Sutton actually throws doubt on that approach in The Politics of Suffering.

These two books both lend legitimacy to the military intervention; they both contribute to a massive shift in public opinion towards a neo-assimilationist trajectory. In the broadest terms both of them do so by far too readily jumping to conclusions about the policy failures of recent decades. Their reasons for moving towards the same assimilationist outcome differ, but both could find themselves alighting on the same platform. The immediate circumstance that steers them towards the same destination is that neither asks questions about the way the social forms of the mainstream society might affect the prospects for their markedly different expectations for cultural continuity. This omission stretches credulity in Sutton’s case. One imagines that as an anthropologist he will at least touch first base by way of an analysis of the mainstream society.

As I shall note later, this staring lacuna in his work and his reflections is not to be tied to any question of good faith. Rather, it would seem that unquestioned and individually centred assumptions about the relation of ideals to outcomes have eventually led to a profound disenchantment. He turns to assimilationist conclusions that he would have fervently rejected at an earlier time. Even given his rejection of the outcomes of the ‘fantasies’ of the ‘liberal consensus’, Sutton has a second coming within the terms of an even more individually centred commitment to humanist idealism. That is, to yet another twist in the history of a colonising process directed by ‘liberal’ practices, in the broadest sense of that word.

A general philosophical predisposition both blinds these authors to the limited prospects for any form of assimilation to the mainstream and appears to limit their grasp of Indigenous culture as well. Understandably in Pearson’s case, as one who grew up under conditions where threads of continuity of Indigenous ways were still present at Hope Vale Mission, he simply appears to take for granted that ‘identifications’ with those ways is sufficient guarantee of their continuity. For him ‘welfare poison’, as a source of income support for alcohol abuse and dependency, is the disastrously negative aspect of that same ‘liberal consensus’ which also combined with rising Indigenous activism to install citizenship and native title.

Sutton, however, works within a more searching and wider perspective. Shocked to the core by what he takes to be the eventual consequences of the liberal consensus in community breakdown, he far more explicitly endorses assimilation to the mainstream society than does Noel Pearson. Certainly there are ‘provisos’: citizens of Indigenous background will be able to look back to their heritage, just as others may look back to the roots of Western-style civilisations in Rome and Greece or in the Judaeo-Christian tradition.

Despite these secondary differences, Pearson and Sutton nevertheless contribute to the same broad shift towards assimilation evident in contemporary opinion. For each of them the negative aspects of the liberal consensus feed directly into community breakdown. For each of them, land rights was the high water mark. It was as if the two writers assume an essence of Aboriginality so that the social circumstances of the formation of values can be bypassed. For Pearson the ideal hope of the practical continuity of his people’s distinctive values persists. For Sutton that hope has turned into the blindness of fantasy: the last gasp of a discredited liberal consensus. The only ideal hope that remains is to look back to a lost heritage and perhaps even to cherish it within the limits of an assimilated mode of being.

Right at the centre of a methodological blindness shared by these authors is the failure to relate the central forms of interchange of both classical Indigenous culture and the new, rapidly changing mainstream to the values they would like to sustain. That is, sustain in practice for Pearson, in memory alone for Sutton. One might anticipate that both Noel Pearson and Peter Sutton could endorse the proposition of an integral association of values with circumstance, yet in practice each of them brushes it aside. Values, it would seem, can derive from ‘roots’ which are wholly subjective, grounded in individual choice.

Pearson’s political and cultural outlook is quite explicitly cast within mainstream identity theory. He identifies a range of groupings with which he identifies: his people, his Lutheran heritage and, a little more ambiguously, with his sense of belonging to all of the Australian people. In short the identifications of Noel Pearson as active agent are far more prominent in his account of his formation than are the distinctly fuzzy references to the institutional framework of his Indigenous heritage. He is quite forthright on the issue of identity. ‘I, and the members of my community, possess layers of identity, some of which are shared with each other, some of which are distinct.’ And he is equally plain spoken as to its derivation. ‘Amartya Sen has supplied us with a theory of what I have called layered identities in his most recent book, Identity and Violence.’ In sum it is to Noel Pearson’s aspirations as an individual that one should look for an understanding of his journey ‘up from the mission’.

It is vitally important to be clear about this. I am not saying that we do not have identifications. The issue is how we ground them in the practical relations of our daily lives. Pearson bypasses that question. He gives the impression of being confused by the way the expression of the values of sharing, integral with reciprocity, feed into a fatal combination with dependency and alcohol. He finds his answer by identifying with Indigenous values, making no more than fleeting reference to the forms of social interchange of classical Indigenous culture. It is an idealism that allows him to seek practical solutions to his dilemmas within the social relations and values of the mainstream without any full recognition that these same practical engagements increasingly dispense with the institutional structures of kinship and reciprocity. Like Peter Sutton, he encounters a structural problem through his total failure to consider the social forms of the mainstream; his identifications blind him to its presence.

Real Questions and Blind Responses

This of course is to touch upon the radical expansion within the mainstream of the market economy. As it quite directly permeates institutions of community and kinship, which once stood at arms length from it, a sense of enhanced individuation increasingly bears in to exaggerate every citizen’s sense of agency.

Even while expressing strong reservations concerning the way Noel Pearson’s approach diverts attention from the classical mooring points of his own culture, even while stressing how that approach blinds him to the dead ends into which embracing the mainstream might lead him, it is important to re-emphasise the often disastrous situation to which he is responding.

Pearson has played a major role in bringing to public notice the way the fatal association of welfare dependence has fed into one particular and tragically flawed track of the liberal consensus. As Peter Sutton notes, ‘it was Noel Pearson who did the most to break the log jam … about dysfunctional Indigenous communities’. The military intervention in the Northern Territory carried consequences for mainstream perceptions of all Indigenous people. Its undifferentiated engagement, across the board as it were, with the diverse circumstances in the north tends to damp down the need to revise the policy expressions of that same liberal consensus in other places.

Few now question Indigenous citizenship, land rights are again becoming more ambiguous, but if a spiral of breakdown affected many Indigenous communities did it affect them all? If it is conceded that some are stable, even developing, what makes the difference? Why does Sutton suggest that the revenues from taxation should no longer be directed towards Indigenous outstations? It would be reasonable to anticipate that he might enquire into these issues as a scholar and anthropologist, as distinct from his despairing turn, across the board, to assimilationist propaganda.

In The Politics of Suffering Sutton mounts a powerful argument for the widespread breakdown in Indigenous modes of life. He records his own disillusionment with the self-serving ‘fantasy’ that the liberal consensus could any longer contribute to positive outcomes. Moreover he convincingly cites evidence of a far greater level of violence in the classical period in the lives of Indigenous people than is commonly acknowledged. The implication is that the roots of the current downward spiral are very complex, not solely to be ascribed to policy failures of the liberal consensus.

Beyond that Sutton notes that Indigenous people are marrying out, as it were, at a rate that in recent years has skyrocketed to above 70 per cent. In effect they are walking away from more community-related ways of living and diluting Indigenous practices by joining the mainstream: assimilation in fact, whatever the intention.

Sutton and Pearson, along with Wild and Anderson, the authors of the Little Children are Sacred report, join with those many others before them (even Peter Howson who back in the Howard years was Minister for Indigenous Affairs) who all acknowledged that a serious breakdown had emerged in the course of the prosecution of policies grounded in the liberal consensus. Those policies were themselves an expression of a different and more humane liberal intervention in Indigenous affairs. It was the continuing expression in terms of policy of that turn towards a more liberal consensus that espoused citizenship in 1967. If, forty years on, those policies were leading to negative outcomes, what might have been the possible responses?

One answer, as we have already seen, was given: assimilation. The shock of a military intervention can deflect attention from longstanding failure to respond to situations well-known in circles of government. An intervention in that mode can declare people to be incompetent by action without consultation (except for a word with Noel Pearson fifteen minutes before the hour struck). Moreover, even with manifest despair among many long-time supporters of Indigenous causes, it can turn back onto the path of wholesale assimilation by way of policy changes, changes half-displaced from public discussion by the shock of the intervention and the bipartisan wedge of the protection of children.

Another approach might have been to look to the blind spots in the neo-liberal perspective. What assumptions does it make about human nature and the way it is profoundly constrained — even constituted — by the institutional arrangements in which human nature finds expression? And, above all perhaps, if the liberal consensus was half blind to the later consequences of its policies, does an ongoing myopia now carry over to affect the policy agenda of a neo-liberal assimilation?

Inside and Outside: Ruling Assumptions

These are difficult questions. For those who wish to question the present turn towards assimilation, a first response might be to ask whether it might not be more appropriate to first pay attention to the vast diversity of Indigenous circumstances. That would question any blanket approach whether in the mode of military intervention or otherwise. For many of those who, as Indigenous people, have taken or who may wish to pursue what I am terming an assimilationist trajectory — including many who as Peter Sutton notes are marrying out — what policy, what practical steps could assist them? Would those steps include helping them to renew their Indigenous roots if they so wished? For those who sought to further develop community-related ways of living very different policies to those prevailing now might well be essential. The question of a quite fundamental blindness within the liberal consensus, as well as within any neo-liberal turn, is crucial. The integrity of future policies depends upon this issue being addressed.

In his book, Peter Sutton gestures towards one of these blind spots. He records a Hawaiian’s perhaps only half serious response to an anthropologist who had been chatting about cultural matters: ‘Hey, we didn’t know we had a culture until the White Man came and told us!’ There is no way of knowing whether this particular Hawaiian was fully serious or not, but it is both astonishing and significant that, as an anthropologist, Peter Sutton should refer to this issue just in passing.

It has been well known, for at least the best part of a century, that while, prior to colonisation, the members of Indigenous cultures may readily recount their beliefs they seldom find a place to stand outside them. Their institutional framework does not include more abstracted social combinations of scholars, or disciplines like anthropology, which are ‘lifted out’, as it were, from the society with which they are integral. Eighty years ago, when speaking of the Melanesian cultures, Marcel Mauss noted ‘an incapacity to abstract and analyse concepts’. This way of putting the issue would be controversial now but what Mauss was getting at in the circumstances to which he was referring was that a self-conscious capacity to stand apart is often unnecessary. In effect a course of action is directed in ways that are profoundly taken for granted rather than consciously abstracted and evaluated. Mauss was not suggesting that these capacities could not immediately be taken on board. He presents evidence that they could. The basic point is that the rationality of the cultures he was representing is more directly embedded, or typically attached to more immediately apprehended environmental points. If it is more likely to operate in a taken-for-granted mode than is ours, that does not exclude recognition of the reality that when, at one level, a whole way of life becomes more abstracted, the way a course of action is governed may also be ‘taken for granted’.*

At least at the level of empirical observation, as Peter Sutton is likely to recognise, to be radically ‘lifted out’ of the limits of one’s familiar and routinised mode of life in our culture, one must enter into a sphere of social interchange which is separated, differentiated from that setting, while also being integral with it. Along with Noel Pearson, he stresses education and points to the way the boarding school was the abstracted setting which ‘lifted’ Pearson, the Dodsons and others out of the immediacy of an Indigenous setting (which was already far removed from classical Indigenous ways). Within a very different realm of social interchange, the foundations were laid for them becoming Indigenous intellectuals. In becoming such they were drawn into the social forms of the settler-colonial culture, including an exposure to the liberal consensus. In Sutton’s case especially one might anticipate that he was able to recognise that abstract forms of intellectual interchange provide the conditions of possibility for the emergence of any particular scheme of policy proposals. Those of which he speaks as the liberal consensus are one such outcome. If that scheme now calls for basic revision, the liberal consensus as such must be interrogated. Peter Sutton backs away from that profound challenge. He ends his book in mystical vein with the mainstream culture as the taken-for-granted context.

To speak of the more abstracted ideas of intellectuals as integral with their forms says nothing about actual insight into that conjunction. Even as an anthropologist, the person inducted into such abstracted schemes may be as little aware of their integral connection with a distinctive form of interchange as typically prevails within the pre-colonial Indigenous settings of reciprocal interchange to which I have briefly referred. Within the ways we constitute abstracted modes of interchange it is typically their scholarly expression that can promote that insight. The unfortunate feature of Sutton’s work is that he leaves aside the consideration of the various ways abstracted schemes of interchange may be related to the process of bridging between two cultures.

That bridging is typically fraught with the misunderstandings associated with different frames of integrity, as Inga Clendinnen so vividly portrays when she depicts the culture gap that led to the ‘just/unjust’ spearing of Governor Arthur in her Dancing with Strangers. Where distance between cultures is great and members of one are profoundly gripped by the certitudes of economic growth, they may readily conclude, with Noel Pearson, that ‘To secure Aboriginal economic development, it might be necessary for us to make far reaching concessions to the dominant culture’. Those concessions might include sending the children away to the boarding schools of the dominant culture, where English is first language, and distantly located jobs in big mining as the means of escape from the ravages of welfare dependency. As one might anticipate for Noel Pearson, all of that would stop far short of seeking a treaty as a framework for interchange between cultures.

What might be a different way? A first step would be to find a productive place to stand within the diverse forms of contemporary social interchange to look back upon the way the dominant values of the culture are integral with its dominant mode of social interchange. If there are structured possibilities for transformation inherent within the social forms through which the peoples of a culture carry on their lives, could a focus upon them lead to policy guidelines? That is, policies that do not lead either to Pearson’s apparently unintended consequence of de facto assimilation or to Sutton’s endorsement of personalised recruitment towards the same result.

Neither of these routes, as they converge towards the same precipice that mainstream culture is building, examines their own assumptions. While both Pearson and Sutton are ‘lifted out’ of, abstracted from, full immersion in the practicalities of the daily lives of their fellow citizens, they do not critically examine the assumptions and values they share with most mainstream people. In short, while they do enter into an intellectual form of interchange, which allows them to make explicit and to generalise about dominant values, they do not critically examine the way they are driven by them.

Were they to do so the conclusions they might reach about the mainstream culture might coincide with those reached by a growing minority who question its current trajectory. Its dominant value of growth, while integral with the practicalities of the expanding market, may well be incompatible with the survival of the human species. Why blindly induct others? In some contrast to that, as long as values of reciprocity and sharing are paid only lip service within Indigenous culture — by their being ‘valued’, as a distinct form enacted — they are open to co-option.

Erosion by exposure to the ‘welfare poison’ supplied courtesy of the welfare consensus is not necessarily the end for intentionalist planning. Before jumping to that conclusion an analysis of the assumptions of the liberal consensus and the prospects for their revision is a necessary condition of any serious approach to policy formation.

For the present the ideas, the intentionality of many Indigenous people, who have yet to break out of essentialist ideas about their nature as supplied by the liberal consensus, still maintain the hope that cultural values may be sustained without on the ground practical arrangements compatible with them. The suggestion here is they cannot, that support must be limited to just that. Pearson is right to insist that when it replaces a self-active mode of subsistence ‘support’ turns into its opposite. Yet to be right about recognising a problem and selecting a dead end as its solution clearly presents a basic dilemma.

If the first intervention was colonialist settlement and the destruction of Indigenous cultures its widespread result, it is important to acknowledge that colonialism had another side. It expressed moral as distinct from acquisitive imperatives. Mainly Christian at first, then more actively humanist as well, these imperatives found early expression in the missions. They were soon followed by a second stage in colonisation, an ‘intervention’, under the aegis of the liberal consensus. Now as land rights are eroded and reciprocal values are defined as part of the problem a third stage of colonisation, launched by military intervention, has begun. This time around it is driven by the assumption that mainstream culture can provide the answers to ‘disadvantage’ — by assimilation. So go back to GO.

The underlying problem is the deep-set incapacity within mainstream culture to examine how ‘growthmania’ is now driving it blindly towards the precipice. If the liberal consensus is now in crisis it is important to remember that, as a creation of the better intentions of the mainstream, it built up a powerful momentum in the course of the best part of half a century. Any capacity to adequately conceive and follow a different course will call for persistent and drawn out effort. But it is certainly possible to begin to suggest what some of its foci might be.

For some people it may seem presumptuous for a relative outsider, as I fully acknowledge that I am, to enter that field at all. After all, Indigenous people have special rights while those who presume to speak for the mainstream have varying degrees of on-the-ground knowledge that far exceeds mine. Nevertheless there are mainstream policies, they are in crisis, and every citizen should seek to respond.

The first question I would raise relates to the outstations, which, Sutton asserts, are typically disaster sites no longer deserving taxpayers’ support. For my part, while recognising the vitality of many outstations, I would like to see far greater public reporting of whether, with adequate water and power supplied to them, outstations could approach a far higher level of internal sustainability. That is, production of the means of life that are integrally connected with social processes of exchange. I would like to know whether a transition from the specific obligation of kinship to the looser bonds of family naming (see chapter 8 of Sutton, Native Title in Australia) is compatible with the renewal of values of reciprocity.

I do not imagine that this process of renewal could be set in place ‘just like that’, and that it would not entail significant shifts from classical prescriptions of obligations and rights. If it were to be stable at all — and quite apart from its external linkages — it presumably would include figures who could stand outside often profoundly taken for granted values. That is, individuals able to recognise the integral connection of values with the practicalities of the maintenance of a quasi-autonomous process of daily life.

That process itself could scarcely emerge without a relatively autonomous community of reflective individuals able to bridge between outposts. In other words, a reflective community able to value their own ways of living while recognising that other ways might be equally viable. The emergence of an Indigenous mode of reflective interchange of that order is of course a big ask. It would be in the mainstream interest to see if it could be developed. If its reciprocal co-existing roots could be revitalised, we might learn from, rather than simply intervene in, the lives of Indigenous people.

Is it not possible that we have simply forgotten one main root of the institutional basis of our own morality in reciprocity? Didn’t Marcel Mauss assert a basic truth when he observed for his time that ‘Much of our everyday morality is concerned with obligation and spontaneously in the gift. It is our good fortune that all is not yet couched in terms of purchase and sale’?

Mining Indigenous Hope

Noel Pearson positions a despairing article he wrote as late as 2006, which appears quite early in his book, at the opening of a group of chapters entitled ‘Challenging Old Friends’. It is called ‘Hope Vale Lost’. He grew up there; his mother still lives there. Earlier, way back before citizenship, the people earned their own means of subsistence and were also abstracted from, yet lifted out of, the daily practicalities of work by their engagement in a superordinate social body, one which, understandably, they took to exist primarily as a Lutheran community of common faith. They achieved a certain stability by the superimposition of what they took to be ‘ideas’ alone that lent a period of viability to their daily lives. At least these ideas were taken to do so until another set of policy prescriptions worked their way through the bodies and minds of the participants.

By 2006 a second invasion at Hope Vale, this time of ‘welfare poison’, has consolidated its hold, and in a final paragraph Pearson sums up. As he drives away to a different place he reflects on the same symbol of a community that has lost hope that presented itself on his arrival:

As I drove through my hometown on the Sunday evening on my way back to Cairns, I saw the dead puppy still in the street. I thought about the distance between being inured to the fate of a puppy that didn’t see a car coming, and being inured to the fate of our own children.

Yet hope is resilient and by 2008, for Pearson, it has found its reward:

Enter Andrew Forrest. One of the country’s most successful industrialists, Forrest has initiated an idea without parallel. The extraordinary feature of the Australian Employment Covenant is that Forrest and his private sector colleagues are setting the goal of guaranteeing jobs for 50,000 Indigenous Australians. It cannot be overstated how fundamentally this opportunity changes the landscape.

Early in 2008 Forrest was still the richest man in Australia ($9.4 billion). After the meltdown his investments in Fortescue Mining had lost more than 70 per cent of that value. Forrest appears to be an individual of genuine philanthropic intent but he cannot operate without lasting agreements on land rights, nor can Rio Tinto or BHP Billerton, both of which are just next door. For the big miners access to land rights becomes the condition for ‘real jobs’.

One way into the future could be Peter Sutton’s. Aboriginal culture could find a mode of continuity at least in the short term in the process of its dissolution into the ‘remembrance of things past’. But for the longer term? Perhaps first turn back to ‘Reflections on the Current Condition’ in Arena Magazine no. 100 before going on to ask more searching questions of the present limits of reflective scholarship. Such an inquiry might allow Sutton and Pearson, along with a host of others, to more actively consider whether reciprocity might be seen again as being at the root of our humanity. That could be one key aspect of a way into the future for both Indigenous and mainstream institutions and modes of individual formation with which these institutions are integral.

Endnote:

* While this issue is of fundamental importance I cannot pursue it here. Clearly, as for instance Bill Stanner recognised, a capacity to stand apart is present within Indigenous culture; that is, the ability to transcend oneself, to make acts of imagination so that one can stand ‘outside’ or ‘away from’ oneself and turn the universe, oneself and one’s fellows into objects of contemplation (W. E. H. Stanner, The Dreaming and Other Essays, R. Manne (ed.), Black Inc, 2009). For what Sutton might conceivably recognise as a ‘half-way house’ between relativism and realism, see Geoff Sharp, ‘The Idea of the Intellectual and After’, in S. Cooper, J. Hinkson and G. Sharp (eds), Scholars and Entrepreneurs, 2002.

Geoff Sharp is General Editor of Arena Publications.

Standing at the dawn of the 21st century there is no greater concern than the fate of our environment and the Earth community it supports. In response to this there is a growing recognition that our current approach to environmental law is insufficient and, as environmental lawyer Thomas Linzey notes, ‘according to every major environment statistic things are worse now than they were forty years ago’, when the first environmental protection legislation was passed. The reasons why our current system of environmental law is failing are rich and complex. However, I contend that one important reason is inherent to law itself. Indeed, in agreement with Thomas Berry, I contend that human beings have ‘rejected our role as an integral member of the earth community in favour of a radical anthropocentric life attitude’.

Anthropocentrism is defined by Albert Einstein as ‘an optical delusion of human consciousness’ where we come to regard ‘humanity as the centre of existence’. To this definition, I consider anthropocentrism as further encompassing the view that human beings are separate from the planet and all living systems, and the assumption that the universe exists to satisfy the needs and desires of human beings. The division of the world into human beings and nature forms the basis of the modern idea of property law.

Indeed, under Western law, nature is regarded as human property and by definition is a legal object that can be bought, sold, exploited and destroyed to satisfy human preferences. Nature receives its protection through the property rights of human beings, not because they have recognised value or legal rights.

Several problems flow from this framework. To begin, it may not be in a property owner’s economic interest to protect the environment; there might be disagreement over ownership, especially in regard to international waters; and the ecosystem may be unknown or of little recognised (known) value. More fundamental than these practical problems, the status of nature as property creates a fundamental disconnection between humans and the environment and, as David Suzuki notes in his 1999 book The Sacred Balance, this enables us to ‘act on nature, abstract from it, use it, take it apart; we can wreck it, because it is another, it is alien’. Property is the mechanism through which nature becomes vulnerable to human exploitation, further illustrated by Dr Paul Babie in his article ‘Private Property, the Environment and Christianity’ (Pacifica: Australasian Theological Studies, 2002):

All resources are allocated or distributed among people according to the private property concept. The earth is dying, therefore, because humankind sees it as private property, capital, valuable only if exploited for economic gain. The domestic legal system of every society that invokes the private property concept uses it as a rationale and justification for an exploitative stance toward the earth’s natural resources.

The perceptions that human beings are disconnected from the environment and that nature exists for human benefit are clearly outdated and harmful ideas. On this point, psychologists James Hillman claims that ‘even to think we are separated from nature is somehow a thinking disorder … You can’t be separated from nature’ (The 11th Hour, 2007) Certainly, modern science is illustrating that human exist as part of a broader ecosystem or web of relationships. Rather than evolving to reflect this knowledge out law remains trapped in a universe that no longer exists and as Cormac Cullinan notes in Wild Law (2002) ‘we continue to govern ourselves on the basis of a discredited understanding of how the universe functions’.

The status of nature as property not only enables human beings to exploit the Earth, it provides a weak framework for environmental protection. Under this framework we are forced to adopt a regulatory approach to environment law. This means that once a company has ticked the appropriate boxes, and so long as they stay within the prescribed legislative boundaries, the activity is acceptable. In response, the great majority of work done by environmental lawyers and the most obvious form of protection offered to communities is to monitor corporate activity and check license applications. In this sense, all environmental laws regulates are environmentalists. They regulate the way environmentalists respond, and this makes us predictable. Further, any resulting legal challenge is tax deductable for the corporation and in many instances money is set aside for this contingency.

This approach is further weakened when companies have ‘indenture acts’ that permit legal override of environmental laws. The most obvious and harmful example of this is the Roxby Downs Indenture Ratification Act 1982 (SA) that exists over BHP Billiton’s Olympic Dam lease and overrides the States Environmental Protection, Aboriginal Heritage, Natural Resource Management, Water Resources and Freedom of Information Acts.

In essence a regulatory framework for environmental protection is defensive in nature and is impeding our ability to protect the environment. On the other hand, ‘movements’ are driven by communities, unwilling to accept such a defensive role for themselves and move toward fixing the problems of governance that consistently shove them into that position in the first place. Indeed, people were once treated as property. In response, the abolitionists did not ask for a ‘slave protection agency’— they sought recognition of their rights in law. Securing rights means not fiddling around with regulating how that property can be used. It means changing the very framework of governance that defined those things as property in the first place.

It has been said that there is nothing as powerful as an idea whose time has come. In the past eight years there has been a groundswell of action in this area and communities have been driving rights for nature legislation into law. Some examples include Pennsylvania, where five municipalities (20,000 people) passed ‘rights for nature’ ordinances, saying nature has a right to exist and flourish and giving community standing to advocate the rights of nature. Further, in 2008 the constitution of Ecuador was amended to state that nature has the ‘right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its natural cycles, structure, functions and its processes in evolution’. To ensure these rights the government is responsible for ‘precaution and restriction measures in all the activities that can lead to the extinction of species, the destruction of ecosystems or the permanent alteration of natural cycles’.

Berry has coined the term ‘Earth Jurisprudence’ to describe this evolution in law. Earth Jurisprudence refers to legal philosophies developed by humans that are derived from and consistent with the laws of nature. The law of nature is termed the ‘Great Jurisprudence’ and it invites the human community to ‘take its lead from the universe and not from itself when establishing laws’. By understanding and respecting these processes, Earth Jurisprudence supplies the general principles out of which practical laws can be extrapolated. Two important consequences of this the contention that our law should evolve to reflect the inherent value of nature and that human beings are deeply connected and dependant on nature. This shift has the potential to protect our environment and shift our perception of nature in a way that a regulatory approach cannot.

While Earth Jurisprudence is a major field of research and environmental law internationally, very little has been done in this field within Australia. In response, from 16–18th October 2009 Friends of the Earth Adelaide, in partnership with the Conservation Council of South Australia and the University of Adelaide, Faculty of Professions, Research Unit for the Study of Society, Law and Religion (RUSSLR), will be hosting Australia’s first conference on Earth Jurisprudence.

For more information please visit www.adelaide.foe.org.au

Nevertheless, the background concerns about a natural world that can no longer be taken for granted continue to gain momentum. While the significance of empirical evidence is never straightforward, massive transformations in the broader environment, like the dramatic collapse of the Arctic ice-sheets, in place for millions of years, have an immediacy of meaning compelling for many people. Many scientists agree. Similarly, the increasing occurrence of extreme events such as the recent Victorian bushfires are calling into being a new awareness of what the world and Australia may face over coming decades. The likelihood that developments such as these will have significant, if not entirely predictable, consequences for our future world generates deep foreboding. If the global financial collapse disturbs our sense of certainty, climate change now eats away at the grounds of our being.

In 2007 the Rudd Labour government was elected on a platform that contradicted the denialist stand of John Howard. No one could really know at the time what this commitment meant. The term ‘climate change’ does exist as media rhetoric, requiring little substantial understanding of the phenomenon, and we know that Kevin Rudd does know how to manage the media. But even if it were so that a serious understanding of the phenomenon supported the policy shift, this could only ever be a starting point. After all, serious concern can issue in a superficial view that a new mix of policies will quickly restore balance. Isn’t it so that if we focus our intelligence and our technical resources any problem can be managed?

The larger question, usually ignored, has always been how climate change relates to social assumptions. This is not merely a matter of assumptions about energy, as important as they are. The relevant distinction is between processes that can be manipulated through policy responses and those that work at the deeper level of our core assumptions about social life. While there is no doubt that policy is important, it is also limited, especially if it ignores a fundamental change in the conditions of policy formation.

A focus on assumptions that might lead in the direction of destructive climate change must reach down into the cultural assumptions that we feel, but barely ‘know’. Where these assumptions are ignored or merely re-shaped a little within a broad approach to social life that goes unquestioned — the use, say, of solar rather than gas heating, electric rather than oil-fueled cars — climate change is being treated merely as a phenomenon that requires technical change: lifestyle modifications, limited costs and new policies. It will be argued that this approach will be disastrous in a number of ways, especially in seeming to respond to the ‘problem’, easing public anxiety while locking society into a deepening crisis. Even the understandable tendency to turn the debate into a consideration of whether we should aim for 350, 450 or 550 ppm of carbon in the biosphere — a matter that surely must have an answer — easily and usually deflects the debate into a series of technical strategies that leaves untouched the realm of deep-rooted assumptions about our mode of life which it has now become imperative to question. The question of ‘What is to be done’ is pursued within the terms of the society that we have; not only is large-scale social change off the agenda, the type of society that we have is not brought into the foreground.

This absence of social interpretation is a familiar tendency in environmental writing. The question of the social conditions of environmental destruction is hardly ever raised. We must of course be grateful for the insights environmentalists and scientists continue to bring to the climate change question but this does not preclude coming to terms with the limits of current perspectives. The tendency is to concentrate on what is happening in ‘nature’ and not on how social assumptions structure our relations with it. Examples of this treatment of assumptions could easily be multiplied. In Jared Diamond’s Collapse the social only appears in the broad brush-stroke sense of ‘society’ making choices. Because there is nothing distinctive about the social assumptions that lead to the choices; those choices are, implicitly, forms of stupidity or mistakes. In George Monbiot’s Heat, a non-specific notion of ‘society’ is at work in those choices that encourage air travel — a choice that from the standpoint of global emissions is disastrous. But what is the distinctive nature of such a society, why does it so privilege air travel, both taking it for granted and treating it as essential? This level of understanding is typically ignored in environmental perspectives and this absence has the unintended effect of privileging policy and technological solutions over deeper cultural and social institutional solutions. Given the significance of climate change this hiatus predictably will have tragic effects.

Three recent publications illustrate different implications of this tendency to neglect the social world most people too readily take as given. They are Ross Garnaut’s The Garnaut Climate Change Review, David Spratt and Philip Sutton’s Climate Code Red and Gwynne Dyer’s Climate Wars. Anyone who reads these books will learn from them. They contain a diversity of important information and reflect the maturing of empirical research and debate about climate change over the last five years. But they also contain a level of assumption — one deficient in understanding — that they also share. Arguably, such assumptions lie at the heart of barriers to significant action to combat climate change today.

The Garnaut Report is a report to government. It represents an enormous effort that combines an exhaustive compendium of various developments relating to climate change with modelling for different policy possibilities. It is by definition a policy document, addressed to Kevin Rudd and the Labor government in Canberra. It has been widely criticised by environmentalists and others, especially when the Rudd government adopted a minimalist response with respect to the level of emissions reduction by 2020. The basis for this policy was laid at the feet of the Garnaut Report, although it would be unfair to suggest that this is what Garnaut had intended.

Garnaut’s passion is not at issue. The Report shows every sign of being written by a person determined to take the immensity of the climate challenge seriously. It takes up a great variety of developments now discussed in environmental circles and is both informative and well-informed. However, given it is infused with a belief that all the necessary choices can be made through the policy realm and that these will make the difference that matters, it ignores the underlying conditions of policy formation. Hence it collapses into a series of compromises that indicate its broad, unreflective commitment to the contemporary global order. It is structured around a contradiction. All of its policy proposals to tackle climate change occur within the parameters of neo-liberal globalisation. This is a direct consequence of treating climate change as a straight-forward policy issue that assumes that a series of strategies — even radical strategies — will constitute an adequate response. Many people from various standpoints have been highly critical of Garnaut, but no one has really discussed how his given framework, with its focus on policy, shapes what it discusses and proposes.

The problem with Garnaut’s (and with Rudd’s) emission trading scheme (ETS) generally is its central belief: that neo-liberal globalisation is capable of sufficient adjustment to turn climate change around. For Rudd and his many supporters (for example, David McKnight), this is simply another case of the need for government intervention in an instance of market failure, not unlike what is needed to handle the global financial crisis. Rather than accept this view as a rejection of neo-liberalism, it will be argued that this is in fact a massive contradiction: the core institution that is called upon to respond to climate change by sending out appropriate ‘signals’ — the market — is actually the main driver of the climate change crisis. Garnaut’s focus is upon the level of emissions and what policy strategies can be adopted to reduce them and bring them under control. But if the explicit signals to reduce emissions are promulgated by the market, an institution in its present form that calls out by its very structure further consumption of resources and expansive lifestyles, he has settled for a ‘solution’ that will predictably fail. No doubt, some worthwhile changes may be possible, but they will not be the main story. Amazingly, even a crash program to renew power generation via renewable energy has been put aside. This is to be left to ETS modifications to the market, the market as dominant institution being non-negotiable.

In part this can be understood as a consequence of Garnaut’s own contradictory beliefs. On the one hand, he is deeply concerned about and committed to a significant reduction of greenhouse emissions; on the other, he is a significant architect of the global order through his practical advocacy of institutions devoted to global free trade, in turn legitimised by the pursuit of global growth through expansionist trade. In his book Heat, George Monbiot convincingly argues that the growth of global travel is inconsistent with any serious attempt to control emissions. But he fails to come to terms with how this is an implicit critique of the global order itself. And he does not generalise his work on air and shipping travel to the world of trade. But it is able to be generalised and it amounts to a significant critique of the core institutions of the globalisation process.

Trade and travel on varying scales are activities that have been typical of most societies throughout history. However, under conditions of contemporary globalisation, trade and travel take on qualities that do not compare with past circumstances. They become key institutional expressions of a society that has fundamentally changed its structure: a change in balance from social relations that are predominantly local and face to face to a new social principle where relations maintained at a distance better typify its core qualities. Other technological supports to these social relations where the other person is largely unavailable at a face-to-face level — such as computerised communications and the media generally — are also crucial institutional spheres in such societies. But the social institutions associated with trade and travel are perhaps the clearest illustrations of how social assumptions bear on climate change.

There are serious questions about how trade (or travel) can occur on anything like the scale required in a radically globalised society in the future simply because of the growing shortages of fuel needed to sustain it. But quite apart from that, trade — the lifeblood of an order that expands through global exchange — is a symbol of practical activity that feeds global emissions. No doubt many put their faith in the magic of a technological solution, and this can never be entirely ruled out. But it is a hope that resembles past hopes of a perpetual motion machine. In clinging to this hope there is a refusal to consider the proposition that the social assumptions that drive society towards globalisation are core problems leading to destructive climate change.

There are many reasons for questions around social assumptions in destructive climate change being ignored. For a start, the critique of capitalism from a social standpoint has typically addressed social assumptions as set within class relations. Such approaches have never offered much insight into relations with nature and the environment. This is to say that social interpretation, like practical capitalism, has taken relations with nature for granted. Nature is always implicitly ‘there’ to serve social needs. But this attitude is no longer viable. Society not only ravages what is left of nature but, crucially, also treats it as radically malleable — as able to be reconstituted by scientific technique.

The assumptions inherent in neo-liberal thought that bear on nature and the environment are now widely assumed and are not easily put a side. As is all too evident in the work of that key figure of neo-liberal thought, F. A. Hayek, the central tenets of the contemporary order, supported by the market, are rampant individualism and growth. The glorification of expansion — not only of economy, but also population — is a central legitimation of the neo-liberal idea. Supported by a ‘spontaneous’ background structure — the market — and recently supercharged by high technology, neo-liberalism has unleashed a growth machine that consumes and transforms the world around us. While temporarily constrained by a global financial crisis it is, short of a basic and radical challenge, seen to be the only trajectory available to any process of renewal. Rudd’s response to the neo-liberal global financial crisis, to pose government as an indispensible sector in addition to the market, is of little help. It takes on board neo-liberalism’s own self-understanding which poses the choice between market and state as the crucial, defining issue. His ‘radical’ move is to simply seek a ‘balance’. While a role for government in social affairs is not at issue, Rudd’s response lacks insight into the social processes that bring neo-liberalism into being, as well as how it affects social relations. Nor will any technological strategy be capable of challenging this complex of neo-liberal commitments. It is the main social trajectory, and how it is situated within people’s assumptions, which is the question.

In these circumstances, the consequences for the environment of ignoring social assumptions are beyond calculation. There can be no serious response to climate change without a serious response to what counts as development: the endless elaboration of strategies of social expansion that typify what is called globalisation. Climate change as a policy response needs to be displaced by a response that bites more deeply into what we assume and how we act as social beings.

The recent book by David Spratt and Philip Sutton, Climate Code Red, is highly critical of the Garnaut Report as well as Rudd’s policies. It is a much more political book than Garnaut’s could ever be. In fact it is a mixture of argument about the latest developments in climate change and arguments about how to turn climate change perspectives into a handbook for political activism. Like Garnaut, but in a more focused and economical way, it contains many discussions of practical developments in environmental thinking and analysis that a reader can learn from and even be inspired by. It is infused with a sense of desperation about lack of action on climate change, which would be shared by many people knowledgeable about the findings of climate science. But it takes this desperation into territory that, while understandable, is ultimately wrongheaded and even counterproductive.

The organising idea of the book is the concept of the ‘state of emergency’. As I understand it, this idea as related to climate change first came from James Lovelock in The Revenge of Gaia, where he argues that the situation of the world, combining climate change with various other environmental concerns, is such that an emergency in the form of a war economy is justified and necessary. As a way of signifying the seriousness of the state of the world this seemed like a justifiable strategy to focus people’s attention — to jolt them out of normality. Spratt and Sutton take this idea up with zeal, showing how a political emergency could work as a practical response to the challenge of climate change. While Kevin Rudd would certainly disagree with this one-eyed emphasis upon state action because he seeks a balance between state and market, Spratt and Sutton’s proposal shares with Rudd the idea that the proper focus of practical action lies between the institutions of state and the market. This is a consequence, as was argued in relation to Garnaut, of climate change basically being a policy issue that leaves way of life questions unexplored — although the idea of a more powerful state is an important addition in the case of Climate Code Red.

This emphasis has the consequence of turning climate change responses into political strategies of a rather narrow kind. The whole idea of the political emergency has a long history, one which, as in conditions of war, can readily set in place processes that lack empathy for others and respect for democratic rights. It assumes that the process of renewal is largely known and only requires right action. That the crisis may require a more complex consideration of assumed cultural attitudes and social expectations does not really fit the method. It is true that we have an emergency. It does not follow that we need a political emergency. It is true that if our politicians continue to mouth rhetoric and do nothing of any real substance they may call into being a political emergency. But the hard work lies elsewhere.

Climate change must have a politics, but one that captures the distinctive qualities grounded in what we have previously assumed in our relations with nature. Those qualities are cultural, in the sense of deep assumptions leading us on to a variety of (unintended) practical outcomes. To focus on the complex of commitments within neo-liberalism may allow a little more insight into how we have been drawn into a development nightmare, but to do so it is necessary to go beyond neoliberalism’s self-understanding. For it has no insight into how even Hayek’s recommendations have come to have new meanings under the influence of a cultural revolution that has made our globalised world and drawn society down a blind alley or, perhaps more to the point, onto an unsustainable developmental path.

But this unsustainability has a much larger frame of reference than environmental processes. Whether responding to climate change, resource shortages, food shortages, overpopulation or the global financial crisis — the list is near endless — it is essential to come to terms with a new social force in the world. Neo-liberalism captures some of this social complex, but the way society and the market have been transformed over the last twenty-five years requires a deeper understanding than the reference points celebrated by adherents of neo-liberalism. The neo-liberal market is actually a ‘hyper-market’ when compared with the one with which Adam Smith was familiar. There would be no globalisation, no global financial revolution, no global financial melt-down, no Margaret Thatcher or John Howard without the social process that has issued in various technologies such as the silicon chip and the communications revolution more generally. This social process is typically treated as though it were a natural phenomenon, simply taken as fact; as just ‘being there’. But to leave it there is to ignore the distinctive qualities of global culture and related social forces.

There will be no comprehensive understanding of the kind of society that has taken shape since the early 1980s without a grasp of the emergent role of intellectual practice that issued in the high-tech revolution. For the first time in history the intellectual practices shaping the high sciences have engendered a practical revolution in core social relations, productive economy and culture that has changed the relation of society to nature fundamentally. This relation is now a more abstract one because high technology supports new forms of relations mediated by technology and thereby the emergence of a radical extension of sociality, an enormous expansion of social relations with little reference to place — the global. Without this radically enhanced sphere largely ‘situated’ in cyberspace, there would be no experiments in global finance and expanded levels of growth. Nor would there be that overwhelming sense of omnipotence vis-à-vis all prior societies that is so typical of global culture. And climate change, while issuing from forces with a longer history, would not be running haywire at nearly the same rate. Nor would science be contemplating projects to respond to climate change that threaten to carry us into a post-human world.

There are two broad responses to climate change apart, that is, from trying to deny it. The first and most common response is to find ways of reducing global emissions. But there is another approach that is now being taken seriously in various circles that arises from a view that the world cannot easily pull back from disaster in coming decades and that to avoid these it will be necessary to geo-engineer Earth.

This possibility is forthrightly discussed in Gwynne Dyer’s Climate Wars. This book too is environmentally well-informed. It constructs scenarios of possible futures for different parts of the world if no serious response to climate change emerges very quickly. Needless to say, the scenarios are grim. If it is thought that we are already experiencing a global refugee crisis, read Dyer’s account of the abandonment of southern Europe by European culture, because lands around the equator have become intolerable under the influence of rising temperatures, and their displacement by desperate peoples from Africa. Or if China seems all-powerful because of recent levels of economic growth, read his account of the decimation of the core productive lands of middle-China within decades, with consequences so dire one feels real reluctance to reproduce them in print. It is a fine line, but perhaps some things are better left to the imagination.

It is the attitude of Dyer towards geo-engineering Earth that I wish to place most emphasis on because it raises key contradictions inherent in the present crisis. Geoengineering is about various practical ways in which science might protect the Earth from the consequences of excessive carbon, for example, projecting large quantities of sulphates into the atmosphere to shade the planet. But the larger point is that the high sciences are now taking on this strategy as a project. The argument in this essay has been that environmental writing should not ignore the social assumptions that lie behind climate change; that social assumptions are major causes of climate change outcomes. In the case of geo-engineering the issues are somewhat different. Here it is a question of how climate change may call out the massive powers of high technology to generate a response to it.

Dyer has come to the conclusion that geo-engineering in one form or another is required for us to survive the next few decades. Here there is considerable agreement with a range of commentators that we do indeed face an emergency. Dyer also shares with Spratt and Hutton the view that society is already engaged in geo-engineering by emitting carbon on a scale that is shaping and transforming the Earth. But this use of the term geo-engineering normalises its meanings, suggesting that unintentional causes and the highly intentional act of bringing planetary-scale high-tech solutions into play are one and the same.

To go down this road of geo-engineering in today’s world requires a shift from climatology to general science or physics. It requires a shift from a practical science that transforms particular matters on Earth in a manner consistent with its conquest, to taking Earth as its object with a view to re-constituting it (as Geoff Sharp argued in ‘There are Limits to the Unexamined Life’, Arena Magazine no. 98). This is the project of the high sciences, one first initiated in the splitting of the atom and the making of the Atomic Bomb. Now the full range of high technologies shape new worlds as a matter of course, while humanity loses touch with its place in the world. The re-constitution of the species, the concern of bio-technology, will be matched by the project of geo-engineering Earth. In both cases the sciences will draw on massive forces never before available to humanity and the dangers of moving into a post-human realm devoid of all familiar reference points presses ever closer. If the fears called into being by climate change point to the end of our taken-for-granted Holocene world, what irony if our social responses ensure that outcome.

The global institutions that make up the neo-liberal world represent one of the choices possible after that fundamental shift that ushered in the world of high technology. This particular choice harnessed high-tech to the world of capitalism and as such opened up the possibilities of a post-capitalist order (in the sense used by Geoff Sharp, Arena Magazine 98) that no longer restricts humanity and the Earth to given limitations. This is a world that can only continue in a post-human form, together with a geo-engineered climate.

A world that accepts the high-tech revolution but also works within the limitations of the species and responds to climate change by preserving the natural world is possible. It could be both diverse and complex and in turn would be constrained by a reflexive knowledge of social assumptions. It will need to be more circumspect than what we associate with radical globalisation, with a greater emphasis on local cultures and modest ways of living. The social and individual excitements of expansionist culture and economy will be displaced by the real and concrete joys (as well as hatreds) of social relations significantly grounded in the face to face. When combined with technologies that are emission-free, the real challenge to climate change will have begun.

The books referred to in this essay are: Ross Garnaut, The Garnaut Climate Change Review (Cambridge University Press, Australia, 2008); David Spratt and Philip Hutton, Climate Code Red, The Case for Emergency Action (Scribe, Melbourne, 2008); and Gwynne Dyer, Climate Wars (Scribe, Melbourne, 2008).