I never told you “I am fond of you I found solace in your life, solace being part of the team that picked rocks off your paddock, sorted the seed maize. ate corn-beef sandwiches for lunch and that you asked me, when I was 11, to join your card group to make up the numbers for a monthly saturday night of 500 or Canasta, that you were my father’s best friend and farmer companion you at ours we at yours and always machinery books out on the dining table you both mulling and discussing how to fix, re-engineer, or make, a solution. and after that, talking about social things with my mother.”
you never married settled in your isolation attentive to your neighbours attracting select visitors. it just seemed the natural thing, after my father died, to cook food and rally my mother and go to your place one unplanned New Year Eve.
I last saw you, sitting at lunch in the nursing home as I marched my brief contracted time and thought, “I’ll come back another day and have a yarn to Clive”. and you died during your shower the next morning.
Now, 5 years later, amidst my disappointment with myself failing the solace of a memory of a last conversation, I am still given to believing there is time.
Today I received the official Australian Government referendum booklet to insert chapter XI (9) into the constitution. The proposed changes to the constitution will be to add:
“Chapter XI – Recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Islander Peoples 129 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice In recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the First Peoples of Australia: (i) there shall be a body, to be called the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice; (ii) the Aboriginal and Torres Strait islander Voice may make representations to the Parliament and the executive Government of the Commonwealth on matters relating to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples; (iii) the Parliament shall, subject to this Constitution, have power to make laws with respect matters relating to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice, including its composition, functions, powers and procedures. “
I encourage everyone to fully read this statement to really get clear what it says and what it doesn’t say. For example, get clear that we are talking about both Aboriginal and Torres Strait islanders. Ask as you read it, do I really know what each of these words and phrases and sentences refer? For example, do you know who a Torres Strait Islander is? Do you know who an aboriginal person is? Do you know what “make representations” means and what it doesn’t mean?
It is important for all readers to note that (iii) means that the Australian Government (parliament) has authority over the Voice and from government to government there is a possibility that the composition, power, functions, and procedures are changed in line with the policy position of the government of the day. I think it is reasonable to expect that a conservative government will tend towards marked limiting the powers of the Voice and even a labour government will tend to restraining the powers of the Voice. The actual functions and powers etc of the Voice may actually lie in the hands of the cross-benchers and greens. As I expect future elections to increase the independent ranks in the federal parliament, so the power of that group to impact the Voice will be considerable. Indeed, I wonder whether the Voice itself provides the platform for some First nations leaders to become well known across Australia and capable of being elected as independents in federal parliament.
The official referendum booklet comes with a fully sculptured argument for the YES and NO vote campaign.
The first thing I noticed after reading these campaigns is that they fall down into 2 classic social distinctions: i) the hopeful: those with an eye on a future that isn’t going to happen anyhow with all the hope that it will transform what appears broken in our society ; and ii) those with an eye on the risks that are being taken by going on a journey into that future that isn’t just the default future given by the current social and political framework.
I am, myself, a cautious person. However i am also a hopeful person. And while some people fall down fully as anti-risk and others fully as risk-taking, these two distinctions are not dichotomous. I prefer to have my cake and eat it. My, now, considerable experience of life (usually called being an old fart), has lead me to the conclusion that I can have my cake and eat it, that we as a society can have our cake and eat it. On one condition. Life requires effort. A good life requires extraordinary talent, education, research, and innovation. Democratic political life requires constant gardening by the population to both restrain the authoritarian’s power while ensuring we foster those extraordinary domains.
What does all this mean for the Voice? The Voice is a recognition that the Australian Government as currently constitutionalised since 1901 has failed and will continue to fail to bring First nations Peoples into a democratic process that works for them. It is a recognition that, in having a political system that fails First Nations peoples, also impacts mainstream society, especially by having us less democratic and more authoritarian than we say we value. The current response by the Qld Government to imprisoning 10 year olds (mostly indigenous children) in watch-houses is one such reach for authoritarianism in the face of far better practices to reduce juvenile crime. In other words, indigenous peoples, because they currently have no real power at the voting booth, are constantly being treated through an authoritarian lens rather than the lens of research and innovation, as befits a robust democratic society.
I expect the Voice will lead to all sorts of additional haggling in the policy arena. This will create some modelling for how our democracy might more fully develop to engage the population more fully into the future.
While there is no issue beyond the scope of the Voice, any well constituted representation will be savvy in the choice of their battles as per their cost-benefit analysis. In other words, we could leave the agenda of the Voice, to the Voice without feeling we need to hold a maternal or paternal nag over them. The parliament itself, of course, can apply a schedule for representations from the Voice such that it minimises delay in legislation. It would, of course, be of no use to ask for Parliament to use the same schedule for the political parties represented, and to limit the ability of parties to delay legislation on the table, or even getting on the table. In other words, certain politicians do seem to be arguing the issue of delay from a hypocritical stance.
The No vote has determined the Voice is more bureaucracy, and certainly I expect the institution to come with the relevant support required. Improvements to the main problems besetting first nations peoples does indeed require more public servants. It requires exactly the right amount of accountable administrative management. This is part of that extraordinariness I wrote above. The other big part of that extraordinariness is in the requirement for widespread expert social innovation services that have never been developed nor applied with any efficacy in Australia. It is my hope that the Voice will be a champion for social innovation as befits the best practice solutions for health and poverty. This is immanently doable but for the lack of political will.
The Voice is the possibility for restoring the failure of integrity with the original inhabitants of this land that occurred with the british colonisation and invasion of the lands, and the ongoing manipulations to ensure those peoples remain divested of the land. Such lack of integrity keeps Australia as a nation, in the doldrums of growth and development. We lag, not because of our incompetence to bring innovation to the table but because, in denying the indigenous peoples of Australia, we live in a world of denial. And more than any one area of denial, it is our denial of our own self worth that comes from failing to bring indigenous Australia fully into the national fold. When denial is our mantra, we deny ourselves a role in our own democracy, leaving ourselves to criticise from the sidelines, our own long time loosing team – Australia.
The Voice will not only be an amplification of the voice of first nations Australians and the possibility for bringing innovative solutions to bear, from developing productive and flourishing communities to vastly reducing prison numbers, the Voice will also become a lightning rod for every misconceived Government policy and every failure of mainstream communities to bring effort to bear in their own determination of unity. In this, I apologise to the First nations peoples and the leaders for, in supporting the Voice, bringing the additional grief you will be subjected. And in this, I promise to be in the public square making a reasonable argument for expectations and stalwart rejections of essential racists, political grandstanders and the socially indolent.
This is not anything like the definitive article on being an Australian.
Today, 26th January 2023 is the official day chosen as Australia Day, the day when Australian’s celebrate our national identity.
I begin by acknowledging that for the First Nations’ peoples of Australia, this day does not reflect for them the possibility of being part of that national identity but rather reminds them of the confusion, conflicts, deaths, wars, cultural and family disruptions, loss of home and betrayals. I take a moment here to acknowledge that the First Nation’s peoples do not have a treaty with their English conquerors or the current other Australian peoples, nor have they ceded the lands known as Australia.
Take a moment, reader, to imagine the pangs you may have felt when first leaving the home and community you grew up, or a home you raised family for 20 years and then left. These pangs of grief are created by the embodied relationship we have to a place that has become an extension of our selves. We might say, the place is Us-I . Indeed if we take but another moment to quietly reflect who ‘I” am, it might dawn on us that who “I” am is all of the consistencies of our world, from the pathway to the door of our house, the way our family moves around in it, the rituals we have during the week and year from doing breakfast to organising special events. All these consistencies in life flow through, wrap around, bear down, and lift up, our own physical structure. They are who we become. And when another such as a grown child, leaves that place, a tendril of our own structure is pulled away. We might think it is like real physical pain. It is exactly real physical pain. The embodied life “Me”, “I”, “Us” is not a separation at the skin. The skin, and every other sensory organ, is a million dynamical attachments, keys, joints, between our perception of a discrete, contained and constrained, and controllable part of ourselves with what we perceive as the external, fluid, unstable, uncontrollable life. While we often think of ‘life’ as the thing we live in, this is just a perceptual comfort. WE ARE the life we life and everything that shows and has attachments with our attachments, that we draw ourselves against or that draws against ours. When a thousand of those attachments no longer exist to tag to, we notice it just as we notice with pain, the loss of a finger to a sharp knife.
Now imagine that the consistencies of Us is many thousands of years in the setting. Now in a very real sense, every rock, every blade of grass, every movement of air, every call of a bird, rustle of a lizard, enjoins Me-Us to rejoinder. In that place-time, where does my consciousness lie, where does my perception end? Perhaps Me-Us is the vast landscape the my hundreds of thousands of ancestors and me have roamed. Now imagine that every rock I can no longer evoke in my daily or weekly or annual ritual because some new intruder has pushed me back from rejoinder. And pushed me back. And broke the rock. And took me right away from all the landscape. Might not, at some time, the loss of so much of Me feel like I am dying, hanging on by the merest thread, perhaps not even a core, perhaps just a dissipated structure without connections, joints, attachments, really only 10% of who I WAS, perhaps less.
What would it take, then to restore Me to Who I AM?
With what capability is remaining of Me and what capability is available in the new space-time and the Others now here, I and Everyone and Everything is moving, feeling about for connection, and anticipating rejoinder.
Much of our landscape is now the landscape of our national population and the structure we have built, physically, politically and socially. Some of us, like many First nations people, have not been party to the new structures and find there are few places for attachment and connection, and the social landscape yet has offered few structures for attachment and less for wholehearted rejoinder. As a white fella I can only imagine from the resonances I feel in my own bones of ancestoral loss and tearing down and building up and other crimes against Me.
We are not yet, Australian, we who live here and only have a home, here. We are short by millions, billions, of attachments to the vital elements, the life within the geographical lines, each other, the First nations’ peoples.
We will vote for the Voice this year at referendum because we will want to have the whole of everything and everyone with the lines, in rejoinder. That is what it means to be an Australian.
We will move Australia Day to a moment when we saw that, indeed we were all in this national project together, as equals and in the possibility of ritual and rejoinder.
I will finish this reaching out and seeking new attachments by this more lighthearted but so very true reflection on who We are, Australian, Not yet Australian, even Un-Australian. Enjoy.
The problem: That many western countries exist – individualistic, pluralistic and conversationally incompetent. Many eastern countries are less individualistic but not any less intolerant of behaviours contrary to their own. Nonetheless, the problem of the economic and social impact of immigration is not solved by a moratorium on immigration as if, when we return to immigration there won’t be a problem. The problem of social cohesion and workforce development is only addressed from within the environment of robust immigration. In otherwords, unless we are out there playing football, we are not going to solve the problem of why we didn’t win the competition last year.
The key to the ‘resolution’ of cultural diversity comes from holding to a number of principles:
1. We are not dealing with an Australian problem, we are dealing with a global problem in which Australia has a particular role, especially as a model for others.
2. Australia, or any country, cannot deal with it’s challenges in isolation from the global challenges.
3. The global challenge and it’s Australian component is based in inequity. The primary solution is in creating a policy environment that reduces the range of inequity especially through taxation laws ( a big conversation in itself).
4. The institutional development that can be afforded by equitable tax reforms can thereby: foster a vital Vocational Education and Training (VET) sector, as well as all areas of learning, research, services, and innovations; and ensure the national and state coordinated ‘highways and byways’ in transport and communication are world best: and further encourage regional and even remote productivity development;
5. The challenge of diversity, however, relies of the widespread acknowledgement that robustness, resilience, adaptability and innovation is a function of diversity and the harmonization of diverse aspects. What we are seeing in much of the research is the failure to take advantage of the second often because there is a message out there among many cultures, that, all the evidence of the last 100 years in Australia to the contrary, groups of people still think they can’t mix. And by evidence I mean that in every corner of Australia, more and more people are mixing quite well, cross-culturally. Does this mean it’s easy. No. And any relationship inside a monoculture is also not easy. Take anyone’s marriage as an example. Intercultural communities bring a valuable ‘mirror being held up’ to the damaging unspoken cultural messages in any culture. The harmonization of diversity has a simple backbone – conversation. It can be called intercultural conversation or it can be called what it should be in a democracy – community conversation.
6. Equity from a political point of view (democracy in action) calls for community frameworks and processes that give access to all Australians – old hands and new – to the community conversation. By conversation I mean a dynamical engagement around the challenges, needs, and futures of every community, towards policy decisions that work for everyone. And that conversation must be reflected at regional, state, national levels. A nation alike Australia can be at the forefront of the world in this, and showing other countries the way forward. Australia has lost admiration around the world by not being a stand for a cohesive diverse society. And the more we step back from that, the more social cohesive and mental health problems we will have. Rather many people of the world are looking to some other country for the championing of their best life.
7. Communities will continue to grow with the global population that is expected to get to 9 billion people by 2060. That is 20% growth over 40 years. Simultaneously the migration of people due to the effects of climate change is already quite massive in some countries and the pressure on Australia to accept many more migrants and refugees will only increase yearly. We could ignore that pressure. In that case, we will have escalations of boat people far above any possibility to stop them by our navy or afford detention for them. Far better that we have a robust immigration policy and spend the money now on means that increase productivity and create a sophisticated inclusive democratic process, and ensure that we are grown 20% or more over the next 40 years. In reality this might best be done by first developing institutional foundations with small increases in immigration, allowing learning for best practices to guide increasing numbers of immigrants so that the last decade of the forty years would see the majority of migrants to Australia.
8. In Australia, as a complete political entity we have barely done anything in the field of harmonizing cultural diversity yet where those small groups of people have taken up the challenge (the models) we know that a flourishing future built in diversity is the future. Ecological sustainability, water resources, etc, and other problems like crime, are dealt with and improved through this same process.
9. Human beings everywhere and from everywhere are totally able to solve the problems of their and their community’s life. It requires access to collaborations in the community and accountability of both old hands and new hands.
Andrew Nikiforuk of The Tyee, writes, “So, if our current civilization is to survive in any shape or form it needs to fundamentally rethink all energy spending, from how we harness it to what we use it for. As Michaux concludes in his number-crunching report, “replacing the existing fossil fuel powered system (oil, gas and coal), using renewable technologies, such as solar panels or wind turbines, will not be possible for the entire global human population. There is simply just not enough time, nor resources to do this by the current target set by the world’s most influential nations. What may be required, therefore, is a significant reduction of societal demand for all resources, of all kinds.”
Erin Remblance responds, “How we make that transition to lowered demand should be the most prominent discussion in our media, classrooms and households. Why is it nearly invisible?”
She goes on to note, “Years ago the great psychologist Bruno Bettelheim wrote a book about what happens to people in dehumanizing environments. Having survived two Nazi concentration camps, Bettelheim knew the subject well. Near the end of The Informed Heart, he offered this prescient observation. Jews who accepted the status quo and believed in business as usual perished. Those who did not believe in business as usual left before the Germans arrived, sailed to Russia or America or joined the resistance. Many survived. “Thus in the deepest sense the walk to the gas chamber was only the last consequence of a philosophy of business as usual,” wrote Bettelheim. It was “a last step in no longer defying the death instinct, which might also be called the principle of inertia.”
Now a widespread inertia prevents us from seizing control of our fate. We must do all we can to overcome that torpor. The implications are plain. Those communities that reject business as usual and cut their energy spending and all the materialist values that go with it, just might survive the long emergency and write a different ending to this story.
I have two responses to Erin’s points. They are my elaboration on the two key notions in her comments: Business as usual, and scarcity of energy.
I open talking about business as usual because seeing this clearly is the foundation of any transformation of civilisation, and technological and energy paradigm shift is pivotal in sweeping civilisation transformation along. (See particularly the copious and optimistic works of Jeremy Rifkin). What some have called ‘spiritual malaise’ and others “tranquilised obviousness”, business rarely is as usual, and if, like the history of European Jews, you punish a group regularly in small to harsh ways, I reckon they might just think the next bit of noise is just more of the same.
It does take quite a bit of training to be able to get up in the morning and take a fresh look at what’s happening, and that requires even putting yesterday in the past. It also requires being fully cognizant of our biases and mindsets. Anyone who says they don’t have any are doomed to play them out. What then do we hold to that gives us some predictive viability? First is cultivating an independence of thought, a detachment from the tribe whether professional, national, sub-cultural, or party as usual. And that is not antipathy, even the opposite, what others have called “indifferent love”. This stance supports an ability to: follow the evidence from several fields of science; hold doubt without discarding anything until resolved in evidence; and reviewing fully any arguments against. This ability for independent thought supports the interdependence of all independent thinkers for it is only in the recognition of true independent inquiry (search for truth) that a collective of thinkers can divine a greater magic.
This situation we find ourselves is a call to be so much more than we have ever been, so much more than we wound up being, individually and collectively. We will either rise to the call or we will fall. And whatever happens will be what happens. As the WWII holocaust found traction, Lydia Zamenhoff chose to go back to Poland from the USA in the face of immanent danger, she chose to support the last moments of her community and die with them. We don’t know how many hands she held but we do know she died with them. Those of us in the frontline of transforming this civilisation may well find ourselves in a future of ‘holding hands’. We must accept that this is one possible future.
In terms of policy, economics, and human behaviour, the basic economic reality of scarcity does work. Many people living in rural Australia grew up looking after water usage. If you have to make a meagre annual rainfall and a watertank last a year, you have watch usage like a hawk. On the other hand, if old people can’t afford heating in winter, they could die. Well, that’s a time honoured tradition. Australia has ineptly allowed gas companies to sell much of its gas, internationally, leading to scarcity and high prices for energy as we enter winter. I’m expecting an unusual winter death rate among the elderly this year. Feeding into an inflationary boom, those on more basic incomes can be expected to suffer housing dislocation. This in, perhaps, the wealthiest per capita nation on the planet.
Meanwhile the environmental impact of windfarms is already been felt and the next phase of renewable energy farms will not be given such an easy ride. The real difficulty is that we aren’t learning fast enough because, here in Australia, for the last 20 years 80% of our intellectual energy has been spent on arguing climate change denialism with our government. In the end, the example of the holocaust goes to one characteristic of modern politics so far – we are often very slow to the table. Timing being the essence, and we can’t escape the clear timing the IPCC have provided, we will damage our way out of this catastrophe. The question is, which is the lesser poison or the better trade off? Presumably the one that improves the chances of the ecosystem and human civilisation. There’s not much chop in voting for the view that 1 or 2 or 3 billion people can just suffer and die. There’s not much chop in loosing much more of the world’s ecosystems and species than we already have, because that will inevitably lead to the billions of people suffering and dying. The inextricableness of human development and a narrow range of climate and a particular variety of ecosystems, is conclusive. I support the work of the Foundation for Climate Restoration, the third and often overlooked leg of climate solutions. The scalability of technologies of removing CO2 from the atmosphere over the next decade is likely to have less impact and perhaps even a very positive total impact on ecosystems, than any other climate change solution, namely renewable energy development and population adaptation. To solve this crisis, to transform global civilisation so the next phase of human development is of a higher order of workability for people and ecosystems, we’ve got to work urgently together on all fronts, even if it means government ordered rationing.
The UK in WWII proved that a people faced by a single existential threat can adhere to austere rationing policies for several years. Even in the 1930’s the mathematical and nutritional knowledge was ample so that there were no cases on malnutrition in the UK during WWII. Today, we certainly have the capacity to design sophisticated systems for the allocation of energy, the development of renewables, the weaning from fossil fuels, and the equitable establishment of systems worldwide, together with an food security systems. What is still required is for nationalistic governments to get to the table put aside their extreme patriotisms for the future of humanity and the planetary ecosystems that support us.
We have a political choice: the easy choice or the hard choice. The easy choice is for all national governments to come to the table with good will to design global systems that will create both equity in resource access and as rapid a transition from fossil fuel energy as possible. The hard choice is to continue to bicker and terrorize each other.
Either choice will lead to the new civilisation, will lead to the transition off fossil fuels and to equitable distributions of resources. Even if making the hard choice, once a billion people have died and billions of others have suffered through the defensive and aggressive attitudes of extreme patriots, the billions of people of good will remaining,will see those extremists off. Such has been the way of history to date. Will this be the moment we will be able to put our past in the past and take the easy way, or will we insist that the past dictates our actions and only massive numbers of deaths will convince us that another model of governance and social organization is viable.?
Owen's Meanderings 