Doomed Planet

Green Lunacy at the Parkville Asylum

 

Melbourne University’s new vice-chancellor, Duncan Maskell, wants to “reach out” and “build partnerships” with the business sector. It may be harder than he thinks. Potential donors might catch up with what the university’s Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute (MSSI) is advocating. MSSI Director, Professor Brendan Gleeson, has just co-authored with staffer Dr Sam Alexander a book Degrowth in the Suburbs: A Radical Urban Imaginary.[1]

The book calls for the overthrow of capitalism en route to a mightily shrunken non–consumerist “eco-socialism”. MSSI cites reviews of the book as a “beacon of hope” for a “a tantalizing and realistic suburban future”, as the authors guide us “through the calamities of the Anthropocene”. MSSI last March also published an update by the Gleeson/Alexander duo, “showcasing new and exciting sustainability knowledge”.[2] The authors respectfully quote Karl Marx and the Communist Manifesto of 1848. But they argue for a decarbonised Australia which for radicalism makes Marx and Engels seem mild as maiden aunts:

Attempting to take control of the state may not necessarily be the best way to initiate the transition to a just and sustainable degrowth economy, for even a socialist state may find itself locked into unsustainable growth just as capitalism is.

and

A revolutionary consciousness must precede the revolution. If governments will not lead this process, it arguably follows that social movements might have to change the world without (at first) taking state power… [3]

The authors note that Australian householders to the 1950s did a lot of backyard food-growing, dress-making and furniture-making, and DIY building:

This ‘urban peasantry’ declined however in the Post-War Boom, as the rise of mass consumer capitalism enabled households to purchase goods previously produced within the household. We contend that any degrowth or post-capitalist transition may well see the re-emergence of an ‘urban peasantry’ in this sense, albeit one shaped by different times and concerns.

The more pain for citizens the better, apparently, to “shake people awake”:

In our view, it is better that citizens are not in fact protected from every disruptive situation, given that encounter with crisis can play an essential consciousness-raising role. (175).

They say,

Ultimately, the solution to crisis is crisis: a massive suspension of capitalism as prelude to a new economic and social dispensation…To liberate human prospect, we must cast down not defend the burning barricades of a dying modernity. (15-16)

They extol Cubans for food production in backyards, turning “crisis into opportunity”. The post-2007 Greek debt crisis also furnishes them insights “into ways of dealing positively with challenging and turbulent times”. I’m surprised they haven‘t also cited socialist Venezuela’s shining example of degrowth. They say that living standards, despite degrowth, can be propped up by voluntary sharing and gifting. But they caution the middle classes that “access to expensive handbags through sharing schemes is not progressive if it merely entrenches consumer culture.”

Richard di Natale’s Green’s Party, they say, “has begun to recognize the need for a post-growth economy, even though it treads very carefully knowing that it must not alienate a voting constituency that is still developing a post-growth consciousness” (180). I don’t think di Natale will thank them for that insight.

In one of the sickening clichés of the Gleeson/Alexander academic style – dating back eight years to Alexander’s Ph.D. thesis — the authors time-travel to 2038 and discover what a success their policies have been (145).[4] Large fossil-fuel companies are nationalized in a near “war time mobilization” and their workers handed a job guarantee in renewables (167).

Graffiti daubers in 2038 instead write inspirational slogans: “Graffiti art sprayed all over Melbourne captured the spirit best: ‘I have a little; you have nothing; therefore, we have a little’” (154). Suburbanites share food from their vegie plots, eschew distant holidays (local trips show “hidden delights” within reach of a borrowed electric car), mend their own clothes, eat vegetarian and fertilise their backyard plots with nutrients from their composting toilets. “As old attitudes die, it is now broadly accepted that a civilized society in an era of water scarcity should not defecate into potable water…” they write (158).

“Tiny houses” on wheels proliferate on idle driveways and spare rooms are opened to boarders. Homesteaders enjoy sewing, baking bread and brewing beer. (Home-brewed cider and port feature in Alexander’s previous yurts-and-jam-jar imaginings). People spend their leisure on “low-impact creative activity like music or art, home-based production, or sport. (164)”. But many sport fields get converted to cropping, which is tough on the likes of AFL fans who initially create “instances of social conflict” until won over by Gleeson and Alexander’s insights (159).

The elderly purr along on electric bikes, and neighborhoods share ‘electric cargo bikes” capable of dropping multiple kids at school. The ‘vast majority’ of city people do some food-growing and bee-keeping in their welcome new roles as “urban peasantry”. They convert train-line verges to chicken and goat farms and former car parks to aquaculture. With so much  physical work, people need less public health care, “freeing up more of the public purse for the energy transition” (160).

The ambience at MSSI hasn’t changed much since I last checked them out four years ago. Those earlier pieces — The joy of yurts and jam-jar glassware, Melbourne Uni’s watermelon patch, and A book without peer — can be read by following the links.

MSSI is now running a whole project on eco-socialism’s “Great Resettlement” of the suburbs after we cut loose from our “fatal addiction” to oil, gas and coal. Just for starters, Gleeson/Alexander are now agitating for a top marginal tax rate of “90 per cent or more”,[5] wealth taxes “to systematically transfer 3 per cent of private wealth [do they mean per annum?] from the richest to the poorest” and estate taxes of 90 per cent or more “to ensure the laws of inheritance and bequest do not create a class system of entrenched wealth and entrenched poverty.” In their view, Australia should give a guaranteed living wage to every permanent resident and a “job guarantee” involving the state as employer of last resort (193-4).

The book says the “working class struggle” (91) should involve, of course, a giant increase in State control for a “wholesale eco-socialist transition” (174). There would be “vastly increased democratic planning and perhaps even some rationing of key resources to ensure distributive equity” (195). State and community banks would monopolise most mortgages and use the profits to fund a guaranteed right to public housing (191), with socialization of property per se likely later down the track (190).

To prepare the masses for this Gleesonian world of degrowth, grassroots education campaigns would get special importance and the arts sector would weave “emotionally convincing” narratives about anti-consumerism (195) – — except maybe for climate tragic Cate Blanchett; her portfolio includes a $6m Sussex mansion.

In the book’s sole flash of common sense, the authors say, “Electric cars are still on the rise, but progress is slow as few households can afford them, and their ecological credentials remain dubious in many respects” (164-65).

You may be wondering about this Sustainable Society Institute. It’s not some rogue element of the campus in a reefer-strewn Carlton hideaway but an interdisciplinary Melbourne University standard-bearer. It has a “diverse and vibrant  Advisory Board of experts, leaders and champions of sustainability.” They include Nobelist Peter Doherty and the president, no less, of the university’s professorial board, Rachel Webster.

Housed in the architecture faculty , it has a staff of 21 including four professors, 6-7 PhDs and 10 administrators. There goes about $3m salaries a year in tax and fees, let alone costs of MSSI delegations to annual UN climate gabfests. MSSI purports to produce high impact publications, post-grad research and public debate – although the only debates there are among green-leftists. MSSI has staff exchanges with Germany’s far-left Potsdam Climate Impact Institute, which has helped lure Germany into a crippling energy shortage.

Check out MSSI’s “diverse and vibrant advisory board of experts, leaders and champions of sustainability.” Chair is Melbourne’s deputy mayor Arron Wood, a graduate of the Climate Leadership program run by globe-trotting, CO2-belching Al Gore. Other members include John Bradley, State Environment Department head and previously CEO of power distributor Energy Networks; and various green group leaders like Katerina Gaita, CEO of “Climate for Change”. She’s a fellow Al Gore graduate and daughter of Romulus My Father author Raimond Gaita with whom she shared the jolliest green family chinwags at the Wheeler Centre (below).

The MSSI board, apart from some vested interests, also bulges with corporate high-flyers of the capitalist imperium targeted for destruction by MSSI. These barons and duchesses of a dying order include Rosemary Bissett, sustainability head of National Australia Bank; Gerard Brown, corporate affairs head of ANZ Bank; and Victoria McKenzie-McHarg, strategy manager at Bank Australia. She boasts of leading the campaign to replace Hazelwood power station and stopping another Victorian coal-fired power project going ahead, plus there was her role in the women-in-climate change seminar. Then there’s Adam Fennessy, EY consultancies’ government strategy partner and ex-head of Victoria’s Environment Department. No green lobby would be replete without big emitter Qantas, and MSSI has Megan Flynn, listed as Qantas group environment and carbon strategy manager.[3] Sadly for Qantas, Gleeson’s post-capitalist and climate-friendly world will be a no-fly zone.

Last week Melbourne University’s council and its academics combined to put out an improved free speech policy, not before time as the Institute of Public Affairs audit last year cited some nasty incidents: 

Conservative students launched a membership drive and a posse of Melbourne University academics cried ‘Racists!’ and had the conservative students thrown off campus. Former Liberal MP Sophie Mirabella was shouted down and physically confronted during a guest lecture at the University of Melbourne.

The Gleeson-Alexander “array of revolutionary reforms” includes a scenario “to create (or re-create) a ‘free press’” (p194-5). I hope they don’t have a tax or fee-financed bunyip version of Pravda in mind.

Associate Professor (climate politics) Peter Christoff is a long-time MSSI executive committee member. He’s publicly called for legislation imposing “substantial fines” and “bans” to silence conservative commentators of the Andrew Bolt/Alan Jones ilk. This was a contrast to last week’s university policy to promote “critical and free enquiry, informed intellectual discourse and public debate within the University and in the wider society”. Christoff was addressing a 2012 university seminar aptly titled Law vs Desire: Will Force or Obedience Save the Planet? His draconian sanctions were, as per my transcribing from 20 minutes in,

based on the fact that unchecked climate denialism over time would cause loss of freedom and rights, the death of thousands of humans, the loss of entire cultures, effectively genocide , extinctions… 

The legislation to be contemplated might be roughly framed around things like Holocaust Denial legislation which already exists in 17 countries, focused on the criminalisation of those who public condone, deny or trivialise crimes of genocide or crimes against humanity… 

“The [fifth] objection [to his proposal] is that this is simply unworkable, inquisitorial, having the perverse effect of increased attraction to banned ideas and their martyrs. It will depend on the application of such law. If it is selective and well focused, with substantial fines and perhaps bans on certain broadcasters and individuals whom I will not name, who stray from the dominant science without any defensible cause, it would have a disciplinary effect on public debate. There still would be plenty of room for peer reviewed scientific revisionism and public debate around it, but the trivial confusion that is being deliberately generated would be done away with, and that is a very important thing at the moment.

His proposal was heard with equanimity by the panel comprising Professor Helen Sullivan, Director of the University’s Centre for Public Policy (introducer); MSSI’s Professor Robyn Eckersley; activist Dave Kerin and Professor of Rhetoric Marianne Constable (University California, Berkeley). The young audience showed no negative reaction. Compere was the university’s Dr Juliet Rogers, now a Senior Lecturer in Criminology. (Her Melbourne Law School PhD was on ‘Fantasies of Female Circumcision: Flesh, Law and Freedom Through Psychoanalysis’).

Professor Sullivan, summing up at 1.54.20, says Christoff’s contribution is useful

“just about how you might start to use the law and possibility of the law, to generate a sense of resistance and generate people out of a passivity. I would not want to think Peter’s contribution was off the point; it is ‘in there’ and may be part of the mix and something we need to be thinking about.”

One of three comments on the youtube seminar page reads: “A highly distinguished, diverse group of intelligent human beings openly discussing hard topics to help humanity navigate our way through these hard times with a sense of justice, democracy and reason.” Another begs to differ: “Just listened here to a group of academic Eco-[authoritarians] who all are embracing the biggest scientific swindle of all time. Fascinating insight into lunatics.” 

Christoff and Eckersley in 2014 co-wrote a chapter in the Christoff-edited book “Four Degrees of Global Warming, Australia in a Hot World”.[6] They reached the following “Conclusion” (p201): 

 The American political scientist Chalmers Johnston called 9/11 and the continuing War on Terror ‘blowback’, caused by United States’ imperial foreign and defence policies from the 1950s to the start of the century. If we do realise a Four Degree World…we will have cause to call the results for Australia ‘climate’ blowback or ‘carbon’ blowback.

It seems disrespectful to 3000 murdered Americans to suggest that the attack was America’s fault, or “blowback”.

Here’s more Gleeson/Alexander book extracts, free speech indeed (Trigger warning for snowflakes):

# “A massive, disruptive adjustment to the human world is inevitable. The next world is already dawning. Humanity will surely survive to see it…capitalism will not…it will collapse under the weight of its internal contradictions. (15)

# Their recipe for suburban reform is for “radicals and progressives – indeed all who experience a sense of care and responsibility for viable human futures – to loudly indict a dying but still lethal capitalism for its crimes against human and natural prospects.” (204)

# Eco-warrior David Holmgren, writing in the book’s Foreword: “The global economy is a Ponzi scheme of fake wealth that will inevitably follow the trajectory of previous bubbles in the history of capitalism – but this time, the tightening grip of resource depletion and other limits will make this boom cycle the final one for global capitalism.’ Holmgren says he found the Mad Max movie the “primary intellectual reference point” about the energy-scarce future. (vi)

The co-authors argue that we should not “callously close borders”, as we need to take in not just (so far mythical) climate refugees but invite the world’s poor in general for reasons of “solidarity and compassion”.

“We must oppose the tide of scapegoat racism that seems to be driving the wave of populist nationalism that today calls for the closing of borders at a time when we must be opening our hearts” (18-19).

Concurrently, somehow, the state should enforce constantly reducing resource availability, such as 3 per cent a year, to ensure degrowth plus justice and sustainability (184).

They quote Slavoj Zizek, their oft-cited Slovenian philosopher, describing the capitalist economy as “a beast that can not be controlled”. It must, however, be brought to heel before it propels humanity, and all we presume to govern, into the abyss, they add (9). Zizek is a particularly odd fish.[7]

Their war-cry: “We should raise an infernal racket about the narcosis that has settled in the dying hours of capitalism. Sleepers awake! We have the right to imagine and create a more enlightened world. To work…in the suburbs, now.” (205-6)

Back in the real world, bike and vegetable-friendly co-author Alexander, who lives gas-free, says he has draped his home with solar panels to  produce six times more electricity than he draws from the grid (1kWh per person per day). His annual bill is zero. “None of this has required wearing hairshirts of living in a cave without lights,” he says (120), overlooking how much his free electricity is subsidized by taxpayers, renters and non-solar householders.

Maybe the authors will win the 2020 economics Nobel with their proposal for suburban currencies.[8] Puckle Street forex traders ought to give my Flemington dollars a good rate against their Moonee Ponds buck.

I’ve visited some nice universities like Oxford, Cambridge, Chicago, Bologna and Padua. But maybe tourists should give Melbourne University’s Sustainability Institute a miss — unless, like visitors to Hogarth’s Bedlam, they enjoy observing lunatics going about their strange business.

Tony Thomas’s new book, The West: An insider’s tale – A romping reporter in Perth’s innocent ’60sis available from Boffins Books, Perth, the Royal WA Historical Society (Nedlands) and online here

 

[1] The book isn’t cheap: $65 for the e-book and $85 hardcover for 285 pages. Tip: free download from State Libraries.

[2] Degrowth ‘from below’? The role of urban social movements in a post-capitalist transition. MSSI Research Paper No. 6, March 2019

[3] Quotes with page references are from the book. Without a page reference, they’re from Paper No 6.

[4] In Alexander’s 2011 Ph.D. thesis, he time-travelled to 2029 (18 years out). In his Entropia book of 2013, he time-travelled to 2035 (22 years out). Now he time-travels to 2038, 19 years out.

[5] The UK income-tax record rate was 136 per cent in 1968. It was 83-98 per cent in the ’70s

[6] Routledge, Oxford, 2014.

[7] Zizek was in Prague during the 1968 Russian invasion and wrote, “I found there, on the central square, a café that miraculously worked through this emergency. I remember they had wonderful strawberry cakes, and I was sitting there eating strawberry cakes and watching Russian tanks against demonstrators. It was perfect.” Teaching at Cincinnati University, he said he hated the stupid, boring students and promised them A-grades if they didn’t give him any of their shitty papers, and lower grades if they did. No papers were submitted that term, shitty or otherwise. For students asking his help on their personal problems, his routine response was “I don’t care, kill yourself, it’s not my problem.”

[8] “Most suburbs have also developed their own local currencies that are helping stabilize and support localized economic transactions beneath the surface of the dying markets of global capitalism.” (163)

10 thoughts on “Green Lunacy at the Parkville Asylum

  • Wayne says:

    The Venezuelan’s don’t seem to be coping with degrowth very well. But they must be doing it wrong,

  • PT says:

    I love the bit going on about the “internal contradictions” of capitalism considering these ecoloons are the most contradictory people out there, and seem to have no awareness of it. Some examples:

    They want “no growth” (which must surely mean no population growth). Yet they promote unlimited immigration, so long as they are people the eco warriors classify as “refugees” (which seems to mean they’re “non-White”).

    They talk a lot about 1950’s lifestyles, but repeatedly bad the ’50’s as if it were some sort of dark age hell. Furthermore in the ’50’s genuine quarter acre blocks (1012m2) predominated. It’s not credible that the tiny blocks promoted today could support the varied vegetable patches and quantity of produce that the old blocks could much less support significant chicken numbers as well. Worse, many small yards are paved over to “save water”. This doesn’t even consider the growth of apartments. Yet these people back wholeheartedly both high density infill and apartment building. They also are apparently unaware of the fact that iron is smelted by using coke derived from coal; that all these solar panels and inverters are imported (using oil fired ships); the energy sources most hated by them are nuclear energy (zero emissions)and hydroelectricity – the cheapest source and the only renewable method that can really provided base load power.

    I could go on, but the post is long enough already.

  • en passant says:

    Tony,
    This is the way of the future if we would all just chant ‘Kumbayah’ for three hours a day (and wearing Orange would be a nice touch.
    Having read Orwell I do not find this funny as they truly believe and like good eco-nazis would sacrifice people for the good of the planet, just like the Aztecs, et al.
    By throwing in the ‘feel-good’ cliches it is hard to rationally oppose lunatic fantasies.
    Like all Orwellian socialists their dream is to create equality of misery for all but themselves.
    I worked in Venezuela ans saw the poverty first hand, but nobody starved. Churches and goverment supported NGO’s made sure of that. Yes, life on the bottom rung was hard, but it was life. Now that everyone is on the bottom rung everyone they have solved the obesity issue as everyone starves. That’s the progress socialism always brings, but if you are a tenured, highly paid academic, reality may as well be on the dark side of the Moon. Fortunately, it appears that we are going to take in Venezuelan refugees: “…we should not “callously close borders”, as we need to take in not just climate refugees but invite the world’s poor in general for reasons of “solidarity and compassion”.” The ones we will get will be the devout Christians who opposed Chavez & Maduro, so this is one intake I will not oppose, despite the paradox.
    What paradox? Well these dangerous people want a ‘Cultural Revolution’ (perhaps like Maoist China {20M dead}, Pol Pot’s Cambodia {2.5M dead = 30% of the population}, the Ukranian Kulaks {maybe 3M dead}) from which a ‘New Society’ will arise. Actually, it would never get the chance because when we have declined to a de-industrialised state, other more vibrant people will move in and take over Oz. The real paradox is that having starved ourselves, these [insert suitable words here] want to open our doors to even poorer people.
    Ask me again why I moved to a tropical, fossil-fuelled, cheap electricity country.
    How is the climate in Melbourne this winter (snigger)?
    Finally, would they actually do harm to ‘deniers’ like me?
    From an Australian Musicologist:
    “… some Global Warming deniers would never admit their mistake and as a result they would be executed. Perhaps that would be the only way to stop the rest of them. The death penalty would have been justified in terms of the enormous numbers of saved future lives.” — Professor Richard Parncutt, University of Graz, Austria, 25 October 2012

  • en passant says:

    Apologies for some grammatical errors. It happens when I am angry.
    I note that they failed to add Lysenko to their Board. The fact that he is dead should not be a bar to a well-paid tenured appointment.

  • Salome says:

    Someone cited the Sustainability Institute in response to a comment I made on a Climate Emergency article in another forum. My retort was to the effect that the Sustainability Institute would have a vested interest in saying such things. Now I know more about it, thanks to this article, I can think of what I should have said.

  • ianl says:

    Disenlightenment is complete.

    I had reached this stage quite some years ago:

    http://scottishsceptic.co.uk/2019/06/17/how-to-survive-the-climate-cult/

    We know ep has relocated to Vietnam. For myself, I cannot bear to live in the tropics for any length of time and finding a temperate zone country (north or south) suitable for relocation is a variation of Catch22.

  • Alice Thermopolis says:

    Tony

    Thanks for deconstructing degrowth. Timely too. Yesterday was the 116th anniversary of Eric Blair’s birth in Bengal in 1903.

    As a colleague (and en passant above) said yesterday: “It’s like some crazy Orwellian satire. It would be funny if it weren’t so terrifying. When do the killings and the gulags start?”

    No surprise to see Peter Doherty, medical researcher, on the Advisory Board of “experts and champions of sustainability”. He was also on a panel at a UWA Writers Week event, “Breaking the Impasse”, on 20 February 2016, together with two other enthusiastic climate fixers, Laura Tingle (AFR) and economist, Richard Denniss (Australia Institute). The audience of about 200, packed in the Romeo Tent like sardines in a can, was enthusiastic too, believing we are at some kind of “tipping point” and that only the. intellectual elite can show the way back to the Garden of Sustainable Eden.

    Doherty, there to promote his new book, The Knowledge Wars: “What am I doing talking about climate change?” Indeed, what was a medical researcher doing talking about it?

    Anyway, at question time I stood up and said: “We can’t control global economic growth. We can’t control our population growth. Are you seriously suggesting we can control the planet’s climate?”

    There was a stunned silence for a few moments. Doherty answered: “we have to TRY!”

    He’s clearly still trying, but must have decided to work with SSI on how to control society first.

  • Bela (Bill) Martin says:

    To say that reading this left me with my head spinning is a gross understatement. Mercifully, the inmates are not yet in charge of the lunatic asylum but they are certainly busy preparing themselves for the task.

  • bruce says:

    And what happens to medicine? Down the street from the wooden one bedroom cottages with their wood fires and backyard vegie patches, will there be a modern, multistorey hospital with operating theatres equipped with the latest equipment and anaesthetics, staffed by skilled medical specialists with the latest diagnostic technology? And fully airconditioned of course. The answer is no, because once the green strictures take hold everywhere, the majority of basic industries that underpin all metals, ceramics, concrete, and medical devices and pharmaceuticals will be closed down. The best your GP is likely to do for you if you attend with something which would have required major surgery in previous times is to send you home with a naturally derived analgesic, such as a root to chew on. Read about medicine, and end of life conditions in the 18th century if you want to find out more.

  • Lawrie Ayres says:

    These people all suck on the taxpayer teat and “work” in a taxpayer funded university. Where does that wealth come from? It does not come from hermits cultivating vegetables in their own excrement.

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