South Wind

The British prime minister, Keir Starmer, startled delegates at his party’s conference last week by calling for “an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, the return of the sausages”. They knew he meant hostages and he quickly corrected himself, but too late. The video was already on its way out for the world to see, hear and laugh at.

This misstatement by a public figure known for being cautious and deliberate was unsettling, but also oddly appropriate. The dreadful carnage of this conflict is sanitised by diplomats manoeuvring delicately around a settlement, and never mentioned by the leaders who feed off it. 

Starmer’s audience expected him to present as being fully in charge, as it does all those taking on the mantle of authority. We expect our public face to be assured and certain, and it’s a shock to see the human behind the mask. 

But it’s a shock we need to get used to, because the mask of authority – the pretence that all is in hand when it manifestly is not – is doing irreparable harm in a time when global order is in a heap of trouble.

Future anxiety, including but not solely about climate change, is one underlying driver of this disquiet. Another is neoclassical economics, based on the work of the Chicago-based Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman and taken on as gospel 40 years ago by most Western governments, including Australia. 

Neoclassical economists argue that markets are essentially rational, that higher taxes are always bad, that wealth at the top tends to trickle down to the bottom (a seriously discredited notion still adhered to by some zealots) and that smaller government equates to more growth. This economic belief system and the debates swirling around it have heavily influenced public policy for decades.

The realisation that it was fundamentally wrong has been slow to take hold, in part because (like Middle East diplomacy) it uses language that conceals the brutal reality of the lives it’s supposed to represent. But as veteran economics journalist Ross Gittins has written, neoclassical concepts have damaged government everywhere. 

In Australia, a series of outsourcing inquiries including Robodebt and financial services have exposed excessive zeal among public service economists (“econocrats”) – and revealed a dark place from which economics is only just starting to emerge. But it’s not there yet, and it’s not alone in needing a makeover. The rest of us do too.

A fortnight ago, the Cambridge University journal Global Sustainability published a research paper arguing that the world’s current economic system is a major driver of social inequality and environmental damage and therefore in dire need of reform. 

Authors were physicist and sustainability expert Mark Diesendorf from UNSW Sydney, Geoff Davies of ANU’s Research School of Earth Sciences, Thomas Wiedmann from UNSW’s School of Civil & Environmental Engineering, Joachim Spangenberg from the Sustainable Europe Research Institute in Germany and economist Steven Hail from Torrens University, South Australia.

As the paper points out, human activities have crossed most of the nine planetary boundaries defined by Earth system science, thanks to the domination of government policy by mining, property, financial and other interests. We won’t reverse this calamitous course without breaking the grip of neoclassical economics.

In effectively capturing government, these vested interests employ an intellectual framework to justify and support their power and to exploit the world’s natural assets and most of its people – avoiding responsibility for the consequent stream of waste. In the process they put future life on Earth in serious danger.

Critical analysis of neoclassical economics over the years, says the paper, has had little impact on economics teaching or public discussion. Even critiques by established “conventional” economists have failed to mitigate the pernicious neoclassical influence on public policy.

Ecological economics, emerging in the 1970s with a focus on planetary and public health and social justice, was resisted by influential neoclassical economists, notes the paper. Such alternative economics approaches have been restricted to just a few Western universities, and their research has been excluded from major economics journals and kept out of the public spotlight.

A few years before he died in 2006, veteran US economist John Kenneth Galbraith wrote of “leading active members of today’s economics profession… [who] have joined together into a kind of politburo for correct economic thinking”. He would turn in his grave to know that “kind of politburo” still holds the world in thrall in 2024.

Neoclassical economics is undermining our response to humanity’s greatest threat, catastrophic climate change. It lies behind repeated approvals for coalmines and gas hubs. It rewards drivers of environmental degradation while inhibiting public action to prevent it. It’s a cancer eating away at our future.

It was possible to feel sorry for Jeremy Rockliff last week as he sought to bat away an insistent Greens leader, Rosalie Woodruff, wanting to know if he had “actually read” Tasmania’s 2024 State of the Environment (SoE) report. 

“There is significant information to absorb,” he told Woodruff – well over 600 pages of it. And absorb it he must.

Fifteen years have passed since the previous SoE report – three times what it would have been had the government and the responsible agency, the Tasmanian Planning Commission, adhered to the 1993 legislated mandate of a report every five years. 

The report’s foreword notes “the complex challenge of communicating environmental information” so as to shape policy and influence outcomes “amidst changing national and global contexts and growing environmental pressures”.

The pain of its birth is testament to that. In 2002 then-planning minister Michael Ferguson, persuaded to act on the 13-year absence of an SoE report, gave the commission less than two years to produce it.

And the commission delivered, producing a document that’s a cut above any of its three predecessors in 1997, 2003 and 2009. This is an admirable blueprint for dealing with challenges which, as the report makes clear, are daunting.

“The mutual dependency between Tasmania’s economic prosperity and the health of the natural environment cannot be over-emphasised,” said the report.Tasmania’s “defining challenge” is to meet the sometimes-conflicting objectives of ensuring the environment is properly cared for while social and economic needs are met.

We’re starting from a low base. The report lists numerous issues demanding urgent attention including degraded marine habitats from warming waters and invasive species, rapidly declining numbers of migratory shorebirds, fragmented native vegetation cover and other threats to native species, declining river health, and poor progress on reducing greenhouse emissions.

The SoE report calls for better monitored and protected marine habitats and coastlines. Faced with a growing list of endangered species, we need better mapping of native plant communities, measures to stop illegal land clearing, coordinated culling and other measures to control deer, cats and other feral animals. We need an expanded and well-funded system of reserves and a permanent statewide soil monitoring program. 

The condition of waterways including inland rivers, lakes, wetlands, and estuarine waters has been degraded by discharge of farm nutrients to waterways, the demands of a growing irrigation network and urban water issues. The SoE calls for an ongoing statewide water monitoring and analysis program.

Environmental issues have been creating political martyrs ever since my old Mercury colleague Hugh Dell lost his ministerial adviser job over the flooding of Lake Pedder 50 years ago. Labor minister Andrew Lohrey was sacked for being too outspoken on the Gordon-below-Franklin hydro scheme, which also saw the end of Doug Lowe’s premiership. Early this century the forest wars dogged the career of Labor premier Paul Lennon and saw off the Labor-Green government under Lara Giddings in 2014. 

All through these times the Greens under Bob Brown, Christine Milne, Peg Putt, Nick McKim, Cassy O’Connor and now Rosalie Woodruff, have been working away, sometimes within government but mostly outside it, to “keep the bastards honest”. Now, a bevy of independents in both houses pursue the same aims.

In 2022, at the start of this SoE process, a request for extra resources to meet the tight deadline drew a blank. But somehow the commission and the scientific and technical experts employed for the 2024 SoE got the job done.

While relying on voluntary citizen science out in the field, these people were paid for their work, but their level of remuneration would not count as pocket money in another project of state significance, the proposed AFL stadium in Hobart – a project for which both major parties have declared their undying support.

Serious action on the far more critical SoE recommendations seems a remote prospect, but it shouldn’t. Given that it was Ray Groom’s Liberal government that set the SoE process in motion 30 years ago, it ought not to be a stretch for Jeremy Rockliff and his 2024 Liberal team to commit to implementing SoE recommendations in full.

Written in the plain, honest style of all good science, this is a document for our time. Its authors – many home-grown, many from elsewhere – have one thing in common: a deep love of their island home. In particular, they care for the natural values that are our island’s signature, the things that set Tasmania apart from everywhere else in the world.

These special values are what the State of the Environment report is asking Tasmanians to protect. It demands to be taken seriously, because not to do so is not to care about our island home, and for a government that is unforgivable.

American democracy has survived slavery, the Civil War and political skulduggery thanks to an ingenious arrangement of checks and balances – and plenty of goodwill. Then along came the 45th president.

Donald Trump has dominated the affairs of his nation like nothing or no-one in living memory. And in this election he has seemed unstoppable, at least until Vice President Kamala Harris became the Democratic candidate.

US presidential debates used to be staid, structured, largely predictable affairs, but Trump’s arrival on the scene changed everything. From the day he stepped up to debate his Republican primary rivals in 2015, his complete disregard of formal limits has turned politics into a spectacle that no serious student of humanity can ignore.

The 2015-16 Republican primaries were like nothing the party had ever experienced. A record field of 16 opponents was utterly defeated by Trump’s ability to steal the limelight with outrageous personal insults and a complete disdain for the truth.

They and conventional media treated Trump as a political novice, a fringe-dweller and a simpleton who would eventually self-destruct. That was their first mistake. Throughout that long primary campaign he crushed experienced opponents by breaking all conventions and constraints of traditional conservative politics. 

Among his many political positions, the one that stood out then and now is cultural grievance. He was and remains a mouthpiece for every base prejudice against difference: people whose skin colour, language, religion, birthplace, gender – you name it – aren’t the same as his. 

Against the background of a chequered past with women, leading into the general election he debated the Democrats’ battle-hardened Hillary Clinton, an event marked by his standing close behind her and talking over her.

The consensus that Clinton won that debate missed some critical markers. What Trump lacked in wisdom and verbal acuity he made up for in forceful behaviour and brutally simple messaging. Central to that is a personality trait which according to his niece, psychologist and author Mary Trump, was well known in the family from his childhood.

“The kids in the neighbourhood alternately despised and feared him; he had a reputation for being a thin-skinned bully who beat up on younger kids but ran home in a fit of rage as soon as somebody stood up to him,” she wrote in her family memoir, “Who Could Ever Love You”. 

“That is one of the most damning and dangerous things about Donald Trump,” she added in a CNN interview last week. “He’s never evolved from that. That’s still who he is… This is a man who has spent his entire life pushing the envelope to see what he can get away with, and as soon as he realises nobody’s going to stop him he pushes the envelope far more.”

Trump, who likes to give his opponents derogatory descriptors, has called Harris Comrade Kamala (alluding to her liberal politics) while deliberately mispronouncing her name. 

At the start of last week’s televised debate Harris, who had not previously met him, approached him, shook his hand and made a point of pronouncing her name. During the 90 minutes of debate she would often mention him by name and turn to face him. But Trump could never bring himself to look in her direction and referred to Harris only as “she” and “her”. 

Harris also called out his lies, as did the debate moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis. The speed and accuracy of the latter’s fact-checking – conventional media doing what it should always do – unsettled Trump, used to riding roughshod over questioners. 

One of the “facts” they corrected, using a rebuttal from the city manager of Springfield, Ohio, was Trump’s false claim that “illegal” Haitian immigrants were abducting and eating Springfield residents’ dogs and cats. 

Trump and running mate JD Vance later doubled down on those claims, extending the lie to include an equally discredited allegation about Haitian migrants snatching geese from parks. The claims have had a devastating impact in Springfield, which had provided asylum to legitimate refugees who are now in fear for their lives.

Trump’s career still has a way to go. Even if he loses the election, he and his acolytes have already flagged their intention to do what they did four years ago and seek to overturn a negative outcome, except this time with far more preparation. We should take that as seriously as we would an approaching cyclone. 

Early this month Trump spoke scathingly of climate scientists as “poor fools” who “have no idea what’s going to happen”. The driver of political chaos is also a driver of climate chaos, one more reason why he should never step inside the White House again.