Australia - global sociopath
Scott Mann
Australia as a global citizen
seems hell bent on economic
and ecological destruction.
There are obvious problems in treating such a radically divided and
unequal society as contemporary Australia as a single actor on the
global stage. It is far from clear that Kerry Packer, with his personal
fortune of $6.4 billion and his wealth increasing by $3.2 million a day,
actually inhabits the same world as the more than 30% of adult
Australians primarily dependent on government welfare payments.
There seems little in the way of common ground here.
But then again, given the substantial erosion of working class power
and representation over the last 25 years, it is perhaps not such a
problem after all. Legislative restriction of trade union rights, and
economic policies that have created and maintained high levels of
unemployment have combined to widen the gulf of wealth and power
between the classes. With the entrenching of economic rationalist
ideology amongst Labor Party leaders, as well as Liberals, and the
effective stifling of public debate about any kind of serious socialist
alternative, the voices of dissent seem to have been repressed deep into
the national unconscious, leaving the ruling class of corporate
executives and political leaders free to speak with a single voice, and to
act with a single purpose.
Thus identifying Australia as a world citizen, with the 'directing
mind' of the local power elite of corporate and political policy makers,
we see an individual in urgent need of restraint and rehabilitation -for
their own good and that of the rest of the global community. Here is an
apparently sociopathic personality, unconcerned with the social
wellbeing of others or, indeed, with anything other than their own most
immediate and short-term interests; a powerful argument for
super-national institutions of criminal law enforcement in the interests
of the wider world community.
Ecological destroyer
Scott Mann teaches law at the University of Western
Sydney.
02001 Scott Mann
email: [email protected]
VQL. 26,NO. 1, FEBRUARY. 2001
As Ted Trainer notes, Australia has the worst environment record of all
the developed countries, with the world's highest mammal extinction
rate and greatest production of municipal waste (687 kg per person per
year, compared with the OECD average of 513 kg), and with nonrenewable energy consumption higher than the OECD average. While
other OECD countries have cut their energy consumption per unit of
GDP by an average of 40% since 1970,Australia has made no significant
reductions. In a world of dire and worsening water shortages, Australia
has increased household water use in cities by 25% in 20 years.'
Australia is the only country that failed to meet the London
Convention on Sea Dumping's 1995 deadline to cease ocean dumping
of industrial wastes, and continues to dump highly toxic heavy metals,
chlorine and other compounds into its coastal waters. At the same time,
Australian forests continue to be cleared at world record rates of around
5000 square kilometres a year. As Bob Brown and Peter Singer point
out, an estimated 5 million hectares of native vegetation was cleared in
the decade 1983-93.2 'In 1990 alone, 664,000 hectares were cleared.
AUSTRALIA
-
GLOBAL SOCIOPATH
This is in the same league as rainforest clearing in Brazil,
estimated at 1.1 million hectares in 1990-91.'3 Where
legislation has been introduced to try to slow such clearance,
as in NSW, the State governments have been hopelessly lax
in enforcement.
One third of Australia's semi-arid zone of 1.8 million
square kilometres is still being grazed commercially by
cattle or sheep, mostly on huge properties owned or leased
by ultra wealthy individuals and private corporations. But
the land does not have the capacity for commercially viable
beef production, with soils low in nutrients and 'fertility
depending on the recycling processes of fragile ecosystems
and the maintenance of the top few centimeters of the soil
p r ~ f i l e ' The
. ~ hooves of cattle and sheep destroy this vital
topsoil, rapidly degrading the fertility of the land.
Neither can the fragile, old and poor soils of Australia
continue to support current wheat production. 'It has been
estimated that with the export of our 1989 wheat crop, some
$200 million worth of soil nutrients left the country
Landcare tries to stem the tide but 'does not have the baseline
studies it needs. It also lacks the backup of laws to halt
clearance of native vegetation and to ensure the protection of
native biodiversity on private as well as public land.'6
Classical Liberals might claim that the only victim here is
the nation itself; the crime is otherwise 'victimless', and
should, therefore not be counted as a crime at all. But as with
the chronic alcoholic or drug addict the burden ultimately
falls on the wider community to care for the body destroyed
by decades of dissipation, and for the dependents, terrorised
or abandoned.
Australia's very high rates of consumption of fossil fuels
-along with the massive rate of old-growth forest clearance
- as well as representing far more than its 'fair share' of
non-renewable resources, means that it also contributes far
more than its 'fair share' of greenhouse warming of the
surface of the earth. This means the destabilisation of ocean
and air currents producing significant changes in the
weather, altering the frequency and severity of bushfires,
droughts, tropical cyclones, floods, landslides and coastal
erosion.
Rising sea levels will destroy farmland with salination, as
well as flooding of soils, fresh water supplies and cities, with
a rise of one metre inundating five million square kilometres
of the world's lowlands, destroying one-third of all cropland
and creating 50 million environmental refugees. This would
include flooding one quarter of Bangladesh, one-seventh of
its cropland, and displacing 12-15% of its population. So
would such a rise inundate 12-15% of Egypt's cropland,
with much of the heavily populated Nile Delta flooded if the
seas rose just 50 centimeters. In the Pacific region, parts of
Indonesia, as well as hundreds of Pacific atolls would be
flooded after first losing their fresh water.7
Extrapolating Australia's current policies towards refugees
into the future, it is far from clear that these desperate displaced
millions will meet with a friendly reception should they seek
sanctuary amongst those most directly responsible for their
plight. Rather, like current victims of super-exploitation and
regression overseas arriving by boat on Australian shores, they
can presumably expect to be locked away in appalling
concentrationcamps in the desert, awaiting deportation back to
their flooded homelands.
While Australian researchers have led the world in
developing sewage treatment and sustainable energy
systems, such as the solar cells developed by Martin Green
and his team at the University of New South Wales, it has
been the politicians and entrepreneurs of other nations, such
as Spain and Germany, who have encouraged and supported
the M e r development and applicationof such systems. Those
in Australia have provided no such support. As Ian Lowe points
out, while the Spanish PM has installed Australian designed
solar panels on his roof, Mr Howard angrily removed similar
panels put on his roof by Greenpeace members, and saw that
the installation team members were arre~ted.~
While other nations have extended effective sewage
treatment and imposed carbon taxes and restricted motor car
access to city centres to reduce fossil fuel consumption,
successive Australian State and federal governments have
completely failed to follow these leads. Instead they have
continued to dump untreated sewage and industrial waste
into the ocean, subsidised diesel fuel with its potent
carcinogenic emissions, and signed binding contracts with
private corporations for the construction of tollways that rule
out competition with new public transport for decade^.^
Most recently, at the sixth conference of parties to the
climate convention (COP6) in The Hague, it was no surprise
to see the Australian government siding with that of the USA
in blocking progress towards implementing the 1997 Kyoto
protocol, aiming to achieve a small reduction in greenhouse
gas emissions worldwide. Instead, the very aptly titled
Australian Minister for Forestry and Conservation argued
enthusiastically for the right of the worst polluters, including
Australia, to actually increase such emissions, on the ground
of defining certain of their forested areas as 'carbon sinks',
offsetting emissions through 'soaking up' atmosphericcarbon
dioxide.
It is true that trees and forest litter in the soil can function
as long-term carbon sinks. But to see a Liberal government
that has done absolutely nothing to stem the tide of
destruction of Australian native forests using those that still
remain as an excuse for increasing the nation's carbon
pollution of the biosphere is truly stomach turning. Perhaps
even worse is support for a US position that would grant
'carbon credits' for newly planted forests while deducting
nothing for accelerated destruction of old growth forests.
This same Australian government has recently legislated to
allow electrical power generation through burning 'waste
wood' on an increasing scale.
Ignoring global economic cause and effect
Ecological concerns have never been top of the list for
Australian policy makers in recent years. Instead, they have
struggled with issues of reliance on the export of primary
commodities with declining terms of trade, dependence on
the import of capital and shortages of managerial expertise.
Their solutions, dictated by economic rationalism, have
centred on policies of 'freeing up' market forces through
reducing tariff protection for local markets, privatising
government instrumentalities and deregulating financial
transactions. Despite massive - and ever increasing historical evidence to the contrary, it continues to be claimed
that such steps will lead to modernisation and growth of high
tech industries, reduced unemployment and improved living
standards.
In fact, such tariff cuts have encouraged the shift of
manufacturing operations to low wage, low cost areas
overseas, leading to appalling exploitation of overseas
populations and business closures and job losses at home,
particularly in car production, clothing and footwear. Such
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A U S T R A L I A
- G L O B A L S O C I O P A T H
local unemployment, along with part-time, casual and
sub-contracted work, has been increased and enforced by
new - and ruthless - corporate managerial ideologies,
demanding radical 'downsizing' and 'rationalisation'.
Meanwhile, the expanding stratum of parasitic bullies the 'managerial and supervisory ranks', 'necessary' for
enforcing this intensified 'discipline' of work -continue to
increase their demands on the limited wealth of the nation.
While the real wages of the working population stagnate or
decline, those of senior managers ascend into the
strat~sphere.'~
Indeed, as the managers are well aware,
without significant productive gains through large scale
investment in new technology and the opening up of new
mass markets, their own benefits crucially depend on their
extorting an ever greater surplus from the declining group of
actually productive workers. And like the priests of feudal
Europe, promising the peasants a glorious afterlife in return
for appropriate subservience and effort on Earth, so do the
economist servants of the new feudal elite continue to
promise better days for all sometime in the future as the
reward for increasing sacrifice today.
Nor do the new feudal lords give back very much of their
ill-gotten gains as tax to fund the social wage of health,
education and welfare. On the contrary, accumulated and
inherited wealth remain virtually untaxed, with lots of
allowances for the well-off; company profits are taxed at a
much lower rate than wage-earners' incomes and capital
gains tax has been reduced to half of income tax. Nor are they
even willing to submit to the limiteddemands that the system
does make on them. As Frank Stillwell notes:
ACOSS estimates that about $8 billion of tax revenue is lost
annually through exploitation of tax loopholes and shelters;
including $2 billion through the abuse of provisions regarding
trusts and private companies, $1 billion through negative
gearing, $600 million on company cars, $3 billion through
'unfair superannuationbreaks', $1 billion through property tax
loopholes, and $500 billion through artificial income splitting.
The major beneficiaries are the relatively wealthy. It has been
reported that, of 100 leading wealth holders on the Business
Review Weekly 'rich list', 80 declared a taxable income of less
than $25,00O.'I
With their vast incomes, the irresponsible elite suck in
high cost luxury imports, manufactured at the expense of
necessary subsistence resources for the poor and destitute of
the world. And, through so doing they increase the balance of
payments deficit in Australia. The ever-declining revenues of
the state mean ever-declining resources for environmental
clean-up and regeneration and for assistance to less developed
areas of the world.
Similarly, far from encouraging investment in the
production of new technology, or reducing real costs to
consumers, financial deregulation and privatisation have
created an economic environment conducive to rampant
speculation and monopoly price fixing by private service
providers. High technology continues to be imported - at
huge cost to the balance ofpayments -to replace rather than
create jobs at home. The floated currency remains at the
mercy of international markets, allowing wealthy overseas
speculators to dictate government economic policy enforcing the miseries of high interest rates (which, in turn,
draw in more capital from overseas, increasing balance of
payments problems through greater demand for overseas
interest payments) and slashed welfare budgets.
As Stillwell points out, Australia has actually become
more dependent on exports of basic commodities and low
VOL. 26, NO. 1, FEBRUARY 2001
value-added materials than it was at the beginning of the
trade liberalisation process, and the largest export remains
that major contributor to global warming - coal. Not only
does this material produce more carbon dioxide (per unit of
energy generated) than any other fuel, but its combustion
also releases sulphur oxides and sulphates, mercury and
other toxic metals, along with carcinogenic organic
compounds. This toxic pollution causes millions of cases of
avoidable human illness and death around the world every
year, with acid rain from coal destroying huge areas of forest
in Europe, Asia and North America.
Along with combustion, coal extraction also creates
environmental havoc, with deep mines acidifying streams
and producing subsidence, as well as endangering the lives
of mine workers, while surface operations destroy great
swathes ofnatural ecosystems, dumping tailings into valleys
and leaving the land unfit for future agricultural operations. So
that, in recent years, even China, as the world's largest coal
producer, is rapidly closing down mines and establishing
coal-free zones. And all ecologically enlightened commentators
call for an immediate halt to the burning of coal as fuel.
But Australian entrepreneurs and politicians push on
regardless, mining, exporting and burning this filthy stuff,
and demanding special treatment from the international
community because of the extent of their dependence on it.
Nor is this material exported to poorer regions so as to reduce
their dependence on destruction of old growth forests for
fuel and subsistence farming. It goes instead to wealthy
industrial areas to be burned up in the production of high tech
luxuries.I2
Close behind coal as major exports, come wheat, wool
and beef, the production of which, as we've seen, inflicts
massive damage on local ecosystems and is quite
unsustainable in the longer term. Again, such material goes
to wealthy purchasers, rather than to those in greatest need.
And its production uses up resources that could have
provided sustainable subsistence for the poor and the
hungry.
At the same time, Australia continues to export
wood-chips - six million tonnes in 1995-96, mostly to
Japan, produced through massive destruction of old-growth
forests. As Singer and Brown observe:
The industry is effectively transferring the ancient forests of
Australia to the rubbish tips of the northern hemisphere. It is an
industry that harms those from whom it takes, as well as those to
whom it gives; for it also undercuts the paper recycling industry
in Japan, increasing the need for expensive landfill sites and
causing jobs to be lost there.I3
Most recently, in face of such obvious 'backwardness' of
the Australian economy, the Liberal leadership has identified
a shortage of skilled labour - particularly in the areas of
science and information technology - as a fundamental
cause of the problem. And their proposed solution, rather than
reversing the massive cuts they inflicted on the educational
system in 1996, is to encourage migration of skilled labour
from overseas; allowing the taxpayers of other nations
(including much poorer nations) to foot the bill for creating
such skills, and then stealing them. Very rational and efficient.
But should we perhaps, at least, see tariff reduction and
transfer of manufacture as worthy sacrifices for the benefit of
those -previously unemployed - third world populations
now offered the opportunity of work in the factories of the
transnationals? While it is true that transnationalcorporations
are shifting their manufacturing operations to less developed
5
AUSTRALIA - GLOBAL SOCIOPATH
regions to take advantage of cheap labour in those regions,
low wages are still better than no wages at all. As Paul
Krugman maintains:
Global poverty is not something recently invented for the
benefit of multinational corporations ... [and] the only reason
developing countries have been able to compete with
established first world industries is their ability to offer
employers cheap labour. Deny them that ability, and you might
as well deny them the prospect of continuing industrial growth,
even reverse the growth that has been achieved.14
A closely related argument also concerns those whose
(allegedly) misguided ecological concerns would similarly
seek to lock the third world into permanent backwardness
and poverty. For even though these new third world
manufacturing operations are indeed often particularly heavy
polluters, the solution to pollution itself also lies in economic
development, creating the wealth to pay for environmental
clean ups and for new, cleaner technology. Certainly,
continued poverty and backwardness is no solution.
The first things to remember here, of course, are the
appalling conditions of many of these workers, including
children, terrorised and bullied in the workplace, withoutjob
security, with low wages and long hours and appalling
standards of health and safety. And this is all so completely
unnecessary given the productive wealth of the modem world,
as we see very clearly when we compare the salaries of the
managers of the transnationalswith the wages of their workers
in India, China, Indonesia,
and the Philippines.
We must also recognise the particular vulnerability of
desperate third world populations in face of the massive
advertising and promotional power of the big corporations.
We must look at the consumption patterns of this new third
world industrial proletariat, subject to ideological
manipulation by western transnationals, persuaded to spend
their hard won wages on 'high status', high cost but low
value imported foods and drugs - including cigarettes and other consumer goods that lower, rather than raise real
living standards and prevent the local production of better,
safer products. As Self points out, 'much of the hard-won
foreign exchange is spent on cars and imported goods for the
new middle class, or on "cargo cult" luxuries such as
coca-cola, widely advertised and drunk in poor countries
which have excellent h i t drinks of their own available'.15
It is true, as Krugman argues, that:
the growth of manufacturing -and the penumbra of other jobs
that the new export sector creates - [can have] a ripple effect
throughout the economy. The pressure on the land becomes less
intense, so rural wages rise; the pool of unemployed urban
dwellers always anxious for work shrinks, so factories start to
compete with each other for workers, and urban wages also
begin to rise.I6
But, by the same token, such rising wages and -heaven
forbid - signs of unionisation and worker militancy can
now simply signal another move to still more desperate and
backward territories.
At the same time, this growing inequality of incomes
undermines the creation of the mass markets that have
previously fueled economic expansion and prosperity. As
Stillwell points out:
to the extent that investment in production facilities is attracted
to particular localities by low cost wage labour, there is a 'race to
the bottom' in living standards. Different localities engage
vigorously in begger-thy-neighbourcompetition but that leaves
open the question of who will buy the products ... if all nations
6
are simultaneously engaged in reducing labour costs, there is a
global tendency to economic over-production - unless the
enhanced spending power of the managerial and professional
elites outweighs the depressing effect of wage cutting."
So either the whole system disintegrates, or the gap
between the new feudal elite and the rest of the population
increases still further, with more and more people simply cut
out of the world economic system.
And since the whole reason for the shift of manufacturing
operations is to reduce costs, with low wages devoted to
subsistence rather than environmental protection, it is
ludicrous to argue that such a step will somehow contribute
to protecting or reconstructing the global ecosystem. On the
contrary, as Stillwell points out, it produces another sort of
'race to the bottom' as firms relocate their resource
extractive and polluting activities in those countries most
keen to attract capital investment, even at the expense of
environmental standards.I8
The massive foreign exchange and stock market crises
that struck a series of newly industrialising nations in 1997
and 1998 showed how weak and vulnerable such nations are
in face of the whims and prejudices of wealthy foreign
investors, with decades of 'progress' reversed overnight in
some cases. Australia's voice is hardly to be heard amongst
those calling for radical reform and regulation of the world
monetary system to avoid M e r such disasters in the future.
Recent developments in Papua New Guinea with massive
pollution of the Ok Tedi and Fly river regions through
dumping of tailings from BHP's copperlgold mine in the Star
Mountains, along with the cyanide spills from Australian
mining operations in Eastern Europe, clearly demonstrate
the attitude of Australian multinationals to indigenous
overseas population^.'^
At home in Australia, the logic of continued emphasis on
'global competitiveness' in labour costs and downsizing
draws the nation into this 'race to the bottom', forcing
working class wages ever lower in a futile effort to compete
with the already below subsistence wages of authoritarian
overseas regimes. Local industries, producing for local
consumption, collapse due to reduced demand, creating
unemployment and general economic decline. In the
process, Australian workers lose the ability to purchase the
products of third world manufacture.
Suggestions for behavioural reform
Of course industrial development is a vital necessity for the
poorer parts of the world. But this needs to be an organic and
balanced development of broadly based, mutually sustaining
industries to replace - and repair the damage of - the
one-sided dependence on raw material export bequeathed by
decades of colonial and imperial domination. In all areas the
emphasis needs to be, first and foremost, on balanced and
organic self-sufficiency - with world trade as a bonus,
rather than a vital necessity. Of course, this means a great
deal of help from the first world to allow others to achieve
such an outcome.
Along with cancellation of debt and much expanded
direct assistance, a good place to start is with ethical trading
agreements, enforced by the developed nations, that require
certain basic conditions relating to wages, hours, health and
safety and environmental sustainability to be fulfilled as
preconditions for allowing goods to be imported. And if this
Continued on p.21
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