WHAT IS THE PROBLEM
In solidarity with the world wide occupy movements and in protest against the elitist and hierarchical power structures associated with CHOGM, groups have started occupy Perth in Forest Place, a traditional meeting place in Western Australia for political meetings of all kinds.
But apart from the claim to be 99% of the population, what are the issues that should address occupy Perth? We are a temporarily privileged community – we don’t have the same levels of rising youth unemployment as are found in Western Europe, the degrees of political repression such are found in the Middle East, or the homelessness or absolute poverty that characterises the Americas. How do we reach out to the general population of Western Australians, that leads them to join the movement actively, or when that is impossible, to support the movement passively?
For this we need a deeper analysis of the Western Australian situation.
The economy of Western Australia is built upon the 5 R’s; the Resource Industry, the Rural Industry, the Residential Industry, the Retail Industry and the Recreation Industry. All these 5 sectors are completely unsustainable, and finish up disempowering Western Australians.
· The Resource Industry: is based upon control by mega-mining corporations, outside local control, whose sole purpose is to extract Western Australian resources and ship them overseas as quickly as possible. Such mining communities are wholly dependent upon just one industry, and should it be decided outside the community that the mine is no longer economic, the economic shock to the collapse of local employment or retail spending can become terminal. The results of such resource extraction development is to leave ghost towns, as when they go the town collapses. At the same time, as is happening with ALCOA at Yarloop, there are serious issues about local pollution and its health effects upon resident populations nearby. Fly-in-fly-out policies of major mining companies, greatly increases the state’s carbon footprint, giving Western Australia one of the highest figures in the world.
· The Rural Industry: has been a mainstay of the state’s economy for a long time. Farmers and the country towns dependent upon them, have no control over the cost of their inputs or outputs, and have coped through spreading their costs across ever larger acreages. As a result populations of such communities have been forced into permanent decline, businesses have shut and relocated, and the rising levels of dry land salinity seriously threaten their survival, the average farm now supports only 0.8 of a family income, with additional income being supported off the farm. The average age of farmers is currently 57 years and rises nearly 12 months every 12 months. The embedded energy in Western Auustralia’s farming makes it one of the most vulnerable sectors to the rising costs of fuel that will be associated with peak oil.
· The Residential Industry: in the form of house construction, is one of the most important in Perth. The hidden subsidies that go to land developers of all kinds, privatises residential housing profits, whilst socialising future costs, at the same time it encourages the destruction of native vegetation and productive agricultural peri-urban lands, prevents the development of medium density housing, and creates car dependent urban sprawl amongst the worst in the world. At the same time, the forms of housing developed require heating in winter and air-conditioning in summer – at least in most other countries people can devise housing that is sustainable without energy inputs for ¾ of the year. Housing thus is totally dependent upon cheap water, cheap energy and cheap credit costs, which are unlikely in the future. Western Australia, with one of the highest rates of car ownership in the world and a completely undeveloped sustainable transport infrastructure has huge and growing problems. Already we are pushing seriously against the natural limits of the city for water use.
· The Retail Industry: because the retail industry is one of the most highly concentrated in the world, with decisions being made in Melbourne, the average calorie of food consumed in Western Australia travels a huge number of food miles from where it comes from to where it is consumed, and the figure is constantly growing. Hidden subsidies penalise local growers, local markets and local retailing, who are unable to compete with the energy and credit subsidies going to the major retail chains. At the same time the retail industry encourages unsustainable levels of consumption, and through constant advertising distorts human values and makes Western Australia believe that happiness can be bought through consuming more. Given the fact that the age of mindless consumption is coming to an end, and the hidden environmental costs of the consumer society through the waste it produces is coming to an end this is of serious concern for the future.
· The Recreation Industry: of tourism, is completely dependent upon cheap national and internal transport. Perth is the most isolated city of its size in the world. To depend upon tourist revenues, depends upon the nature of the world economy in delivering rising lifestyles to the world’s people. While this may be true temporarily for the rising economies of China and India, to depend upon tourism for all of one’s income, distorts local values, increases dependency upon approval from others and reduces sustainability. Tourism also places huge demands upon cheap water and power costs, and depresses labour costs, ultimately reducing wages in a never ending attempt to attract the “foreign dollar”.
At the moment the average Western Australian does not realise the degree of their vulnerabilities in this way, and so the Occupy Movement through its outreach programs need to begin a drive towards awareness raising and education of the Western Australian population, of a kind never before been attempted.
WHAT IS THE SOLUTION
Given these problems what is the solution? In every case we see the solution is one and the same. What we need is not business as usual, the pandering of vested interests or continued dependence upon the 5Rs. What we need is a form of ecologically sustainable community economic development (ESCED). Community Economic Development aims not at maximising the extraction of non-renewable resources from the community, but in maximising local community resilience, ensuring that each dollar spent in a local community circulates an extra two or three times through local hands before it leaves to bring in resources from elsewhere. It begins with the examination of local vulnerabilities, and then using what resources are available to build local sustainability and reduce these vulnerabilities, in such a way as to improve people’s quality of life while reducing levels of consumption.
There are seven factors that will help ESCED.
1. Build Community: This is the first and most important factor as all else depends upon it. We need viable communities, as research shows that when difficulties arise, and they are coming, those who live in supportive and caring communities cope the best.
2. Simplify Your Lives: This is really only possible if you are living in a supportive and caring community. At the moment, we have crossed an important threshold where complexity now reduces the quality of life. Simplify and your standard of living will improve.
3. Maximise Creativity: Creativity is reduced if people have no time, and simplification of life will increase leisure needed for creativity, We need creativity of every kind; political, economic, social, cultural, artistic, technological, spiritual and environmental.
4. Spreading Non Violence: Our western Australian community is currently based upon structural violence against Aborigines, against refugees and migrants, and other groups. Structural violence dehumanises both the exploited and the exploiter.
5. Preservation of Local Knowledge and Wisdom: There is much local wisdom that in our modern world is being lost. Some of this comes from the collapse of sustainable communities, both indigenous and white Australian, when lost is difficult to rediscover.
6. Resacralising the Earth: Our current unsustainability comes ultimately from a faulty belief system about the nature of our relationship to the Earth itself. A shift in consciousness is necessary to preserve the changes discussed above.
7. A Financial/Economic System Supportive of the Other Six: At the moment our financial/economic system leads to the destruction of the six factors above, not to their encouragement and development.
The Occupy Movement, by championing these 7 factors, will be able to reach out easily to ordinary Western Australians, as it speaks to their concerns, and to the concerns they have for their children’s future.
