By Tracy Sorensen
The campaign to turn back political gains made by the green movement in recent years — symbolised by important victories like the banning of mining at Coronation Hill and the shelving of the Wesley Vale pulp mill — is gathering steam.
WA Premier Carmen Lawrence, sensing the possibility of a post-WA Inc resurrection in the polls, made the shift from green to growth a major theme in her February 12 economic statement/election manifesto. She told what remained of the big end of town that if they wanted to go ahead with some lavish development projects, the government would oblige by ensuring legal claims by Aborigines and environmentalists did not hold things up too much.
Paul Keating has begun making positive noises about a renewed Wesley Vale bid, and John Hewson refuses to talk any more to the Australian Conservation Foundation. The 1990 federal elections, with Graham Richardson furiously shoring up the green vote for Labor and the Liberals casting around for ways of appearing relevant, seem a long way off now.
A recent backgrounder from the Institute of Public Affairs, selectively quoted by Frank Devine in his February 10 column in the Australian, has suggested a new angle for corporate executives wishing to green-bash. In the IPA paper, anthropologist Ron Brunton argues that there is a parallel between the "sorcery" and "witchcraft" of tribal peoples and the beliefs of green movement activists.
Sorcery is evident, says Brunton, in the terrible tendency to see land as something to be held in common. If people can't privately own land, why would they bother to care for it?
There is more "sorcery" in the lack of reverence displayed by some greens and tribal peoples for the sacred qualities of private property. Brunton examines "potlatching" among North American Indians last century: the Indians would give away or destroy excess seal oil and blankets they acquired in the fur trade. Why didn't they transform it into capital, create class society and go on from there? Brunton just can't understand it.
If Brunton's definition of "sorcery" is a belief in practices which bear no real relationship to the intended outcome, then there could hardly be a clearer example than the IPA's conviction that only a deregulated marketplace can ensure environmental protection, or, for that matter, jobs.
Privatise everything, Jeff Bennet urges in another IPA paper, and your environmental goals will be achieved. The only hitches he sees in his scheme for buying and selling "environmental property rights" lie in the bits of the environment no-one can get at: the upper atmosphere, for example. That and beaches (he envisages resistance to the privatisation of those for "purely political reasons") might reluctantly be left to governments to look after.
But in Australia today, algae-clogged rivers and a million out of work stand as rude reminders of the unintended outcomes of capitalist production.
Something better?
Is it possible to do better? The collapsed regimes of eastern Europe, with their environmental crises, have led many to think that there is no feasible alternative to the existing world economic order, and that a greener version of "business as usual" is all that can be realistically achieved.
Yet it is evident that the ecological crisis demands much more: a fundamental reworking of the economic order is necessary to achieve sustainable societies. Within green groups, this emerges in economic policies and demands which objectively go beyond the framework of the "free market".
Green economic policies range from sets of specific suggestions to be carried out within the existing system — for more public transport, or a shift away from particular unsustainable activities such as logging — to the anti-growth, de-development ideas of green author Ted Trainer, whose vision includes an insistence on negative economic growth, vastly reduced international and national trade and an "opting out" of the mainstream economy.
Recently two major national environmental groups — Greenpeace and the Australian Conservation Council — have gone on the offensive in response to the media's jobs-versus-environment campaign.
Both groups have released packages which detail ways in which greener economic policies would create, rather than destroy, jobs. Both present their policies as methods of stimulating (or "pump priming") the economy in recession.
Releasing the ACF package on January 31, president Peter Garrett said: "Australians want to work and they want to protect their environment, but for too long we've been told that we can't have both — that a healthy economy and a healthy environment are mutually exclusive. Nothing could be further from the truth."
Greenpeace national liaison officer Rick Humphries, sending off his group's "Green Jobs" proposal on the same day, said that Greenpeace was "committed to the concept of ecologically sustainable development. Our submissions to the government today are a tangible demonstration that job creation can be compatible with environmental protection."
Proposals
The ACF package includes the expansion and upgrading of rail systems; government investment in wind farms; financial encouragement for solar hot water use; the introduction of least-cost energy planning; tax rebates for farmers spending money on combating land degradation; and the phasing out of payroll tax and its replacement with an increasing energy tax.
It advocates increasing Australian involvement in the global market cts and services, noting that this is expected to be $US300 to $400 billion worldwide by the year 2000.
It promotes eco-tourism, a rapidly growing niche in the world tourism market. An improved national park system would be essential to boost this industry.
Similar themes emerge in the Greenpeace package. The plan includes an urban transport strategy for Sydney, a national freight transport strategy and job opportunities in renewable energy technology. It outlines an ecologically sustainable pulp and paper industry that would "put an end to job losses and the constant debate over resources".
The upgrading of the rail system in Sydney would involve capital expenditure of approximately $2.7 billion over the next five to 10 years. The national freight strategy envisages an investment of $5-9 billion over the same period.
Greenpeace advocates a series of measures to remove the "existing structural economic bias" favouring fossil fuels at the expense of clean, renewable energy sources. Fossil fuels are now priced below their true costs in terms of greenhouse emissions and the depletion of "natural capital"; prices should be increased accordingly.
Implementation
Neither package is presented as part of the policies of a new economic order; they are seen as practical ways the government can, within the framework of the existing economy, make a commitment to spending its way out of recession.
But the implementation of these plans — notwithstanding the claims that the packages would eventually lead to net savings (e.g. through more efficient energy use) and import replacement — would require a major short-term investment of billions of dollars, and a total reversal of the trend towards privatisation and deregulation.
A government beginning to carry out these policies in current economic conditions — and these are the conditions for which the packages are proposed — would immediately cause big business to up stakes and invest elsewhere.
A small example of the way in which the packages rely on demands that cannot be met without more basic changes: the ACF document suggests that government agencies could stimulate environmentally friendly technologies. Telecom, for example, could encourage greater use of photovoltaics to "boost this industry and increase its export competitiveness".
But Telecom is being run as a corporation relentlessly pursuing competitiveness on the private corporation model. It makes decisions based on profitability. To turn this around and have the utility switch to photovoltaic cells in order to demonstrate their effectiveness, the federal government would have to do a general policy about-face and take on the wrath of big business.
Sorry, says Ross Gittins in his column in the February 12 Sydney Morning Herald, the ACF and Greenpeace job creation packages reased government spending. Whatever the merits of the programs, he explains, the problem is that "there are limits to how much government spending can be increased before it causes problems elsewhere: high inflation or, more likely, a blow-out in the trade deficit".
If the idea is to stay within the existing economic framework, Gittins is probably right: "we" can't afford to implement the green job packages.
Unfortunately, the ACF's political strategy has tended to keep that organisation within Gittins' closed loop of capitalist economic logic. Its strong focus on lobbying prime ministers and potential prime ministers has won the occasional victory, such as Coronation Hill. But it cannot bring about the fundamental reorganisation required for an ecologically sustainable economy.