Comment by Peter Anderson
In recent years the Australian Democrats have become known for their concern with the key issues of the environment and social equity. With that in mind, it is interesting to look carefully at the environmental proposals included in the party's policy statement, Getting to Work.
The Democrats' program sets a course somewhat different to the destructive path taken by the major parties. Unlike Labor and the Coalition, the Democrats do look positively at environmental concerns and attempt to develop an alternate policy approach to the crude economic rationalism of the major parties.
Nonetheless, the policy document sets out to a large extent to tackle the major parties on their own free market ground.
Two questions arise: How effectively does Getting to Work counter the rationalist scenario? And just how successfully can environmental concerns be defended within the general parameters of the economic rationalist debate?
The brief environmental section of the document begins with the observation that "there is an obvious trend towards greater environmental decay, which necessitates major changes to the structure and operation of industry". The need for greening industry runs like a vein through the policy document.
According to Getting to Work, "the most concerted attempt to formulate economic policy responses to meet the environmental challenge is the Ecologically Sustainable Development (ESD) process initiated by the Hawke government" but later ignored or abandoned by Labor and the Coalition.
The document also evenhandedly endorses the Australian Manufacturing Council's view that "best practice environmental management" — BPEM, production processes and products consistent with ESD — should become a national and corporate goal.
In fact, Hawke's ESD process proved to be little but window dressing. The Wilderness Society refused to participate in the government's ESD working groups from the outset, and Greenpeace pulled out following the adoption of Labor's "resource security" legislation. The Australian Conservation Foundation and the World Wide Fund for Nature issued their own 270-page response to the final ESD report.
There are strengths as well as weaknesses in Getting to Work. It justifiably argues for the application of national environmental standards and for the creation of a bona fide National Environment Protection Agency, and for a number of other useful reforms. But when it comes to the processes by which such reforms could be implemented, tegorical: government intervention would be required, and a range of market incentives and penalties are proposed.
"Market solutions can be relied on", the document argues, "where prices reflect total costs and the operation of the market furthers the public interest". However, given the relentless drive by industry to socialise many private costs, especially infrastructure costs and waste disposal, the occasions on which either of these criteria are met are extremely rare.
The Democrats argue that where companies lack the investment resources needed for BPEM or to tackle environmental problems, or where their international competitiveness would suffer, the government should step in with compensation and assistance.
Like the recourse to market mechanisms, this is also problematical. The effect of the former is to pass on private corporate costs to the consumer, causing a drop in average living standards. The latter would unjustly compensate companies which caused the resource and waste problems in the first place.
In fact, there are more socially useful and more equitable solutions that flow from appropriate public ownership, which Getting to Work does not consider. It would be superior, for example, to require that funding for compulsory resource use and pollution control standards on industry be met out of past company income gained through delinquent environmental practices.
If companies will not or cannot meet these costs out of past or present profits, and continue to operate, they should be nationalised and the costs of meeting strict environmental controls paid for out of revenue from a steeply progressive income tax system.
There are also problems with proposals to raise prices on non-renewable resources and polluting activities in order to reduce their use, or the proposal for increasing petrol excise as a means of replacing current car registration fees.
"Placing a dollar value on 'free goods' (clean air, natural habitats, clean water, etc) is one mechanism which will lead to the more judicious and efficient use of such resources, as companies and individuals will have to pay for their use."
This is an increasingly common idea. But, using the price mechanism to prevent overuse is inequitable and ineffectual. Those who discontinue use due to price increases are usually at the bottom of the income scale; many companies could simply pass on the resulting higher input costs and go on polluting.
In most cases, overuse is the product of privatised (as opposed to socialised) decision making. The best example of this is in transport: attacking the use of the private motor vehicle to reduce exhaust emissions by raising the price of petrol misses the essential point that the high cost and unavailability of public transport is the major the first place.
Getting to Work rightly argues that markets should play only an appropriate role. "Implicit to the proper working of a market are the twin notions of reasonable equity between the players and full knowledge of the factors required to make informed decisions about whether to buy or sell" (emphasis added).
Can it be established, however, that such conditions exist anywhere outside the textbooks of conservative economics? How can there be equity between employers and employees, between big capital and small business, between the very wealthy and the very poor?
Getting to Work argues that the market "will only work well if questions of equity/justice and scale are democratically decided and imposed from outside". But that begs the question, how will democratic decisions be made and by whom will outside solutions be imposed?
The logic of this case leads inevitably to the conclusion that the only way to adequately ensure rational use of resources, environmental preservation, equity and justice is through what might be called socially responsible planning, a concept Getting to Work does not contemplate.
Getting to Work does call for greater public participation in planning and project approval, but the proposal appears as an add-on rather than central to the program. However necessary and realistic it might be, social planning is a concept which has been driven from the spectrum of acceptable ideas by the rationalist onslaught.
Ultimately, to tackle the environmental crisis it will be necessary to take decision making out of the hands of the owners of private capital and place it with democratically constituted community organisations operating within the parameters of a plan drafted by government and approved by the overwhelming majority of society.
With regard to the international implications of the environment policy, Getting to Work addresses only two main questions: the foreign debt and immigration.
The argument that Australia's foreign debt aggravates the excessive exploitation of natural resources is not a convincing one. Perhaps the only time such an argument was offered was to support Labor's decision to relax restrictions on uranium exports. But whether the debt was the cause of or the pretext for that decision is a moot point.
Australia does not have a "Brazilian" problem, in which debt/poverty is the cause of much of the destruction of the Amazon forests. In any case, even in Brazil the answer does not lie in the further processing of natural resources for domestic use or export (along the lines suggested for Australia by Getting to Work) but the cancellation of the iniquitous debt.
Similarly, the argument that a sustainable economy needs a stable connotations. While there is a widely recognised and acute danger of global overpopulation, arguments for limiting Australia's population growth by restricting immigration are very dubious.
The claim that the current immigration system "takes no account of demand within the Australian labour market", and that because of migration many skilled workers have been unable to find employment, sounds like an echo of the old White Australia argumentation.
The real point is to support those organisations that will defend the rights both of residents of long standing and newly arrived migrants while simultaneously upgrading all activities related to international solidarity and aid to the world's worst-off nations.