The Familiar from a Different Angle - Renting, Moving and Disorientation

Last week I was planning to go to a yoga class at a neighbourhood house in the adjacent suburb of Elwood. It's a place of picture-book picturesqueness with narrow winding streets and rows of art deco apartments and intimate shopping centres with independent boutiques and an oversupply of cafes (there's also a flashy, beachy aspect that we won't go into). It is heavily freighted for me because I lived at the Elwood end of (then ultra-hip) St Kilda for one year back in 1988. Nowadays both suburbs are just ultra-expensive, but they still carry for me the weight of the bohemian romanticism that blinded me to the necessity of home ownership for so many years. Much of the charm that attracted the young to these suburbs in the seventies and eighties came from the strong presence of Jewish people from Eastern Europe who had settled there after the Second World War, bringing their rich artistic and culinary cultures with them.

I mapped out the route I would take to the yoga class using Google maps. It was a trip of only seven or eight minutes, but I have lived in Melbourne all my life and although I am not really familiar with Elwood's mish-mash of streets it is not as if they are foreign either.

Yet I could not find the place in time for the class. I drove up the wrong street and then I was in the right street but with not a clue which section of it the neighbourhood house was in. The class started at 6.30 pm. At 6.45 I turned for home feeling cheated, my attempts to reforge my life in this new place stymied. Yet there was a deeper problem. I couldn't really imagine myself at the yoga class. There was something fairytale for me in my mental image of it. As if I was fated not to make it there, because it wasn't quite real.

This raises a mild mental problem that I don’t think or talk about that much because it usually doesn’t involve suffering. It's the place in my experience where dysthymia (mild clinical depression) meets depersonalisation.

I managed to get to the yoga class the following week – I had done the trip in daylight the Saturday before, determined to know in advance exactly where the centre was. And as I waited to give my money to the short, sweet-looking female yoga teacher with the kind, lived-in face and the Eastern European features – the sort of person I associate with my traditional idea of Elwood – I started to feel slightly removed from the situation. For a few seconds I felt as if I was experiencing a memory of this event – but not in the sense of deja vu; rather, in the sense that the emotional content was simply not strong enough for the episode to be taking place in the present. It had a recycled quality. I mentally shook myself and was back in the present again, but a little unnerved. It was as if I could not take in the reality of having managed to join the class.

These feelings are not acute or frightening. They hark back to my nervous breakdown at the age of 21, when they were infinitely stronger and more threatening because I fought them ceaselessly, scared shitless as to what they indicated about my mental state. They were accompanied some of that time by the distorted sense that everything around me was contaminated by being a manifestation of capitalism. Not contaminated in the OCD sense, just completely engulfed by this overarching political reality.

I wonder now whether the content of that distortion was less significant than it seemed to be at the time. Perhaps I have a constitutional inability to fully come to terms with life as it is without experiencing it as some sort of system that represents a threat to me. I wonder whether my ingestion of the bizarre worldview of Irish Catholicism at such a young age has forged this inability. Because now the distortion has a different theme. It’s been there for a few years but has grown stronger since my move – I see everything in terms of Melbourne’s stratospheric property prices.

The social and economic aspects of depersonalisation

The homes around me don’t seem quite real, because they are unattainable – completely so in my case, but also increasingly to people of the younger generation. The houses and old-style flats in Elwood seem to have regressed to the fairytale world of my childhood that I never really left. They are, in fact, fairytales because they look and sound like real homes while being the residences and future homes of millionaires, or the playthings of rich investors. (Mansions don’t have that effect on me, probably because they represent a class that has always been there and whose wealth has always been unattainable to most.) My continued romanticisation of places like Elwood is both a defence against the realities of Melbourne real estate and an acknowledgement of how surreal house values have become in relation to daily life.

It’s confusing because the architecture of where I live has very distinct delineations depending on the area. My suburb, Gardenvale, is more ‘comfortable’ and established than East Malvern, the suburb I left, yet it’s also much less showy (a large Jewish population; people who have bought there simply because they like the beach). But Gardenvale also has elements (architectural as much as anything) of Brighton, the posher suburb over North Road, which is different again (old money and cricket stars). Then there’s Elwood, to which yet other kinds of money are attracted (rock stars, rich new agers, young professionals who love the outdoors, wealthier young families).

Yet Gardenvale itself has felt fresh so far, a place in relation to which I have no emotional baggage. I have commented on the strange foreignness of this suburb, the sense that I have moved to another country rather than an area that is 15 minutes drive from my folks' place. This has also been profoundly disorientating, but not in a bad way.

There is a further complicating factor. When I lived in inner city Carlton for five years in the nineties I was always bumping into people I knew (I’m sure this still happens to younger people who are willing to pay inner city rents). I’ve long moved from Carlton but on my fairly regular visits there I rarely bump into people I know. So there’s a feeling that I have lost my peers, and a sense that they have all moved to the inner north and left me alone (Coburg, Preston and Reservoir, inner northern suburbs which were affordable in the nineties but a long way north of Carlton, spring to mind). I think this loss of community strengthens my feelings of confusion and disorientation when I go back to old stamping grounds like Elwood. Perhaps there’s an age factor also – does depersonalisation get more acute with age, as the brain tries to process an increasing bank of memories while also taking in the present?

Perhaps my dysthymia and depersonalisation are also due to my precarious place in the social fabric. For a while I seemed to be experiencing them less often since joining Grow, but since moving house they've come back. Perhaps they are the way my mental weakness expresses the fundamental puzzle of where I fit in now. Is there any of the old St Kilda and Elwood left? Even if there is, is it actually relevant to me? What am I doing here? What does it actually mean for me to live in a particular location as a childless single woman in her fifties, who’s on a low income?

But I shouldn't talk only of my disorientation and failures to arrive. I now live about five minutes closer by car to the centre where my weekly Grow meeting is held. And only one or two weeks after I arrived in Gardenvale I managed to find my way on foot to a local Buddhist temple that I'd found on Google Maps. That first walk there was taken with the near-certainty I'd get lost but luckily as I approached the temple, a white neoclassical mansion with a park behind it, other people were converging on the property. So there was a feeling of mastery, triumph almost, at having made it to the temple – a sense that I still had it in me to settle in a new place and find new places to go.

But the sense of formlessness still returns, especially on these winter nights that fall so quickly, so early. Who is this new version of me who lives in this in-between suburb yet rushes off to Elwood? How can she relate to anyone living in either area when most of her peers will have kids and own their places? Is she ever going to stop romanticising suburbs over which real estate agents have been greedily rubbing their hands for decades, or is it possible for a suburb to retain some kind of identity beyond real estate values, a retention some Elwood and St Kilda residents seem determined to achieve?

Ah what the hell. I'm going to give up analysing and join the artists.

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Stress City: A Melbourne Tenant Moves On

The unforeseeable, the impossible has happened. After almost ten years I am to be moved out of my unhappy little nest and forced to search for another.

The owner is selling – or at least her kids are. They are not turfing me out exactly but they may as well be. The new owners could be either home buyers or investors – if they’re the latter, they will probably turf me out anyway because the place is in dire need of much more than a spit and a polish to make it look decent, and they’ll get much more rent that way.

I have no idea how this is all going to work out. They want to sell in early May and I will be looking for somewhere to live and presumably packing while the sales manager holds open for inspections (or ‘opens’ as the lingo is). Life is about to become very interesting. Where will I hide the boxes and the washing when potential owners traipse through the house?

I got the phone call on Friday afternoon when I was looking at DVDs in an op shop. The only thing I felt for the rest of the day was numb disorientation. I wasn’t very well organised so only had time to look at two properties on the Saturday. It was a shock to discover that, if I want a two-bedder, there’s no way I’m going to be able to afford to settle on this side of town.

Private rental in Australia is almost uniquely unregulated. There are few restrictions on when you can turf tenants out (unless they’ve signed a lease, which is usually a maximum of 12 months) and you can put the rent up every 6 months, to whatever the market rate is. Tax breaks for investors encourage the cashed-up to buy properties for investment purposes. In a tight market due to high rates of immigration (a business lobby policy, nothing to do with asylum seekers) the cost of housing to buy and rent far outstrips inflation and wage rises.

Virtually all landlords these days are basically profiteers (except my father, who still charges a mere $140 a week for his tiny one-bedroom investment property, in effect subsidising someone he doesn’t know from Adam, whose rent comes out of a trust fund (!), to the tune of about $100 a week. It is confusing having a father who will drop everything to help you and who says things like ‘you can come and stay with us if you need to’ but who has absolutely no sense of putting family first when it comes to charity (especially when the family member has a psyche disability!).

It means that the question of responsibility – of how much power I have over my own situation, and the extent to which my difficulties stem from the immaturity that is an offshoot of my illness rather than the illness itself – constantly exercises me. But in a way my father’s own immaturity – he acts with similar blindness towards my mum – frees me. It doesn’t really matter whether the neoliberal state and my father have both let me down. The fact is I must bear the responsibility, like it or not, and make the best of things. This is actually freeing for me. It’s taken me far too long to realise that not only can I not rely on my family, but that they are also difficult people to actually help. Better late than never to understand the truth.

 Allied with this knowledge is another strange irony. I’d convinced myself that I was stuck on this side of the Yarra, dutifully close to my ageing parents. On this side there’s East Malvern, where I currently live and which is very white bread, and a range of suburbs that are increasingly less boring, culminating in St Kilda and East St Kilda which in the seventies and eighties were hubs of Eastern European Jewish people combined with penniless artists and musicians. It was a magic combination and one you couldn’t find in any other part of Melbourne. Its particular feel was completely different from the much more studious, serious dissent of the inner north, which basically houses those of my generation who went to Melbourne Uni – they couldn’t afford to buy houses in inner city Carlton or Fitzroy so they just kept going further north, and now the likes of Reservoir have inner-city style contingents.

But yesterday was a reality check so profound it has put me off this side for life. The maximum rent I can afford is pretty low for a two-bedroom and the place I saw in Elsternwick, next door to East St Kilda, depressed me so badly that I broke down in tears on the standard investment-flat carpet that you find in these places. But it wasn’t just the cost – I realised, traipsing to and from the real estate agent’s office to pick up and drop back the keys, that I don’t like Carlisle Street any more. There are few rebels left in St Kilda, they’re mostly young male backpackers here for a good time and a root. All the interesting shops are gone, and it’s mostly cafes, bars and two dollar shops. In fact, there’s nothing of street life that interests me on this side of town any more.

And this means that, after resigning myself to staying on this side, it may just be marginally more affordable to go back to my beloved inner city, the place I feel I truly belong. Moving all that way seemed too hard and self-indulgent until I realised it would be slightly cheaper to live in West Brunswick than in Elsternwick or even the slightly daggier Caulfield.

As I walked towards my car after seeing the Elsternwick flat, remembering that I’d put on mascara that morning, I thought ‘You’d better check your face’. At the same time another thought occurred, not so well articulated – that I might very well forget to check my face. I knew that there would be something deliberate about that. I felt extremely sorry for myself, and at times like this – the sense of crisis of having nowhere to place your head – part of me reverts back to the needy child who expects the entire world to look after her.

And guess what? Overwhelmed as I was, I did forget to check my face in the car mirror. It was only as I jostled my way along Carlisle street back to Wilsons that I remembered. I hoped it would be okay.

When I handed the key over, and told the receptionist the property wasn’t quite what I was after, she said ‘All the best for your search.’ Oh dear. I rushed back to the car and things were even worse than I’d imagined. I didn’t have just black under my eyes, but a grey mascara 'tear' down the lower part of my left cheek. Oh yes, the world was going to be made aware of Catherine’s dilemma, like it or not!

I despise this narcissistic part of my personality, but I also understand it. It has taken me so long to grow up, but the trouble with life in Melbourne these days (and I suspect most Western cities) is that simply being realistic and aware of how to get by isn’t enough anymore. The rental situation really is very challenging, however much I adjust myself to its realities. What makes me sad and angry and one of the reasons that I will try to fiercely guard that childish part (rather than parading her) is that if I had not been so immature I could have done okay. In the seventies and early eighties, if you were white and lower (or upper) middle class, it was very hard to stuff up getting on in life in Melbourne, but I managed. I am still suffering for silly decisions that I made decades ago, when I really didn’t know any better. Now that I do know better, and the inner odds aren’t stacked against me to the same degree, the outer odds are more stacked against me than ever.

Still, I know I’ll be okay. As my father assures me, I can always stay with my parents for a small interim period although I would rather die than do this. I have Grow meetings in which to air my problems. I have my intuition, which I have honed to a fine art in the last ten years and which I can use to help me sort out which flats to bother seeing, and to help me make my ultimate choice. I have a very open mind. I will continually test out ‘the universe’ – the energies, if you like – by trying things out and looking, and will keep adjusting to whatever realities I find. I truly believe and hope that life in the inner north will be better than here – not perfect of course, but better.

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Buying less, caring more: towards a sustainable, non-growth economy

Woke up early this morning with a blog entry clamouring to leave my brain and get onto the page.

There are two different knotty issues that I’ve been thinking about a bit lately and wanted to place side by side because I think they could illuminate each other. I’m not trying to solve these problems so much as simply start to look at them in tandem. Before I do that I want to warn that I’m just as much a part of the problems as anyone. In fact, it’s my own inconsistencies that lead me to contemplate these issues – the gap between my ideals and how I live my life!

So here goes.

Buddhists tell us that all living creatures want to be happy and enjoy the world. Yet our fast-paced capitalist society treats the earth, as well as human and non-human animals, as resources that need to be productive or at least managed. The effect of this is that we all overlook just how much care and nurturing the earth and its creatures need. In a sense, the whole set-up in many Western cultures requires us to do this if we are to function ‘properly’.

I suppose I’m talking a bit about sustainability here, but with a living creature component.

In his popular blog Rocky and Gawenda, former editor of The Age newspaper Michael Gawenda writes about the effects that his tiny, mischievous dog has had on his life. Since Gawenda’s retirement from full-time journalism Rocky has become his close companion: every morning they rise at dawn and go for a long walk along St Kilda beach.

But Gawenda still has many work obligations, and in an article in The Age a few months ago he wrote of his reluctance to acknowledge the depths of despair that his regular abandonment of Rocky produced in his beloved mutt. He feared that one extended absence had led to an estrangement so great that Rocky would never fully recover the depth of trust and affection he had once displayed towards his master.

In the article, Gawenda reluctantly grappled with just how delicate the emotional make-up of a non-human creature such as Rocky might be, and how much such a creature might require in care and attention.

When we start to be willing to look at a situation like that, the needs of the world can seem too overwhelming. In fact, it is nothing more than an invitation to put living beings before gain – an invitation that the world constantly tries to draw us away from.

Michael Leunig is a Melbourne cartoonist, illustrator and artist turned writer. In his regular pieces for the Age, Leunig contemplates life from the slow lane. Living in the bush, he is alive to its nuances, and documents with great honesty the rhythms of his own emotional life as he relates to an increasingly dysfunctional wider world.

Leunig is far from perfect either: his failure to see the sufferings of women denied agency and power in the world, as well as his inexplicable hostility towards Australia’s embattled intellectuals, not to mention thought itself, are baffling.

In 1995 he produced one of his most controversial cartoons, ‘Thoughts of a baby lying in a child care centre’. A tiny newborn lies in a crib at a child care centre. The child is in despair because it believes that its mother has abandoned it, and it then turns that despair in on itself, deciding that it must be unworthy. Feminists were furious.

No doubt one reason for this cartoon being controversial is that Leunig was pointing out an unpleasant truth: our society does not really want to think about the complexity of the needs of a single child, and instead puts the work ethic and the dollar first.

But what I think made feminists angry was the assumption that only one half of society was responsible for this grave failure to care: women. For one short moment, Leunig was able to contemplate the giant need and great loneliness of a single child; but it was too painful for him. Rather than remain in uncertainty, and invite the ‘negative capability’ that Keats suggests and that he himself claims to be comfortable with, he simply reached for a convenient scapegoat. If he could blame women for the problem, he no longer had to deal with its full implications.

Jeff Kennett was the conservative premier of Victoria from 1992 until 1999. Gung-ho, aggressive and revengeful after many years in opposition, and having inherited a huge debt from the outgoing Labor government, he seemed to take great joy in shutting down hundreds of government schools, carrying out mass sackings of public servants, and privatising the electricity industry (which caused massive job loss).

But since retiring from politics, Kennett has changed. A former chairman of beyondblue, an organisation that publicises depression and assists sufferers, he now regrets his failure to consider the social effects of electricity privatisation. This infamous right wing warrior made the following admission in The Age of 12 December:

It’s very easy to change the natural order of life but it comes with a huge social and economic cost. If I was in office ever again and implementing change as I did in the past … I would make sure that I had a lot of education in place … I would try better to understand the impact of change.

Although many people see the categories of right and left as outdated and meaningless, I don’t agree. It’s been said that what distinguishes them is the left’s willingness to actually consider the effects of political and economic decisions on the ground, for individuals, communities and particular groups, to look at the micro as well as the macro. Through his involvement with beyondblue, Kennett has learned to do this and is a wiser human being as a result.

So – what’s the other issue I wanted to look at? I know this post is getting long, so I’ll try and keep what is an infinitely complex topic outrageously short.

The journal New Scientist had a great collection of articles in its 18 October 2008 issue on why the continued growth model of economic development simply wasn’t possible any more. It’s not a matter of ideology – the earth can’t sustain continued growth any longer because its resources are finite, and they’re fast running out. Rapidly rising population is a large part of the problem.

In his contribution, Tim Jackson looks at the sustainability–growth issue in terms of the need to reduce carbon emissions. He warns that if we factor economic growth (which itself seems to require increasing population) into the equation, ‘the idea that technological ingenuity can save us from climate disaster looks a whole lot more challenging’.

Jackson goes on to calculate how low in carbon emissions our economies would have to be by 2050 if we a) want to stabilise greenhouse levels in the atmosphere at ‘a reasonably safe 450 parts per million’ and b) factor in projected population increases, continued economic growth and the need to eradicate extreme poverty. He demonstrates that to achieve such a stabilisation, ‘the carbon content of economic output must be reduced to just 2 per cent of the best currently achieved anywhere in the European Union’. It would, in other words, necessitate more or less ‘complete decarbonisation of every last dollar’ – a well-nigh impossible task.

But if economic growth is the problem, adopting a different model would represent a change of gargantuan proportions. How is it to be done without causing widespread suffering? In fact, reducing growth in a chaotic fashion already has increased poverty and death – In March 2009 it was estimated that the recent global financial crisis would lead to the deaths of an additional 200,000 to 400 000 children.

Any discussion on changing our economic system to one that doesn’t rely on growth must look at how we can reduce consumption without increasing unemployment and causing widespread hardship.

What would a sustainable society and economy look like? Because goods would be built for the long term, maintenance and repair would become major industries.

There would be major government investment in services that have been sorely neglected for years such as public transport and social housing, as well as huge investment in renewable energy. But let’s not forget that, worthwhile as these investments are, they will still rely on the world’s natural resources to be farmed and dug from the ground (eg iron ore).

The need to care more, which I’ve identified in the previous section of this blog entry, is perhaps one of the solutions. Caring could be a significant form of employment in a sustainable economy. More teachers in classrooms. More childcare workers in creches. More psychologists and psychiatrists and counsellors in psyche units, community health centres, mental health outreach teams and jails. More nursing staff in aged care centres. More doctors in the western suburbs, new suburbs and rural areas.

But a lower consuming society would also leave more time for its citizens to care for each other, which wouldn’t cost anything, but would save a lot of money.

In the long run, this would lead to a reduction in crime and incarceration. Community bonds would strengthen.

Caring for the earth, through environmental employment projects and community vegetable gardens, could also increase.

I’m not an economist and can’t even begin to discuss here what the nuts and bolts of a non-growth economy would be, how it would actually sustain itself, pay its workers and feed its population. My point is that we need to start discussing what such an economy would look like and how we could move towards it. And perhaps the fact that the world demands so much care and attention – so much more than we can currently give it – is one reminder that something needs to change.

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Money for nothing: the Climate Pollution Reduction Scheme and the ascent of Abbott

I’m writing about an emerging form of mental illness that has recently been identified by mental health professionals, and that I think I may be suffering from: politician induced depression, or PID. It’s been found in dictatorships for decades, but in recent years has turned up in increasingly endemic proportions in Western countries like Australia.

The main symptom is a growing despair that is activated every time the sufferer sees or hears a politician speak. Treatment consists of graded exposure to current affairs programs and radio news broadcasts, plus compulsory reading of books such as Alain de Botton’s The Consolations of Philosophy. Membership of the Greens is also recommended but not mandatory. As a final resort, sufferers are urged to run for parliament.

I’m only half joking. Australia these days is a hot place, and our capital cities are no exception. The evidence of climate change is everywhere, but all the pollies care about is keeping the coal industry onside.

I complained recently about a November heatwave in Melbourne – actually there were two mini-heatwaves, and the temperature reached 38.2 on 20 November before the cool change brought some rain.

But that was nothing compared to what the rest of the country was facing. In New South Wales, weather records were broken as some places reached 45 degrees. Meanwhile, South Australia’s equally giant heatwave saw eight consecutive days of over 35 degrees, between Sunday 8 November and Sunday 15 November. During the heatwave, maximum temperatures in parts of South Australia also nudged 45 degrees. On 19 November, Adelaide’s temperature reached 42.8 - the city’s hottest day ever recorded for November.

During these heatwaves catastrophic fire warnings were issued in both states. Dozens of bushfires swept across both South Australia and New South Wales, including Sydney’s northern outskirts; at different times in each state, at least 100 fires were burning.

There were also bushfires in Victoria and even one in Tasmania, which is known for its chilly weather compared with the rest of Australia.

And this was before summer had actually begun.

A climate scientist with the Bureau of Meteorology, Dr Harvey Stern, said that there was a ‘high chance’ that the hot weather that swept New South Wales, South Australia and Victoria was connected to climate change. As well as giving the world a sneak preview of what they can expect from global warming in the next few decades, Australia is currently the highest per capita producer of emissions in the world, so we really need to get our act together.

Climate capers
Meanwhile Australia’s politicians have been fiddling while the country literally burns. The two main party groups, the governing Australian Labor Party and the conservative Coalition (Liberals and the rural-based National Party) have been taking part in what amounts to a faux battle about climate change. The battle has resulted in zero action on climate change but huge media furore over the fall of Coalition leader Malcolm Turnbull (pictured above), yesterday replaced by the right-wing Catholic Tony Abbott.

Because he does not have a majority in the upper house, ALP leader Kevin Rudd had been trying to negotiate with the Coalition a deal that would enable the passing of his Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS) before going to the climate summit at Copenhagen. The CPRS is in the form of an emissions trading scheme.

Former Coalition leader Malcolm Turnbull and some members of the Coalition had been in favour of passing the Scheme, complete with amendments the Coalition had negotiated with the ALP, in time for Copenhagen. But a noisy minority of right-wing Coalition members were building up a simmering resentment towards Turnbull.

The fact is, in this sunburnt country, many of these renegades don’t actually believe that human-induced global warming exists, or they seem not to care, and they’ve publicly declared their stance. Basically they were trying to steal the glory from Rudd at Copenhagen, and to respond to Rudd's own move to the right by moving even further to the right than he has.

The anger of these renegades finally resulted in a dramatic change of leadership yesterday to Tony Abbott, who won by the narrowest of margins. This win was unexpected, as Abbott, a former health minister in the Howard Coalition government, is unpopular with voters, particularly women.

Turnbull was hoping to get the amended legislation passed in the Senate before his leadership showdown, but it wasn’t to be. With Abbott as leader, just hours ago the Senate formally rejected the legislation. This means that Rudd won't be able to take his CPRS to Copenhagen as a fait accompli. But it also enables the government, if it so chooses, to dissolve both houses of parliament and call an early election.

The great irony is that the ALP and all parts of the fractured Coalition have actually been on the same side all along – that of doing very little to mitigate climate change, and keeping the big polluters, particularly Australia’s powerful coal industry, happy. It’s difficult to understand how the international community could have been happy about the CPRS Rudd would have have taken to Copenhagen if the Senate had passed it. In fact, a recent article in The Guardian slams Australia’s record and current action on cutting emissions.

In negotiating CPRS amendments with the Coalition (Coal – ition?), and indirectly helping to precipitate their leadership crisis, Rudd made an extremely poor scheme even worse. He also demonstrated he would do anything to avoid negotiating with the Greens.

Disturbingly, the media have been reporting the leadership drama with the focus entirely on the politics rather than the planet. They’ve allowed Turnbull to portray himself as someone willing to sacrifice his prime ministerial aspirations for the principle of taking action on climate change. No-one in the mainstream media so far has directly challenged this breathtaking deception.

Meanwhile, the actions of the renegade Coalition members have enabled Rudd to pretend to the confused electorate that he’s their climate saviour, when the opposite is the case. Rudd might have got somewhere with his CPRS if he’d negotiated with the Greens, who have five members in the Senate, and independent senator Nick Xenophon, who at least believes in climate change (ironically, today in the Senate two disaffected Liberal 'wets' voted with the government on the amended CPRS; if these two Libs and Xenophon had supported a CPRS influenced by the Greens, it could have passed). Rudd chose instead to negotiate with a right-wing party that did nothing to mitigate climate change during its 11 years in office. And in the end it betrayed him, after giving him its word it was negotiating in good faith.

Despite all the spin, and the media focus on the Coalition in the last week or so, Fran Kelly reported on Radio National on 30 November that support for the ALP had dropped slightly, accompanied by a slight boost in support for the Greens. This suggests that at least some voters were unhappy with the further weakening of an already compromised CPRS that the Coalition's amendments would have led to.

Locking us into doing nothing
Even without the Coalition’s amendments, the incredibly complex piece of legislation installing the CPRS -- it will be reintroduced to parliament next year -- will lock Australia into targets so low they are laughable. The official target is 5–25 per cent below 2000 levels by 2020, but the conditions attached to a 25 per cent reduction are so many that this higher target is unlikely to prevail. And Treasury modelling indicates there’ll be no actual reduction in greenhouse emissions until around 2033, because investment in offsets such as overseas carbon sinks will count towards the reduction.

The CPRS also not only offers, but locks in for the future, massive compensation to the big polluters. Importantly, the compensation figures included in the legislation assume that Australia cuts its carbon emissions by only 5 per cent by 2020. This means that in theory a higher rate of compensation to the polluters could kick in if the cuts are steeper than 5 per cent.

According to the Citizens Climate Campaign, Professor Garnaut, the Government’s own advisor on climate change policy, has criticised the CPRS, especially the compensation it offered the biggest polluters.

The deal struck with the Coalition on 24 November, before Turnbull’s defeat, would have watered the legislation down even further. Under the deal the government would have doubled its handouts to the coal industry, providing $1.5 billion over five years. Power generators would have received a further $4 billion in permits to pollute, bringing the total in permits to $7.3 billion. Further, $1.1 billion would have been spent on assisting manufacturing and mining businesses with higher electricity prices because of the CPRS. To top this off, $5.76 billion set aside to compensate consumers for the increased cost of living would have been cut.

Ordinary Australians were already going to be subsidising the big polluters, which would be able to go on with business as usual. However, these amendments would have made their subsidy even higher – $4 billion, rather than the original $2.5 billion, which was bad enough.

The dramatic turnaround in Coalition policy leaves many environmentally aware Australians feeling confused. On the one hand, they're relieved that we are not yet locked into a useless ETS; on the other hand they’re dismayed at both major parties’ refusal to really tackle climate change.

However, they shouldn't get too excited. The Minerals Council of Australia stated today that this was an opportunity to improve the CPRS legislation (read: throw more taxpayer money at the mining industry).

The proposed CPRS was complicated to start with and always had pathetically low targets. But when the global financial crisis struck, and even before it started negotiating with the Coalition, the government had heralded further industry-friendly changes, including moving the starting date from 2010 to 2011.

This cavalier approach to the planet, along with the Coalition’s changing position and the willingness of the media to air the views of climate change denialists in the interests of spurious balance, sent a message to the average Australian that climate change was not as dire a problem as previously thought. A recent poll by the Lowy Institute of International Policy found that Australians were less concerned about climate change than they had been two years earlier. According to the poll, on a list of 10 goals in 2009, climate change had slipped from its 2007 position, when it came equal first.

The Greens in Higgins
On 5 December a by-election will take place in my electorate, the House of Representatives seat of Higgins. The Liberals have a new candidate, Kelly O’Dwyer, to replace the one-time Liberal treasurer Peter Costello. The ALP isn’t fielding a candidate as Higgins is a safe-as-houses Liberal seat, but the Greens are. Their choice of candidate has been controversial though: Dr Clive Hamilton is a progressive economics academic and commentator, and one of Australia’s most committed climate change activists, but he has trouble connecting with the electorate and getting his message across.

Given the current Liberal Party furore it will be interesting to see whether Abbott’s leadership reduces the Liberal vote in Higgins. O’Dwyer claims to believe that humans play some role in climate change, but any policy must preserve our economy.

The Greens are the only party in the federal parliament with emissions targets that recognise the climate science – by 2020 they want a 40 per cut in carbon emissions compared to 1990 levels. Whether Higgins voters recognise the urgency of the situation, and send a message to both the ALP and the Coalition to get their act together, is yet to be seen.

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Fulminating about executive salaries

I’ve been building up to writing a post on this and I’m about to boil over.

The topic of ‘executive renumeration’ is big in Australia right now. The Productivity Commission is looking into it. The Australian Government has acted in a very limited way, due to widespread community outrage, to curb salaries by making shareholder approval mandatory for termination payments that exceed a year’s base salary (big deal: they’ll just up the salary, but at least a salary is fully taxable). A discussion television program called Insight recently ran a program on the topic.

The evil prince Sol Trujillo has recently announced his coming departure on 30 June from the partially privatised Telstra, Australia’s paramount Telco. His salary package last year allowed for a maximum $13.4 million depending on performance, despite the fact that he alienated just about everybody, including the government. (Please explain to me why this is not outright theft.)

Since joining the company in 2005 he’s managed to sack 10 000 people, according to a February article in The Australian newspaper. The share price is currently lower than it was when the first lot of shares were floated in 1997. Jokes about Telstra service, if that’s not an oxymoron, are comedy staples.

The Productivity Commission is going to look at the regulatory framework that governs payment of executives and directors in Australia. It will look at some of the myths and truisms surrounding executive pay, such as: is it really tied to performance? Does upping salaries actually improve performance? Are the board members who make decisions acting on behalf of shareholders as they’re supposed to do or are they acting on behalf of executives?

I’ve been amazed at the narrowness of the media discussion of this issue. The Insight program features a journalist/host asking questions of an audience largely made up of people with an interest or expertise in the topic under discussion.

On the recent program that dealt with this topic, several of these audience members were shareholders. Some of them expressed the view that they were only angry because the ridiculous amounts being paid weren’t tied to performance. If the executives were doing their job, they wouldn’t mind the outrageous sums.

I’m going to be a contrarian on this issue and say: no-one pulling a salary is worth more than, say, $500 000 a year, no matter what they do. Sure, the job should pay enough so that lifestyle-wise these people can feel that they are above the herd (as well as being compensated for the hours involved and the responsibility). But beyond a salary that achieves that, perhaps they might actually perform better if they were paid less.

Look at a school principal. Their job is incredibly complex. They get paid an amount that recognises the sacrifices they make in terms of time and stress. And what value are they producing? The citizens of tomorrow, who will invent, create, toil, pay taxes, make the next generation, etc etc. Isn’t that worth more than anything a corporation produces? Yet school principals are paid a fraction of what the average CEO takes home. But we don't see them going on strike until their wages match those of the private sector mavericks.

Now here’s the thing. What if school principals behaved like spoilt brats, crossed their arms and said: ‘I wont get out of bed unless you pay me 3 million.’ The community would be shocked. Newspapers would be chock-full of letters condemning the avarice of these people and the poor example they were setting their students.

So rather than admiring the anti-social solipsists of big business for their ego-bound deludedness, we might actually question whether they are emotionally fit to lead an organisation. Isn’t greed one of the seven deadly sins? Doesn’t a belief that it’s worth sacrificing, say, 100 jobs so you can be paid obscenely indicate a dangerous egomania? And if these people are only in it for the money, will they really have the interests of the company and its shareholders at heart? What sort of school board would employ a principal who was obviously greedy and grasping?

Yet CEOs are admired for their selfishness, their childish petulance, and yes, their greed. Shareholders teach their own children not to be greedy, but tell these dingbats that they’re worth millions a year.

Of course, part of the problem is the way corporations are set up in the first place. Their first duty is to their shareholders and making a profit, rather than to the community as a whole. This has led to a culture whereby shareholders of traditional companies (not ethical investors) outsource their rapacious behaviour and even, in some cases, contempt for the environment, implicitly telling the company to do their dirty work for them. If you're going to do that, you want someone a little bit tough and ruthless.

The ironic thing is, whenever you interview someone in a powerful position making lots of money they always say they’re not doing it for the cash but because they love the job. If they’re not committed to the job for its own sake, they shouldn’t be there.

I don’t mind if someone identifies a gap in the market, starts a company and makes a squillion. They’ve taken financial risks and they deserve to reap the benefits, within the bounds of the law.

Business journalists have been part of the problem, particularly while the boom was still on. They’re just too embedded in the whole mad culture to make objective analyses. One journalist had the temerity to justify these amounts with the statement that top execs were vulnerable to losing their jobs at any time.

But CEOs are salaried. They’re not gambling on their own money like genuine entrepeneurs. The career risks they run in being judged on performance are no different in kind than those that everyone on a contract, so common these days in the professional world, is subject to, not to mention those in casual jobs who face financial obliteration on a daily basis. Why should they alone be compensated for job insecurity, compared with a market research telephone interviewer who is paid $19 an hour if they’re lucky, and for whom every shift could be their last?

That the people who make the crucial financial decisions in the plush boardrooms of the corporate world are in a little world of their own is indisputable. The recent Insight program included a member of the Telstra board, a board that, in the midst of a recession and following job cuts, had recently voted for base pay increases for executives. Amazingly, he justified this by stating that it was more stressful running a company in difficult times.

Does it never occur to these people that the company might actually do better if it used some of the obscene amounts it pays the top brass to create more positions for employees who actually do the work that counts, such as, in the case of Telstra, technicians, researchers and IT experts?

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Appalling pollies

Following politics in even the most basic way in Australia leads inexorably to existential despair. Certain questions spring to mind: ‘How can supposedly intelligent people (ie politicians) say and do such stupid things, things that are so obviously contrary to common sense, not to mention democratic principles?’ ‘Why is the mismanagement of government functions like public transport now routine?’

Just one example is the Formula One Grand Prix that the good town of Melbourne ‘hosts’ in March each year - coming up soon, on 26-29 March. This year the state of Victoria is paying Formula One CEO Bernie Ecclestone about $47 million for the privilege. The exact figure is secret despite the fact that it’s taxpayers’ money, but The Age newspaper did some foraging and produced the estimation. This year, because of the drying up of sponsorship due to the recession, the entire cost of hosting the Grand Prix is estimated to be $50 million!

The Auditor-General’s report on the 2007 Grand Prix found that, after benefits to business and tourism were taken into account and issues such as traffic jams and noise were factored in, there was a net loss to Victoria of somewhere between $800,000 and $13.4 million.

The venue for Melbourne’s Grand Prix was determined with an outrageous disregard for community rights and sentiment. It’s held at the Albert Park Reserve, only about 3 kilometres from the CBD, one of the few Grand Prix events to be held in an inner city location.

According to the Save Albert Park group, Albert Park is the only major area of open space in the municipality of Port Phillip; it’s certainly the largest. It includes more than 20 grounds for various field sports and hosts a golf club, as well as tennis and bowling clubs.

For four months of the year, the most popular months weather-wise, key roads are closed leading to traffic delays and use of the park is disrupted by preparations for the Grand Prix, which turns parts of the park into a huge construction site complete with the coming and going of trucks. And during the race, residents have to put up with blocked-off streets, traffic disruptions and the constant high-pitched whine of the dangerously loud cars.

The carbon footprint of the event is also high.

Port Phillip’s local council is against the race. But the park is under the jurisdiction of the state government. And in July 2008 the government announced a new deal that would keep the race in Melbourne until at least 2015.

When the race first came to Melbourne in 1996 under the previous Liberal (right-wing) government, many Melburnians were outraged when the venue chosen by the dictatorial Jeff Kennett was the Albert Park. (Kennett’s crash-through style would eventually give rise to the neologism to be 'Jeffed’).

Facilities and roughly 1000 trees were demolished with over 400 trees felled on one day alone (funds were provided for replacement facilities but sportsgrounds are unusable for months at a time). Concerned citizens protested in front of bulldozers, and at one point were forcibly moved by police.

Holding the Grand Prix in the park would have been illegal. To make it possible, the Liberal government passed the Australian Grand Prix Act 1994, to the outrage of lawyers’ associations, civil liberties and environmental groups. The scope of this Act is simply extraordinary.

Among other things, it removes the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court from the operations of the Act, and gives the Australian Grand Prix Corporation total control of the park – it can cordon off any area it wants, demolish any building, close roads and cut down trees at will.

The wily Labor Party, which as the opposition had initially supported the Save Albert Park group, kept the race as part of its major events program when it came to power in 1999.

According to the state government, the benefits to local businesses of hosting the Grand Prix make the huge cost worthwhile, but the figures it uses to back this are considered dodgy by some. The National Institute of Economic and Industry Research calculated the net benefit of the 2005 race to be $174.8 million. But the methodology used by the NIER has been challenged by some economists.

Meanwhile attendance numbers have been dropping since the race started, with what appears to be a very slight increase last year over the 2007 figure (although the AGPC figures are highly dodgy and include the free tickets they throw around to boost the numbers). Meanwhile there is an avoidance factor -- many local residents go away for the Grand Prix event, taking their business with them, and some protesters claim that hotel reservations actually drop during the weekend the race is run.

Such is Ecclestone’s power that the Melbourne Grand Prix is the equivalent of someone knocking on your front door and saying: ‘I’d like to run a foot race around your loungeroom, and you’ll have to throw out your lounge suite – is that OK? Oh, and by the way, you’re going to have to pay me really big money’.

This is just one example of the corroding of democracy under governments of all stripes in the last 15 years or so, at both state and federal level. The other glaring one on the state level is Melbourne’s appalling public transport. The government outsources the running of public transport to private companies, in particular Connex (trains) and Yarra Trams (trams). Again, the supposedly Labor Government continued the privatisation that the previous government had started, despite admitting recently that it actually saves no money!

Public transport’s never been good in Melbourne but things got worse when petrol prices rose and people wanted to cut their greenhouse emissions. They crowded onto the inadequate train system in droves and now widespread train cancellations, commuters being left stranded for hours on platforms and being squashed into overcrowded trains are the norm.

But this actually suits the government. It doesn’t have to do anything or take responsibility: it simply blames Connex for the problems. Connex plays the part of whipping boy and in return gleefully shovels away its huge profits and sends them back to France.

In future posts I’ll look at why such ridiculous government decisions are becoming the norm, and some possible solutions.

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